"Ted Lyte, amateur thief, has chosen an isolated house by the coast for his first robbery. But Haven House is no ordinary country home. While hunting for silverware to steal, Ted stumbles upon a locked room containing seven dead bodies. Detective Inspector Kendall takes on the case with the help of passing yachtisman Thomas Hazeldean. The search for the house's absent owners brings Hazeldean across the Channel to Boulogne, where he finds more than one motive to stay and investigate"--Page [4] of cover.

Ben the tramp's uncanny knack of running into trouble is unsurpassed in the final crime thriller written for him by J. Jefferson Farjeon. On a grey afternoon he was destined never to forget, Ben sat down on a park seat and proceeded to think, not of cabbages and kings, but of numbers, lucky and unlucky. But it wasn't Ben's lucky day, or that of the nondescript-looking stranger sitting at the other end of the bench - murdered before his very eyes! That was the prelude to the most uncomfortable and eventful twenty-four hours Ben had ever spent in an uncomfortable and eventful life. J. Jefferson Farjeon's famous Cockney character Ben, who first appeared in No.17 and six other novels, was never so richly humorous or so absurdly heroic as in this, his last hair-raising adventure taking place at No.19, Billiter Road.

The return of Ben, the prince of tramps with his rich Cockney humour and naïve philosophies - and in trouble as usual. Strange things are happening in the untenanted houses of Jowle Street. There are unaccountable creakings and weird knockings on the door of No.29, where the homeless ex-sailor Ben has taken up residence. But even stranger things are happening in the House Opposite, from where a beautiful woman in an evening gown brings Ben a mysterious message - and an errand that puts him in more danger than he bargained for. Once Ben the 'passing tramp' had been immortalised on film by Alfred Hitchcock in No.17, his return in a new novel was guaranteed. The House Opposite tells the story of criminal goings-on from both sides of a London street, and was admired for being delightfully amusing and genuinely uncanny.