Edmund R. Fairfax – författare

A wealthy man drops dead on the eighteenth green, without a mark on him, in full view of three witnesses - and the puzzle is off and running. 'Chester K. Steele' was never a real person but a house name of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the fiction factory behind Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, applied to adult mysteries written to order. A brisk, competently machined whodunit from the firm that industrialized American storytelling, this edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 34 full-page color plates.

Joseph Conrad's first collection of stories, written while he was still deciding whether he was a sailor who wrote or a writer who had sailed. Five early tales carry us to where the empire runs out: a Dutch trader married into a Malay family and despised by both sides, a colonial agent going to pieces alone at a river station, a Breton farm where the peasants must deal with a fool. The lagoon and the outpost are already unmistakably his. This edition presents the complete and unabridged collection, newly typeset and illustrated with 30 full-page color plates.

Jane Austen's first novel and her funniest is a gleeful send-up of the gothic craze she loved. Catherine Morland, weaned on horrid novels, arrives at an ancient abbey convinced she will find a murdered wife behind a locked door - and learns that real life offers subtler dangers than the ones in books. Even as it mocks the gothic, it pauses to mount a spirited defense of novel-reading itself. Sold for ten pounds in 1803 and published only after Austen's death, this edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 43 full-page color plates.

Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers is the greatest swashbuckler ever written. A hot-headed young Gascon named d'Artagnan rides into Paris spoiling for glory and, within a day, has three duels arranged with the finest swordsmen in the king's guard - Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, soon to be his sworn brothers. Behind the flashing blades lie a queen's honor, a set of diamond studs, and the cold patience of Cardinal Richelieu. Endlessly imitated, never equaled, this edition presents the complete and unabridged novel, newly typeset and illustrated with 50 full-page color plates.