A corpse in a top hat leads Dr. Gideon Fell to a killer with a sick sense of humor in this mystery by the celebrated author of Hag's Nook. At the hand of an outrageous prankster, top hats are going missing all over London, snatched from the heads of some of the city's most powerful people―but is the hat thief the same as the person responsible for stealing a lost story by Edgar Allan Poe, the manuscript of which has just disappeared from the...

"A sinister case of deadly poisoned chocolates from Sodbury Cross's high street shop haunts the group of friends and relatives assembled at Bellegarde, among the orchards of 'peach-fancier' Marcus Chesney. To prove a point about how the sweets could have been poisoned under the nose of the shopkeeper, Chesney stages an elaborate memory game to test whether any of his guests can see beyond their 'black spectacles'; that is, to see the truth without...

Famed crime solver Dr. Gideon Fell attends a housewarming party in the English countryside, but a ghost spoils the fun in Golden Age mystery master John Dickson Carr's stylish, baffling mystery novel. The house is called Longwood, and its history is wet with blood. It is closed up for good in 1920, when a massive chandelier falls, crushing an eighty-year-old butler. Oddly enough, the old chandelier was sturdy, and there was no way it could have fallen...

John Dickson Carr, one of the masters of the British-style detective novel, evokes the danger and delights of 1912 New Orleans in this puzzling murder mystery. Journalist and spy novelist Jim Blake takes an assignment for Harper's Weekly that puts him on a train to New Orleans, where congressional candidate James Claiborne Blake is being targeted by enemies who threaten to reveal that there is a glamorous Creole courtesan in his past. But in New Orleans,...

"The purpose, the illusion, the spirit of a waxworks. It is an atmosphere of death. It is soundless and motionless... Do you see?" Last night Mademoiselle Duchêne was seen heading into the Gallery of Horrors at the Musée Augustin waxworks, alive. Today she was found in the Seine, murdered. The museum's proprietor, long perturbed by the unnatural vitality of his figures, claims that he saw one of them following the victim into the dark-a lead that...

John Dickson Carr, a master of the Golden Age British-style mystery novel, presents Dr. Gideon Fell's most chilling case, in which a clock-obsessed killer terrorizes London A clockmaker is puzzled by the theft of the hands of a monumental new timepiece he is preparing for a member of the nobility. That night, one of the stolen hands is found buried between a policeman's shoulder blades, stopping his clock for all time. The crime is just peculiar...

Featured in Carr's widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Hollow Man, Dr. Gideon Fell is a portly sleuth whose formidable intellect is the terror of every criminal in London and the envy of every detective in Scotland Yard. The Blind Barber: Aboard the majestic ocean liner Queen Victoria, the theft of a reel of top-secret government film sets off a chase involving stolen jewels, massive marionettes, and a corpse that won't stay put. It will take the...

To solve a long-forgotten crime, a professor challenges the devil in this nefariously puzzling, romantic tale from the Golden Age master of mystery fiction An aging scholar of Restoration history, Nicholas Fenton has long dreamed of traveling into the past. He has a date in mind-May 10, 1675-as well as a purpose: to solve the murder case of the woman he loves, his rakehell ancestor's lovely wife. Obsessed with delivering her from danger, he turns...

Hurled back in time, a London police detective struggles to solve a nineteenth-century murder mystery in Golden Age master John Dickson Carr's thrilling mystery novel. A woman is killed in a well-lit corridor, dying before the eyes of three witnesses who, impossibly, detect no foul play. For more than a century, this baffling murder lies cold in the files of Scotland Yard until it is discovered by Detective-Superintendent John Cheviot, who yearns...

This "{Is a} nail-biting locked room puzzle...Carr's gift for creating a creepy atmosphere again meshes with a brilliantly constructed and eminently fair whodunit." - Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Who can I trust?" Love-sick Dick Markham is reeling. He's set to marry Lesley Grant-a woman whom he learns is not who she appears to be. She seems to have been associated with three poisonings, all of which were in locked rooms. Another crime has...