A man vanishes from a Norfolk inn between the fish and the entree, leaving a hundred thousand pounds and a mission from an American millionaire undelivered - and the guests who watched him go have their own reasons for it. Oppenheim wrote some hundred and fifteen thrillers and invented the international-intrigue novel as a form; this 1914 one is the clean machine, and the Norfolk coast in it is genuinely cold.

A Greek fruit-seller in Chicago, an heiress's child who goes missing, and a man everyone in the city has walked past a thousand times without seeing. Lee taught English at Smith College; her Uncle William was loved by a generation, and this 1912 novel does the same trick - the person nobody notices turns out to be the only one who is really paying attention.

A woman learns on her honeymoon that her husband has been tried for murdering his first wife and let go on a Scotch verdict of Not Proven - and decides that a wife may investigate what a court would not. Collins gave the detective work to a woman in 1875, thirty years before anyone else thought to, and gave her a legless, malicious, brilliant informant nobody forgets.

Jacob Flanders is never described. He is assembled instead out of what other people notice - his mother's letters, a room in Cambridge, a woman on a bus, sheep's jaws on the beach, an empty pair of shoes. Woolf set the Hogarth Press up in her own dining room and hand-printed the early books; this was her third novel, the one where she abandoned the old machinery for good, and the war does not need to be described either.

Holland, 1672: a mob tears two statesmen to pieces in the street, and a quiet gentleman in Dordrecht goes on trying to breed a black tulip because a hundred thousand guilders are offered for one. Dumas takes the real lynching of the De Witt brothers, sets a flower contest beside it, and lets a jealous neighbor do the rest. The tulip mania was forty years past and the greed was not.

A man vanishes from a Norfolk inn between the fish and the entree, leaving a hundred thousand pounds and a mission from an American millionaire undelivered - and the guests who watched him go have their own reasons for it. Oppenheim wrote some hundred and fifteen thrillers and invented the international-intrigue novel as a form; this 1914 one is the clean machine, and the Norfolk coast in it is genuinely cold.

A Greek fruit-seller in Chicago, an heiress's child who goes missing, and a man everyone in the city has walked past a thousand times without seeing. Lee taught English at Smith College; her Uncle William was loved by a generation, and this 1912 novel does the same trick - the person nobody notices turns out to be the only one who is really paying attention.

A woman learns on her honeymoon that her husband has been tried for murdering his first wife and let go on a Scotch verdict of Not Proven - and decides that a wife may investigate what a court would not. Collins gave the detective work to a woman in 1875, thirty years before anyone else thought to, and gave her a legless, malicious, brilliant informant nobody forgets.

Jacob Flanders is never described. He is assembled instead out of what other people notice - his mother's letters, a room in Cambridge, a woman on a bus, sheep's jaws on the beach, an empty pair of shoes. Woolf set the Hogarth Press up in her own dining room and hand-printed the early books; this was her third novel, the one where she abandoned the old machinery for good, and the war does not need to be described either.

Holland, 1672: a mob tears two statesmen to pieces in the street, and a quiet gentleman in Dordrecht goes on trying to breed a black tulip because a hundred thousand guilders are offered for one. Dumas takes the real lynching of the De Witt brothers, sets a flower contest beside it, and lets a jealous neighbor do the rest. The tulip mania was forty years past and the greed was not.