Philip Trent is an artist, a journalist, and an urbane unraveller of highly problematical crimes. He comes to his avocation naturally, for he is a "man of tropically luxuriant mental gifts" who is "clever at getting at the truth about things other people don't understand." In fact, ...

Do you remember the exploits of "wise, witty" Max Carrados, the blind detective who flourished in Edwardian London, in those transitional days between hansom cabs and great motorcars? The chances are, if you are a fan, that you have run into Carrados before. for his cases have often ...

Four casks have just been hoisted out of a ship's hold, when the rope sling breaks sending them crashing back onto the deck. Two of the casks start to leak wine, the third is undamaged, and the fourth is slightly injured, but sawdust rather than wine is escaping from a crack at the ...

The London police have a baffling murder on their hands. An unidentified man has been bludgeoned to death in Middle Temple Lane, but there is no weapon at the scene and practically nothing to go on. Frank Spargo, a young reporter covering the story, is almost ready to go home, when ...

Richard Austin Freeman, the doyen of the scientific division of detective writing, is best known for his character Dr. John E. Thorndyke, M.D., F.R.C.P. A close and careful investigator, and the outstanding medical authority in the field of detective fiction, R. Austin Freeman not ...

Suppose you were locked into one of the most secure prisons in America around 1900; put into solitary confinement, with periodical inspections by the warden, who knew for a fact (you had told him) that you would escape in less than a week. How would you communicate with the outside, ...

Just as young T. H. White wrote one forgotten detective novel before achieving fame as a writer, James Hilton, prior to Lost Horizon and Good-bye, Mr. Chips, pseudonymously authored a finely crafted but critically neglected detective mystery, which remained obscure even at the apex ...

An immensely old and priceless Aztec Codex, watched by two men, disappears from a locked room. Mysterious footsteps, heard even in broad daylight, horrible images of a hanged man haunt a thoroughly modern house. Unknown, headless corpses are found on a well-traveled highway heavily ...

The setting: a black, dripping November evening in wartime London. Bruce Mallaig, a young analytical chemist sitting on a bench in Regent's Park, watches a stranger approach, then suddenly disappear beneath a footbridge. Seconds later another figure appears on the same overpass, stops ...

The year is 1913. The disgraced and formerly penniless aristocrat Sir Everard Dominey returns from German East Africa a reformed and wealthy man determined to take his place in English society. But is he Sir Everard or the German spy, Baron Leopold von Ragastein? Leopold, educated ...