In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade famously says, “When your partner gets killed, you’re supposed to do something about it. Doesn’t matter what you thought of him.” The following story includes a crime, a trial, and an execution; as such I suppose you could call it a crime story. But the reason I chose it […]

Here is the shortest Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle, and also probably one of the shortest novels ever written—for it was printed as a book in its own binding, containing 34 pages. It was written in 1922 for the library of Queen Mary’s Doll House, a sumptuous doll house built for the wife […]

SOLVING A PICTORIAL MYSTERY Not all mysteries involve crimes. The painting below, called “The Linder Gallery”, attracted the attention of Michael John Gorman, curator of Trinity College’s Science Gallery in Dublin. He has written a book on it and created a website exploring it that you may peruse here. He provides a cursory explanation of […]

The 400 YEAR-OLD SOLUTION by James Lincoln Warren My primary computer is temporarily occupied and I can’t use it to access the internet to provide a guest column today. When things return to normal, I will provide the Gentle Reader with new material worth reading. Until then, may I suggest checking out the following Medici […]

Originally, the word novel was merely a synonym for novelty. Its application to literature comes to us courtesy of the Italian Renaissance author and humanist Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), who used it in the sense of “amusement” to represent an engaging tale—as with the century of short tales he wrote in his magnum opus, The Decameron, […]

The story below, which is to be found in Volume 10 of Burton’s translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, more colloquially known as The Arabian Nights, is sometimes held out as being the oldest fictional murder mystery. Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1820-1881) was himself one of the most renowned […]

AUGUST DERLETH and SOLAR PONS by Leigh Lundin Why isn’t the great detective Solar Pons better known? Pons strikes me as the friend you loved in school but were afraid to like too much lest your own popularity suffer. After all, what could Derleth, a North American Midwesterner who’d never been to England know about […]