CURTIS EVANS

Murder by Jury: “If there is any place one would think himself safe, it would be in a jury room, locked up with fellow members of a jury, considering a verdict. Yet that, strangely enough, is the place Miss Sanborn chose for her victim. Naturally it takes an unusual bit of scheming on her part to make the murder plausible, and to set the stage so that the killer goes undetected long enough to fill the volume. Yet she manages it without false leads, or last-minute introductions of new characters. . . . It’s well told, and is interesting in the portrayal of the characters of the story.” (Birmingham, Alabama, News, April 3, 1932)

Murder on the Aphrodite: “A houseboat is a pretty fair place on which to stage a murder mystery, and Ruth Burr Sanborn uses such a locale to good advantage. When Mrs. Christine Van Wycke is killed while a psychologist is conducting an experiment to show that no persons notice the same things during a moment of stress, Bill Galleon finds himself wondering if Jane Bridge, or Jane Barron as he once knew her, has anything to do with the murder. Before the solution is reached, Bill has some bad moments about his suspicions, but naturally the romance ends happily and the murder is solved in an ingenious manner.” (Minneapolis, Minnesota, Star, October 19, 1935)

When murder takes place in the hot, steamy shadows of Malaya among the British and Americans far from their native home, colonial police know to call for Ismael, "the smartest detective in the East." A canny, native member of the force, Ismael knows that the same passions and desires flow beneath the surface of all men (and women), secret though they may be. Playing the unassuming native, Ismael uncovers the truth and the killer.

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Two mysteries featuring Ismael are included in this volume.

A gentleman bachelor from the old-money Shephard family brings home a much younger wife, attractive but self-absorbed New York revue star "Joss" King. She promptly begins making changes to the impressive family home, without regard to the feelings of the rest of the family. No surprise then, that a weekend party ends in murder with plenty of suspects . . .

Thirteen mysteries with two series detectives (with one cross-over). The first volume, Death at Dayton's Folly, includes a bibliographic introduction by Curt Evans. Click button below for further details.

A young man, recently jilted, is given a strange prescription from his doctor: detective stories . . .

Quickly becoming an enthusiast, he reads every mystery he can get his hands on, and starts to put into practice the art of deduction. When he is invited on a weekend jaunt to a house party in the country, though, he finds his newfound interest sorely tested when his host is found dead. Can he match the clever sleuthing of his literary heroes? Or will the police win out?

A Hollywood production company has found the perfect location for their action film, a rambling old mansion, abandoned and atmospheric, but they've stumbled into a quagmire of death and mystery.

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(The Edingtons based their memorable House of the Vanishing Goblets on the famous Winchester house, where the superstitious widow of the famed firearms inventor continued to build rooms and staircases to appease the spirits.)

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A detective is called in, but can he find his way through the maze of rooms and suspects?

You'll Be Sorry!: A brief message, written in blood-red script, bluntly warned Kate Archer not to accept her old school friend June Gladstone’s invitation to visit Valley Farm. But visit is just what Kate did—and when she saw that ghastly bleeding thing on the terrace she was very sorry indeed that she had gone. Plunged into a horrific mystery, Kate will need to keep all her wits about her if she means to survive! Fortunately Professor Hatfield, who recently solved those diabolical mutilation murders on the campus at Woodside, is vacationing nearby. The professor knows a thing or two about maniacs. . . .

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You Leave Me Cold!: Just how did Ronny Travers come to die, alone and bedridden in Dr. Chardwicke’s sprawling old house in Woodside? The once highly esteemed scientist assures his new boarder—medical student John Frazer, late of the U.S. Navy—that nothing sinister is afoot, but has Dr. Chardwicke ever really recovered from that nervous breakdown he had a decade ago? John’s uncle, Professor Hatfield, who by his own admission has a peculiar taste for the macabre, has his doubts. What menace waits within the Chardwicke house—and will the fatally inquisitive John Frazer become its next victim?

Ed MacIntyre and Walt Tuttle, harried creators of the hit Chicago radio soap opera serial Home Town, all about the heartrending traumas endured by the good (and sometimes not so good) people of the fictional town of Stedham, have decided to quit the radio rat race and retire to Walt’s quiet little home town in Massachusetts. There they can enjoy the laid-back country life while managing, along with Ed’s wife Binnie, the local pharmacy, which comes complete with a spiffy soda fountain. What can go wrong?

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Lots, as it turns out! Not long after their arrival in Hamsted, Walt is discovered late at night shot dead in a booth at the pharmacy, a scrap of paper clutched in his hand and an overturned glass of strawberry soda spilling pink froth on the table before him.

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Who whacked Walt at the pharmacy? Could it have been someone from Walt’s and Ed’s old Chicago life, or was it someone with a local grudge? What does the town simpleton, the strawberry soda-guzzling “Dodo” Brown, know about the crime? And is he really as simple as he appears? Ed and Binnie find themselves trapped in a real-life mystery melodrama as strange as anything Ed and Walt ever concocted for Home Town—one that puts them in peril of their own lives!

A killer is loose on campus! Amateur criminologist Professor Philip Yerkes has been found shot dead in his locked office at Chatham House, and the dread digit of suspicion is now pointing at two of Yerkes’ own university colleagues, John Hardwick Bailey, one of the country’s foremost Shakespeare scholars, and Thaddeus Davis, noted authority on English poetry. Can young Professor Ben Ingram, who discovered the dead man’s body and is desperately in love with Professor Bailey’s beautiful daughter Mary, exonerate his friends—when even he has reason to doubt their innocence?

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What does neurotic youngster Leonard Crane know about the affair? Or smoothly handsome Guido Luciano? And just where is that odd janitor, Schultz? Can Professor Meade, the scandal-averse university president, keep those blundering police flatfoots at bay in the bloody groves of academe as Professor Bailey tries to find a satisfactory solution to the case?

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For those who have wondered whether the pen is mightier than the gat, read on to the shocking conclusion of Death on the Campus and see.

"Imagine nine tourists cooped up on a small, light-draft boat on the Nile, hot and uncomfortable by day, cold by night, suddenly thrown into panic by the knowledge that one of them is a murderer; that even if he desired to, the desperate brute could not leave the boat because of the barrenness of the land about them. So they must associate with the criminal until they could get back to more-populated country.

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"The first murder was that of a beautiful girl as she stood before the hideous statue of Anubis, King of the Dead, in the Sudan, with its rock-hewn tombs of ancient Egypt. Her death was due to the bite of a deadly asp, which had been placed in her jacket pocket. Then came the murder of a native deck steward, who seemingly knew too much. And still there was no actual knowledge of who had been the criminal. Each passenger suspected his or her neighbor, even the captain coming under suspicion. And it remained for a young girl, a girl with a newspaper training, to eventually solve the hideous mystery. Miss McKinley has made her story one that is terribly realistic, with much of the enchantment and mystery of Africa, flavoring the tense excitement." (1933, Boston Globe)

Murder Rents a Room: Cliff's Edge mansion, in historic Greene County, Alabama, is a bit run down, to be sure, but a line had been drawn at dead bodies—at least until now. When drop dead gorgeous vamp Kitty Leigh Bolling—on her third husband and already on the lookout for a fourth—turns up at the old ancestral home, temperatures run high and the fur starts to fly. With southern passions proving positively murderous and bodies piling up at Cliff's Edge, can attractive widow Kate Frazier, trying to recover from the untimely death of her husband and to make a go of things at Cliff's Edge by taking in paying guests (including wanly handsome visitor Alex Dexter), avoid becoming Murder's next victim?

The Crimson Feather: Convalescing artist Ann Bartley has returned home to wartime Tuscaloosa, Alabama, from Chicago at the urgent though cryptic plea of her married adopted sister, Jean Tolliver. In Tuscaloosa Ann finds tensions running high among the Tolliver family. When Jean's wealthy father-in-law dies a highly suspicious death during a hunt in neighboring Greene County, Alabama, it's up to local sheriff Bill Davies to put an end to one vicious slay ride by catching yet another clever killer. While Sheriff Davies scents the clues to a dastardly crime, can Ann save her sister's sanity—not to mention her own life?

The House that Hate Built: When widowed bank president James Clark weds a second time, to the previously married Margaret Branch, mother of glamorous divorcee Margo Branch, it was a dark day for James Clark's blue-blooded spinster sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, who made it clear to Margaret that she was beneath their notice socially. Margaret retaliated by having her husband build her a house right next door to the Clark sisters, so that the two women would have to look at that house every single day for the rest of their lives. However it's Margaret who dies first, viciously stabbed to death in her house—the house that hate built. Suspects are myriad, and it will take all of Monroe sheriff Frank Garner's wiles to bring the vicious crime—and the ones that follow it—home to the culprit.

The Whip: In Chicago Carla Ives stands accused of the poisoning murder of her diabetic widowed great-aunt and guardian, Mrs. Sarah Willingham, whose every cruelly barbed word was like the lash of the whip to her vulnerable ward. Tasked with determining whether Carla, who has confessed to the heinous crime, is criminally insane, psychiatrist Dr. Mark Sargeant persuades the beautiful young woman to tell him the story of the miserable years which she spent under her cold guardian's "care." What he learns convinces him that Carla could not have been Mrs. Willingham's murderer—yet who was it, in that case, who killed the hateful old woman?

When George Gaynleigh, author and “spasmodic” detective novelist , arrives in the wealthy and seemingly contented suburban development of Randall Green as a guest of his friend Ed Marsh, he little suspects that he will soon be embroiled in a crime problem more intricate than anything he ever dared put down on paper. A person or persons unknown has picked up a nasty habit of shooting men and then stashing their stripped bodies in the rumble seats of local cars—most emphatically not a practice calculated to heighten property values! Soon Gaynleigh joins a neighborhood “homicide squad”—comprised of himself, Ed, a journalist and, wonder of wonders, an actual detective—which tries, with help from Ed’s winsome wife, Jeanie, to crack a fiendishly complex murder case.

What murdering fiend is setting the fires at Fitch’s Folly, leaving behind in their smoldering ashes the ghastly mortal remains of slain human souls?

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Fitch’s Folly is the New England summer home of Peter Finch, that elderly and eccentric New York millionaire who in season lords it over the little village of Vershire. The querulous old man insisted there was a dastardly plot afoot against him, but no one took him seriously—not, that is, until frightful infernos began to blaze and bodies pile up all over his sprawling estate! It was then that burning suspicions began to rage far and wide among Finch’s numerous dependents and servitors, many of them first-rate oddities in their own right. Finch’s pyrophobic chauffeur, Bill Perley, narrates the bizarre and baffling events which take place during that terrible July, as his old army pal, Vershire Police Chief Larry Frost, desperately tries to extinguish what truly is one hellish conflagration of crime.

Five men are discussing crime in the garden of the Serpentine Club in Washington D.C. when news comes of the death, apparently from an overdose of morphine, of a beautiful and mysterious Argentine woman in a Washington mansion. Four of the men present find themselves engaged in helping the fifth, Commissioner Selden, to investigate the case which becomes stranger and more complex as it progresses.

Clues are plentiful but the trail is a long one, and before Trevor Stoke, a scientist and one of the four, has found its end, the reader has followed with him many a false scent, delighted in many clever deductions, but never guessed the solution.

The Capital Murder is a detective story in the true sense of the phrase, but it has all the rapid action, the breath-taking speed of the thriller.

Inspector Norton Kane of the Boston Police uses his keen intellect to grapple with mystifying murders.

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The Beacon Hill Murders: A stock market gambler tries to climb the social ladder, hosting a small dinner party with a few influential guests. When he ends up dead, there is only one obvious suspect, but could she really have committed such an egregious social faux pas?

The Back Bay Murders: Nobody in the boardinghouse believes him when a neurotic young man claims that someone is out to get him, but when he actually turns up dead, who is to blame?

Inspector Norton Kane of the Boston Police uses his keen intellect to grapple with mystifying murders.

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Cat's Paw: A wealthy but despotic uncle rules the roost and pocketbooks of his young relatives. On the occasion of his birthday, an important announcement is forthcoming, but so is murder . . .

Murder Among the Angells: Two aged brothers and their families live in separate wings of the same mansion, tied together by a poorly-devised will leaving the entirety of their father's estate to the surviving brother. No surprise, Death is also in the wings . . .

Inspector Norton Kane of the Boston Police uses his keen intellect to grapple with mystifying murders.

In the First Degree: Inspector Kane is recovering from the flu when he is enticed into investigating threats against an elderly man living in an historic Boston mansion. The unthinkable happens, and murder occurs right under the Inspector's nose. Will he unravel the strange threads of a dark family drama?

Curtis Evans' introduction uncovers the bibliographic details of the two women who wrote these five fantastic novels under the name of Roger Scarlett, and the peculiarities in the publishing history of these often-forgotten classic mysteries (including a remarkable plagiarism case and the influence of these novels on Japanese detective fiction).

Fire rages through Haunted Mine, economic mainstay of the coalmining town of Genesee, Colorado. Some miners have been rescued, but seventeen still are tragically trapped in the mine’s depths. Tony Sheridan, the handsome, outgoing and seemingly much-adored nephew of Genesee’s “benevolent despot,” old Matthew North, heroically descends to the bottom of the mine in a desperate last effort at rescue. He does not return, however, nor do any of the missing men. All hope is abandoned, the ventilating shaft is shut off and both downcast and upcast are covered over by boards. Five weeks later, after the fire has exhausted itself, the shafts are opened and men descend to clear out the wreckage. At the foot of the main shaft Tony’s scorched body is found—with a bullet through his heart! The bullet entered from the young man’s back in such a way as to preclude suicide. The seventeen men whom Tony had tried to rescue are found dead in the mine behind a half-built barricade, under such circumstances that beyond any possibility of doubt they all must have been dead long before Tony made it into the mine. So who or what on earth could have killed Tony Sheridan?​

Before the midnight when young Johnny Angel went whistling up his steps to find a gun jammed unceremoniously into his stomach, he would have described himself as a simple, everyday sort of person.

He loved his job as A-1 mechanic in a defense plant and slaved nights over a union plan to increase production. Other nights he devoted to Janie Allen, to whom he proposed at least once every twenty-four hours.

But a white paper containing a message in mysterious code was thrust into his hand and suddenly he was being pushed around.

Johnny Angel decided to stand up for his own rights. Moreover, he decided to find out just what was going on if he had to buck the whole New York City police department. Before long that was just what Johnny Angel, scuttling through Greenwich Village back streets, was doing, for he had been neatly, beautifully and convincingly framed on a murder charge!

“Johnny on the Spot” is a fast, up-to-the-minute mystery, written with excitement and authority.​

Henry Lanard was dead, appallingly dispatched with a knife to his chest as he lay on his deathbed, fatally ill with pneumonia. Who would murder a dying man? Seemingly the single clue had been briefly glimpsed by beautiful Ethel Baines, the nurse who discovered her employer’s body: snowy prints left by anonymous footsteps.

Perilously trapped with Ethel Baines in the snowbound Lanard mansion are Henry Lanard’s physician, Alfred Trevor, to whom Ethel is secretly married; Lanard’s frivolous widow, Frieda; his calculating attorney brother Courtney; his sardonic spinster sister, Janet; his handsome black sheep son, Neville; and his servants, Sophie and Cowpers Freedly, respectively cook and butler, and Hodges, the chauffeur. In spirit as well, hovering like a malignant specter over the grim mansion, is the beautiful Elizabeth Lanard, deceased youngest child of the Lanard clan. Additionally, in classic tradition another person unexpectedly appears in the midst of the murder maelstrom that engulfs the mansion.

Will this unexpected guest prove friend or foe? And who in the house of death will survive a long winter’s night of heart-freezing terror, in which an anonymous slayer strikes with impunity again and again?

Huddled on the floor, her body clothed only in the flimsiest of night gowns, lay lovely Marguerite Scholl. Robert Crocker, who first found the body, was suspected of the murder, but Peter Adams, a New York City reporter with an enquiring mind, thought it might have been done by someone else. The trail he picks up and follows leads him to the Pennsylvania Dutch country—from one nerve-racking experience to another—for very soon he discovers that “hexing” has a great deal to do with the murder. Even bluff old Sheriff Reed is nervous when they try to question the dour Kruger, father of the slaughtered girl, the testy Dr. Schneider or the strange Conrad Reifmayer who had put a hex on all the Kruger family. Peter Adams is helped a great deal by a fascinating red-headed girl, but it isn’t until they have shared many a danger together that they finally solve The Hex Murder.

Clues and Corpses investigates the life and genre writing of Oklahoma Choctaw detective novelist Todd Downing (1902-1974). Included in this volume are nearly 300 annotated mystery book reviews from the 1930s by Downing and Downing’s essay “Murder is a Rather Serious Business” (1943), as well as analysis of Downing’s own detective fiction, most of which is set in Mexico. A biography of Downing provides details on his life at home and in academia. Preface by Bill Pronzini.

There were the makings of murder in that dinner party, all right. If you had been sitting at that beautifully ap­pointed table as a stranger, you would have thought such a group could hardly be matched for smartness, for culture, for beauty and wit in the women, for keen­ness and force in the men. But there were no strangers at Martin Cole's table, and each one suspected that behind those clever animated expressions lay greed and jeal­ousy, fear and arrogance and ruthlessness.

Set against the background of the execu­tive offices of a large, modern Fifth Ave­nue department store, this tale of subtle intrigue and murder moves with swiftness and precision. And, in following it, the reader finds himself constantly surrounded by the fascinating inner world of merchan­dising fashion, learning the ways of models and buyers and promoters, watching from behind the scenes the extravagant private showings, and sitting in on the councils of the high-powered executives.

That British mysteries from the Golden Age of detective fiction (customarily defined as the period between the First and Second World Wars) were not only aesthetically but ideologically conservative has long been a commonplace of mystery genre criticism. In The Spectrum of English Murder, Curtis Evans challenges this view by looking at the detective fiction of Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher and G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, a trio of popular British crime writers from the Golden Age. Although Aubrey-Fletcher, a Great War veteran and member of his country’s traditional gentry elite, and the Coles, prominent socialist intellectuals, wrote about fictional murder from polar points of the political spectrum, the detective fiction of all three authors is alike in that it often defies conventional expectations of between-the-wars British mystery writing.

The Spectrum of English Murder offers both fans and scholars of Golden Age detective fiction an entertaining and illuminating analysis of the works of three of the period’s most interesting crime writers, all of whom merit modern-day revival.

Two of Anita Boutell’s books in one volume, one a classic clued mystery and the other a psychological thriller. In the first, Dr. Archie Storke investigates the death of a gunshot victim in a quaint English village. In the second, a young newlywed confronts her huband’s ancestral home complete with strange relatives and a dangerous cliff.

A small group of Americans find themselves sheltering in an old French town to save expenses after the fall of the American dollar. This pleasant stay off the beaten path is interrupted with the arrival of a brash American businessman and his wife, only to be further spoiled by the death of one of their own. A young schoolteacher finds himself embroiled in the mystery and it isn’t long before another death creates more turmoil. A young couple’s happiness is on the line in this well-written mystery.

The Bank Vault Mystery: On the morning of the thirty-first three engineers accompanied by the manager visited the vault of the Consolidated Bank. Shortly after they left, it was discovered that a bag containing $180,000 in cash had disappeared. And so commenced the famous bank vault case in which Maxwell Fenner, the casual, dapper detective, made a list of six suspects and in tracking them through a maze of motives and two murders found a criminal genius.

Brokers' End: It was a clever set up. The Treasurer of the great bond concern of F. W. Strong lay across his elaborate mahogany desk with a bullet hole in his forehead. His revolver was at hand, the ejected shell gleamed from the carpet nearby. Motive? The House of Strong after forty years of business "without loss to any investor" had, a few days previous, been declared insolvent by the Court and there were rumors in the air of "irregularities" in the books. It was a clever set up, but after Maxwell Fenner had looked it over and glanced significantly at Inspector Bryce, the latter expressed the thoughts of both when he remarked, "I smell something fishy-it's too damned neat." And then commenced the pursuit and detection of what was to become a string of the most diabolically ingenious murders in the experience of the dapper, casual, and disconcertingly naive Maxwell Fenner.

In The Dartmouth Murders, Dartmouth College student Ken Harris finds a fellow undergraduate hanging outside the dormitory, but events soon prove it was murder, not suicide. As events unfold, and more deaths follow, Ken finds himself questioning the motives of everyone around him. Even his attorney father, helping the police in their investigations, comes under suspicion. The murderer won’t be unveiled until a secret past is uncovered.

“Spider” Meech, an elderly detective, finds himself facing the most challenging mystery of his career in The Wailing Rock Murders. Visiting his young ward and her friends in a great house on a seaside cliff, murder casts a pall over the party. The mystery becomes twisted with a dark family history and twin Gothic manors. In the background, a wailing wind portends death.

Kansas oil man Ralph Loundon is found murdered and dumped on a strawstack, and there is no end of suspects. Steven Steele, crack amateur detective, is on the case!

First published in 1936 as A Frame for Murder, The Strawstack Murder Case offers a baffling mystery in an unusual setting for a Golden-Age mystery. Author Kirke Mechem (1889-1985) was the Executive Director of the Kansas State Historical Society, and brought his wealth of knowledge and love for Kansas scenery to this, his only published mystery novel. (A second mystery, that dealth with themes his publisher was uncomfortable with, unfortunately seems to have been lost.) An oil well fire, Jamaica ginger, a furry primate, and White Castle hamburgers all make appearances in this fun mystery.

Marina Grazie, coloratura soprano, had at least one thing in common with the old gray mare—she wasn’t what she used to be when she was the darling of the Metropolitan. One characteristic, however, she had retained—“a gift for inspiring impulses to violence.” These impulses boiled to the surface among her entourage when she came out of a well-deserved retirement to join the Monte Calvo Opera Company on a tour of the Pacific Coast. Each of them jealously guarded the secret of his own past, but all were united by their bitterness toward the aging prima donna who ruled their lives with a whip of fear. On a sentimental pilgrimage to Lucifer’s Pride, a grim, half-finished castle on the banks of the Columbia River, Marina’s last aria was ended with that homely implement of which Hamlet soliloquized—“a bare bodkin.” During the next twenty-four storm-tossed hours, Tony Graine, the tenor in her company, uncovered a story of intrigue, jealousy, blackmail and revenge as wild as the blizzard which whined around the ancient castle. No police and no detectives were present to delay his brilliant quest of the solution to the deadly riddle.

Murder Ends the Song (1941) is more than a fresh and amusing mystery novel. Into its thrill-packed pages is woven the fascinating atmosphere of the operatic stage, with its petty intrigues, its strange artistic quirks, and the spell which music spins about its devotees.

During the Golden Age of detective fiction Marian Gallagher Scott (1892-1943) wrote scores of pulp crime stories and five well-received detective novels. Leaving her job as a typist in Topeka, Kansas, Scott took up acting as a circuit Chautauqua performer, appearing with her husband, Earl, on stages across small-town America. In the late 1920s the couple retired from acting and turned to crime fiction as their occupation. With the flair of a natural entertainer Marian Scott in her mystery novels offers readers exciting stories with interesting characters and intriguing puzzles.

In Dead Hands Reaching (1932), dark clouds gather as actress Dallas Gentry returns to Willow Valley seeking a divorce from her tyrannical older husband. (A Courtney Brade mystery.)

The brutal Minnesota slaying of a mysterious hermit woman in Death's Long Shadow (1946) leads investigators back to decades-old misdoings in a forbidding New England town. (A Courtney Brade mystery.)

Murder mars a small-town New England wedding in the highly-praised Tall Man Walking (1936). Sophisticated psychiatrist Kenneth Borden investigates as the bodies pile up and a lack of material clues stymies the police.

A peddler’s murder upsets the peaceful environs of Alder Valley, as shameful secrets come to light in The Attic Room (1942). (A Courtney Brade mystery.)

Willoughby Sharp wrote two excellent fair-play mysteries, but rather than highlighting a master private detective, these are well-plotted police procedurals with characters that bring lively interaction to their pages.

Murder in Bermuda takes us to that lovely island, where a murder jars the local police force into surprised but efficient action. Is the murderer a tourist, a local, or a passing sailor? And what does it have to do with a New York kidnapping?

Murder of the Honest Broker opens with two murders of a similar strange nature, but with little else to connect them. Inspector Bullock is on the case, a no-nonsense and brash police detective who sorts the clues and follows the leads by the book. Amusing and puzzling, the NY Times Book Review called it.