Reading Colin Watson's Flaxborough mysteries will make you feel as if you had lived in the town all your life. You'll see the Flaxborough citizenry through the eyes and in the mind of inspector Purbright not as a panoptikum of criminal suspects but as your neighbors. Watson puts peoples actions, motives and feelings into such a perspective that along with the pure reading entertainment, one could use it as a textbook for Psychology 101 class, yet you will laugh out loud on every other page.

When a secret agent disappears in highly suspicious circumstances connected with an acid bath, it is not long before two high-powered operatives arrive. But they find the Flaxborough citizenry even more unscrutable than the problems of international spying.

Right at the bottom of the column, it was. Something for which she had not dared to hope. Not in remote, prosperous, hard-headed Flaxborough. A matrimonial bureau. Two women have disappeared in the small market town of Flaxborough. They are about the same age, both quite shy and both unmarried.

Detective Inspector Purbright of the Flaxborough police force is used to a life of quietude in a small market town, yet he knows that behind the outward respectability of typical English communities a darker underbelly of greed, crime and corruption lurks. Chalmsbury, a neighbouring town to Flaxborough, has been experiencing a series of explosions that have destroyed many of the town's monuments.

Described by Cecil Day-Lewis as 'a great lark, full of preposterous situations and pokerfaced wit' Coffin Scarcely Used is Colin Watson's first Flaxborough novel and was originally published in 1958. The small town of Flaxborough is taken aback when one of the mourners at Councillor Carobelat's funeral dies just six months later.