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Well-known mystery writer John Lexman is charged with murder and sent to Broadmoor Prison. His friend T.X., head of a special branch of Scotland Yard, tries to prove his innocence. (Summary by Gesine)...

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Mystery

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A perfect diamond worth millions is mailed, in a plain package, to a diamond dealer. Then he finds that identical diamonds were delivered to other diamond dealers. Where did the gems come from? Who sent them? And why? (Introduction by Dawn)...

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Mystery

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A young American archeologist, a masked ball in Cairo, an illusive young woman and the unexplained disappearance of a Frenchman fifteen years earlier all play into this mystery by Mary Hastings Bradley. (summary written by the reader)...

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Mystery

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Bank manager John Hornbury is missing, as are securities and jewels from the bank’s vault. Gabriel Chestermarke and his nephew Joseph have unaccountably refused to call in the police to investigate the theft from their bank. When Betty Fosdyke shows up to visit her Uncle John, she finds it past belief that he would simply disappear – let alone that he would commit larceny. Unable to simply sit by and wait while a detective from Scotland Yard investigates, Betty elicits the help of the chief clerk at Chestermarke’s bank and launches into the middle of the mystery.(Summary by MaryAnn)...

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Mystery

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The dead body of a man is found on the steps to some chambers of Middle Temple Lane, near London's law courts. A journalist and a young lawyer start investigating. - This classic English murder mystery was written in 1920 by J.S. Fletcher, himself a lawyer turned journalist and author. (Summary by Gesine)...

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Mystery

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The small town of Shelby is shaken by a brutal murder. A man by the name of Etheridge was found beaten to death. A local inn-keeper, is convicted and executed for the crime. Many years later, a woman in purple shows up at the house of Ostrander, the respected judge who had sentenced the inn-keeper to be executed. This mysterious woman turns out to be the wife of the convicted man, but she does not believe he was guilty. She visits the Judge, to challenge him on his verdict. He listens to her plea, but reaffirms his belief in her husbands guilt. Having nowhere to go, Deborah is given the position of maid, which she secretly uses to obtain proof of her husband's innocence and the identity of the real killer. However, the initial evidence that Deborah collects points in troubling new directions. (Summary by Elaine Webb)...

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Mystery

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Gaston Leroux, perhaps best known as the author of The Phantom of the Opera in its novel form, was also the author of a popular series of mystery novels featuring a young journalist cum detective named Joseph Rouletabille. It is most likely that Leroux styled his hero after himself. Rouletabille was in the tradition of other great detectives who solved their cases by pure deductive reasoning. Much as Sherlock Holmes, who eliminated the impossible and concluded that whatever remained, however improbable must be the truth, Rouletabille included the known facts about the case and eliminated everything that was not a known fact, no matter how much it appeared to relate to the case. In The Secret of the Night, the names of the characters are often challengingly Russian and the plot involves, appropriately, both the Czar and the Nihilists. Introduction by Don W. Jenkins)...

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Mystery

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A habitual late night stroll down Markendale Square plunges Viner into the middle of things most mysterious and most perplexing. A murder, an imposter, secret papers, all combine to mystify even the police themselves. Is Hyde as innocent of the crime as he claims? What is the clue of the veiled woman and the diamond ring? Things are not what they seem to be and how can Viner prove the man's innocence? (Summary by Kehinde)...

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Mystery

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Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) was a prolific American writer of popular mysteries. The Circular Staircase was originally published in 1908 and includes all the elements of the classic whodunit – mysterious events, ghostly apparitions, things that go bump in the night and murder. (Summary by J. M. Smallheer)...

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Mystery

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The many adventures of Professor Craig Kennedy were chronicled by Arthur B. Reeve (October 15, 1880 - August 9, 1936). Reeve was an American mystery writer who created 82 Craig Kennedy mystery stories. The stories have a very Sherlock Holmes type feel, In fact Kennedy has been referred to as the American Shelock Holmes. Along with his reporter friend, Walter Jameson, Kennedy solves many crimes and unveils mysteries using science. This book contains twelve of Professor Kennedy's adventures. The interesting thing about these stories is Kennedy uses newly discovered science from his time period, which we take for granted today. The first story, The Silent Bullet, has everyone wondering how a bullet could kill someone with no noise. Today, silencers on guns are commonplace in movies and on TV. Or as in The Deadly Tube featuring the story of a doctor causing his patients much harm with evil x-rays, or the developmnt of the gyroscope for aeroplanes in The Terror in the Air. Each story features a facinating look at life in the early 20th century, and even includes some action along the way....

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Mystery

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Giles Dudley is called upon by his cousin Henry Wilton to assist him in San Francisco, but the reason for the summons is not at all clear. Dudley answers the summons, only to find himself immediately wrapped in the middle of mystery and intrigue, the roots and ends of which he is utterly unaware. He has been given to care for a mysterious young boy whom he hasn't even seen. His cousin has mysteriously disappeared. Dudley's role in the mystery has him convinced that as he goes about trying to assist his cousin with whatever it was he wanted to accomplish, he does so completely blindfolded . (Summary by Roger Melin)...

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Mystery

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Meet Hamilton Cleek - man of mystery, and master of disguise and derring-do. Cleek's exploits are, to say the least, highly improbable, but the book is enormous fun. The goodies are good and the baddies are very bad indeed, but beware - things are not always what they seem. Suspend your disbelief and enjoy a rattling good yarn! Cleek is the central figure in dozens of short stories that began to appear in 1910 and were subsequently collected in a series of books. (Summary by Ruth Golding and Wikipedia)...

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The novelization of the play of the same name that had an initial run of 867 shows on Broadway and has been performed all over the world and been made into three movies over a span from 1926 to 1959. An intricate mystery, with a wide cast of characters. (Summary by Alan Winterrowd)...

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Mystery

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Antony Gillingham arrives at the Red House moments after a gunshot is heard. The room is locked, the murderer has disappeared and, in Antony's opinion, the police are going about it the wrong way. Antony, who was looking for a new profession anyway, decides to solve the murder himself, with a little help from his friend Bill. (Summary by Kristin Hughes)...

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The Pagan Madonna, one of Harold MacGrath's numerous novels, set in Shanghai, tells a story of intrigue, murder, and illicit art “collecting.” The paths of Jean Norman, a Red Cross nurse from the United States, Ling Foo, a shifty pawn shop keeper, and Anthony Cleigh, millionaire art collector, cross and recross in growing intrigue over a string of beads. It is a world where “. . . every move you make is governed by Chance--the Blind Madonna of the Pagan . . . .” (Introduction by Don Jenkins)...

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Mystery

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Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884), a Scotsman by birth and a barrel-maker by trade, settled in Chicago in its infancy and founded the Pinkertons, the world's first detective agency. Though events associated with the agency after his death have tarnished the name, Pinkerton himself was one of the original human rights advocates. He was a dear friend to John Brown, an advisor to Abraham Lincoln, and 80 years ahead of his time in hiring female detectives. He was also stubborn, irascible, and an egomaniac. The Expressman and the Detective (1874) is Pinkerton's first attempt at putting his real-life experiences into novel form. Though many later works attributed to Pinkerton are understood to have been ghostwritten, this is the work of the man the London Times calls a man at once deeply admirable and quite obnoxious. (Summary by Pete Williams)...

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Mystery

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Lady Molly of Scotland Yard is a collection of short stories about Molly Robertson-Kirk, an early fictional female detective. It was written by Baroness Orczy, who is best known as the creator of The Scarlet Pimpernel, but who also invented two immortal turn-of-the-century detectives in The Old Man in the Corner and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. First published in 1910, Orczy’s female detective was the precursor of the lay sleuth who relies on brains rather than brawn. The book soon became very popular, with three editions appearing in the first year. As well as being one of the first novels to feature a female detective as the main character, Orczy’s outstandingly successful police officer preceded her real life female counterparts by a decade....

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Mystery

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A reward of five thousand dollars is offered, by Phil Ocumpaugh, to whoever will give such information as will lead to the recovery, alive or dead, of his six-year-old daughter, Gwendolen, missing since the afternoon of August the 16th, from her home in New York.(quote from the book)...

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Mystery

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The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) is the first of five collections of mystery stories by G. K. Chesterton starring an unimposing but surprisingly capable Roman Catholic priest. Father Brown's ability to uncover the truth behind the mystery continually surpasses that of the experts around him, who are fooled into underestimation by the priest's unimpressive outward appearance and, often, by their own prejudices about Christianity. Combining captivating stories and insightful commentary, The Innocence of Father Brown is a delightful read. (Summary by Brian Roberg)...

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Mystery

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“No Clue! A Mystery Story” finds detective Jefferson Hastings at the home of wealthy but eccentric Arthur Sloane one hot summer night, when two other guests at Sloanehurst stumble across the body of young Mildred Brace lying dead on the lawn. Sloane’s daughter Lucille asks Hastings to help solve the crime, but Hastings gets surprisingly little help from anybody he interviews, including Mr. Sloane himself and even the mother of the victim. With few clues to aid him and nobody beyond suspicion, including himself, seemingly rock solid alibis begin to fall apart, expanding the list of potential suspects, and Hastings must rely on subtle expressions and the scant evidence at hand to try to solve the murder. (Summary by Roger Melin)...

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Mystery