Library of Congress Crime Classics – serie

It takes a thief…“Le Chat” (“The Cat”), an infamous thief, has come out of retirement and is again liberating expensive jewelry from wealthy tourists on the FreRch Riviera. Or is it a “copycat” who is stealing fortunes? John Robie thought he had left his larcenous past behind. Once responsible for a string of daring thefts and escapes, he was caught and sent to prison just before the outbreak of World War II. Freed during the German occupation of France, Robie joined the French Resistance and received unofficial amnesty after the war ended. He retired to a simple life in the country where he befriended the local commissaire, Oriol, and tended his gardens. Now it's 1951, and someone has been at work using his old MO. When the police come to arrest him, Robie escapes to Cannes. There, he reconnects with his former comrade Bellini, who convinces Robie to help catch the copycat. Disguised as a pudgy, middle-aged American businessman, Robie scouts the local nightclubs and casinos and tries to outthink the new thief. When he meets Francie Stevens, the daughter of a wealthy tourist, she becomes Robie's unwelcome ally, and together they hatch a dangerous plan to catch the thief at a gala party. But soon they both realize that Robie really is a thief at heart. With Oriol and the police on his trail, will he escape capture? Will the real thief be caught? And will Robie give up the thief?

First published in 1923, Jim Hanvey, Detective is a collection of seven stories that originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post and features private eye Jim Hanvey in classic whodunit style mysteries. Described as the "backwoods Nero Wolfe," the genial Hanvey befriends "good guys" and criminals alike to get the job done.Bank robberies, jewel heists, and all-purposes cons—none are a match for Octavus Roy Cohen's waddling sleuth.

When the prompter falls dead during the second act of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre during a matinee performance at the Metropolitan Opera, as one can imagine, it causes quite a stir, especially when it is discovered that the deceased, a one time world famous Heldentenor has been poisoned. The detective assigned to the case, Lt. Quentin, finds himself immersed in the back stage drama of professional opera. His task is made more difficult when he decides that it had really been the star soprano who had been the intended victim, and not the prompter. Will he be able to solve the case before there is another Metropolitan Opera Murder?

Average Jones is a brilliant young man of independent means, thanks to the bequest of a wealthy yet jaded uncle. Five years after graduating college, he finds himself bored with travel and his bon vivant lifestyle, and restless for some meaningful hobby to occupy his mind. On the advice of a friend, he decides to set up a business as an "Ad-Visor," warning potential buyers of goods and services of potential scams. Each "ad-vising" case turns into a crime-detecting story showcasing the amateur sleuth's deductive reasoning, a la Sherlock Holmes. At times bizarre, at times humorous, this collection is highly entertaining, featuring stories such as "The B-flat Trombone," "The Man Who Spoke Latin," and "The Million-Dollar Dog."

An unmissable entry in the esteemed Library of Congress Crime Classics, an exciting new classic mystery series created in exclusive partnership with the Library of Congress to highlight the best of American crime fictionWhen the body of N'Gana Frimbo, the African conjure-man, is discovered in his consultation room, Perry Dart, one of Harlem's ten Black police detectives, is called in to investigate. Together with Dr Archer, a physician from across the street, Dart is determined to solve the baffling mystery, helped and hindered by Bubber Brown and Jinx Jenkins, local boys keen to clear themselves of suspicion of murder and undertake their own investigations.This groundbreaking mystery is the first ever to feature a Black detective and all Black characters, written by Black author Rudolph Fisher, who was a principal writer of the Harlem Renaissance.

Originally published in 1945, V as in Victim was the first crime novel to feature ordinary cops as the main characters, launching the subgenre known as “police procedurals” and earning Lawrence Treat an important place in the history of mysteries.“So Mitch knew in general why he was a cop. ...But Jub Freeman was different, and the difference bothered Mitch.”New York City Police Detective Mitch Taylor doesn’t love being a cop, but it’s a decent, respectable job—except for the paperwork. He files his cases as “investigations,” not crimes, so that failure to solve them won’t jeopardize his promotion. Lab tech Jub Freeman never wanted to work for the police, but landing in the lab suited him well. When they’re called to the scene of a hit and run accident, Mitch is annoyed with the witnesses. None noted the license plate number of the car, but one insists that she heard a woman scream just before the accident.Interviewing the woman in her apartment overlooking the accident, Mitch and Jub are surprised to learn that her scream had nothing to do with the hit and run: she’s discovered her cat died, for no apparent reason. When her date doesn’t show up either, she grows worried and asks the police to check out his apartment at a nearby hotel. There, they find her friend bludgeoned to death.Are the cases related? With no brilliant amateur detectives in sight, can regular police solve these puzzles? Schooled in the ways that real law enforcement operates, Treat takes the readers along on a satisfying ride to justice.

First published in 1918, this collection of tales of Abner’s investigations, told by his nephew and chronicled by the prolific Melville Davisson Post, was hailed as the most important volume of American crime fiction since the work of Edgar Allan Poe."It is a world…filled with the mysterious justice of God!”The titular Uncle Abner is a man with extraordinary powers of observation, a close reader of the Bible, and a towering code of morality, and he does not shy from taking matters into his own hands when the law is too slow or too blind to dispense justice. A landowner in nineteenth-century West Virginia, Abner is a fountainhead of God’s wisdom and justice for the territory. Post’s stories and novels were highly popular, appearing in national magazines and book form. Though the stories are little read today, there is nothing old-fashioned about the terrible crimes committed in the backwoods or Abner’s extraordinary skills as an observer of men and evil.

As manager of New York City's finest luxury hotel The Beaumont, Pierre Chambrun is well acquainted with unreasonable requests from its patrons. When one of the rich rooftop suite owners demands the impossible for his annual birthday bash, Chambrun is unflustered; of course he can have exotic foods and flora flown in from all corners of the globe! No problem procuring the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera to sing "Happy Birthday!" No matter that birthday boy is the obnoxious and well-hated Aubrey Moon—a man who loves nothing better than destroying the lives of those who annoy him. Pierre is more than equal to the task.But when a high-society call girl commits suicide in one of the Beaumont's suites, Pierre learns she'd been under pressure to murder Moon. He also discovers that there is a "Moon Club" made up of people with good reasons to wish the man dead. When an anonymous big spender offers $10,000 to any club member able to exterminate the menace, Chambrun works with his chief of security and the NYPD to catch the mastermind before the plot—and Moon—are executed.

"Smart material, fresh characters, intricate plot, a thumping success!"—New York Herald TribuneHardy is a small-time diamond salesman and ex-cop who knows private deals mean trouble. Against his better judgment he decides to help a rich acquaintance find a special diamond for his wife. Saul finds the perfect gem, but the deal turns deadly when the diamond is revealed to be part of the haul from a violent murder-robbery.Caught between the cops, the mob, a beautiful amateur jeweler, and shady gemologists, Saul must figure out how to clear his name before he becomes the next casualty.

"It boiled down to a white cop and black me, and he had the 'difference' in his hand."Toussaint Moore is a college-educated, decorated war veteran. Because he's also a Black man, his employment options are limited, so he ekes out a living as a private eye serving Black clients in and around Harlem where he lives. When he's hired by producers of a television reality show called "You--Detective!" to keep tabs on the whereabouts of an accused child molester until the episode airs, the gig goes quickly south; Touie finds the man murdered, and himself framed for the deed. Needing to flee, he goes to the small Ohio town where the deceased was wanted for his crime, thinking the key to the murder may lie there. As Virgil Tibbs would experience years later in John Ball's IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, Touie encounters a whole new level of resistance and racism as a Black man asking questions in a small-minded, predominantly white town.As Scott Adlerberg states in his Feb. 2019 article for Criminal Element): "What Lacy does in Room to Swing is consider a question Walter Mosely would more fully explore years later in his Easy Rawlins books. Lacy asks whether a black man (in the late fifties) can go everywhere he needs to, with the freedom his job requires, in order to conduct the investigation necessary to crack a case."

Nightclub singer Margaret Odell, the famous Broadway beauty and ex-Follies girl known as "The Canary", is found murdered in her ransacked apartment, her jewelry stolen. It appears at first to be a robbery gone wrong, but the police can find no physical evidence to pinpoint a culprit. No one witnessed anyone entering or leaving, and the only unwatched entrance to the apartment building was bolted from the inside.Who could have killed the Canary in her locked cage? The victim was seeing a number of men, ranging from a high society gentleman to ruthless gangsters, and more than one man visited her apartment on the night she died. When the D.A. is stumped, he turns to his friend Philo Vance, an erudite and snobbish aristocrat, who applies his brilliant observations of human nature during a poker game with the suspects to determine who in fact knocked the Canary from her perch-permanently.

"A collection that might have been called CSI: 1912."—Kirkus ReviewsThe seventh book in the esteemed Library of Congress Crime Classics, an exciting new classic mystery series created in exclusive partnership with the Library of Congress. This short story collection features twelve tales of intrigue and suspense, starring Craig Kennedy, the "American Sherlock Holmes."New York City, early 1900s.Craig Kennedy, a university professor who uses science to help catch criminals, investigates crimes in and around NYC boroughs featuring deaths by apparent-but-inexplicable means. These highly imaginative crimes include spontaneous combustion and vengeful spirits, along with less fatal crimes involving kidnapping, safe-cracking, and a missing fortune in diamonds. With his impressive knowledge, friend Walter Jameson (his own Watson!), and use of cutting-edge technology of the day, Kennedy cracks each case using unorthodox yet entertaining means.Arthur B. Reeve's Craig Kennedy stories were so popular in his time that he went on to publish twenty-six books featuring the professor, who also appeared in comic strips and a number of films. Readers of classic crime fiction will delight in this collection of twelve short stories. Fans of Sherlock Holmes will especially appreciate Kennedy's insistence on logic and science over brawn.

This entertaining short story collection features Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, nicknamed "The Thinking Machine"-a brilliant but abrasive scientist who proves time and again that any puzzle can be solved by the application of logic.Could you beat the world chess master in one try if you'd never played or studied the game? Or plot and execute a successful escape from an inescapable prison cell? And could you do it at the turn of the twentieth century, without benefit of modern technology? Sound impossible?Never use that word in the presence of The Thinking Machine-it angers him greatly and does not give him a favorable impression of the user. Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen knows that both feats are indeed possible, having accomplished them himself. But he also applies his superior intellect and deductive reasoning to more official ends-namely helping the police solve "impossible" crimes.With assistance from reporter Hutchinson Hatch, who is only too happy to suggest potential cases and then write about the outcome, The Thinking Machine proves that no puzzle is unsolvable-not corporate espionage, nor a kidnapped baby, nor a pilfered necklace, And certainly not a "perfect murder."