The Floating Admiral

The Floating Admiral

First edition cover
Author	(Detection Club) G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, etc
Language	English
Genre	Mystery novel
Publisher	Hodder & Stoughton
Publication date	December 1931
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	351 pp (first edition, hardback)

The Floating Admiral is a chain-written, collaborative detective novel written by fourteen members of the British Detection Club in 1931. The twelve chapters of the story were each written by a different author, in the following sequence: Canon Victor Whitechurch, G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley. G. K. Chesterton contributed a prologue, which was written after the novel had been completed.^[1]

In a literary game of consequences, each author would write one chapter, leaving G.K. Chesterton to write a typically paradoxical prologue and Anthony Berkeley to tie up all the loose ends. In addition, each of the authors provided their own solution in a sealed envelope, all of which appeared at the end of the book.

As Sayers explained in the introduction to the book, "Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view—that is, he must not introduce new complications merely 'to make it more difficult' ... [E]ach writer was bound to deal faithfully with all the difficulties left for his consideration by his predecessors."