The electronic browser books listed below are available as individual titles on IBM formatted 3.5 inch diskettes or the library collections are available on self starting CD. They are read offline using your Internet browser. Many of our e-books are not available anywhere in regular book form, being out of print. Some are out of print because they were written in an era of different sensitivities and are now "politically incorrect."
Classic Mysteries
Each Browser Book on diskette is priced at $3 postpaid.
Each Library Collection on CD is priced at $10 postpaid.
Each paper book title is priced as listed.
| Title/Author | Description |
| The Agony Column by Earl Derr Biggers |
In England The Agony Column was the name of the personal advertisements in newspapers. The story begins with an American visiting London and being quite taken by beautiful young woman he sees having breakfast with her father at a London Hotel. Wondering what he has to lose he places an ad to the girl and after a few days she replies. She asks that he write seven letters to her in seven days to prove he is an interesting person and tells him how to post them. His first letter is innocent enough, but then the mystery begins. Murder and political intrigue are detailed in the letters of a man smitten by love. |
| The Club Of Queer Trades by G.K. Chesterton |
This excellent half-parody of the detective story, particularly of the Sherlock Holmes stories, is a good introduction to the whimsical and off-beat style of the author. |
| The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton |
This is the first book by the author of the ingenious, thoughtful and lyrically written mystery short stories featuring the unassuming priest who solves crimes by imagining himself inside the mind and soul of the criminal and understanding his motives. The stories are full of paradox, spiritual insight and "Chestertonian fantasy," or seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary |
| The Wisdom of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton |
From London to Cornwall, then to Italy and France, a short, shabby priest runs to earth bandits, traitors and killers. Why is he so successful? The reason is that after years spent in the priesthood, Father Brown knows human nature and is not afraid of its dark side. Thus he knows criminal motivation and how to deal with it. |
| The Mysterious Affair at Styles: Poirot's First Case by Agatha Christie |
Set in the hotel of Styles Court in Styles, Essex, this is a murder mystery that seems to be beyond solution. The main character, Arthur Hastings, is a retired military captain who wanted to stay in a peaceful country house but discovers that it everything but peaceful. Hastings has many struggles with the solution but Poirot deduces who the killer is. But Poirot keeps it a secret since he wants Hastings to discover it by himself. |
| The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie |
In this sparkling debut of the crime-solving duo, "Tuppence" Cowley and her old friend Tommy Beresford put an ad in the paper: "Two young adventurers for hire." But they get more than they bargained for when their first job lands them in the middle of an international incident. |
| By The Waters Of Paradise by Francis Marion Crawford |
"I remember my childhood very distinctly. I do not think that the fact argues a good memory, for I have never been clever at learning words by heart, in prose or rhyme; so that I believe my remembrance of events depens much more upon the events themselves than upon my possessing any special facility for recalling them. ... A long series of little misfortunes, so connected with each other as to suggest a sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament when I was a boy thet, before I was of age, I sincerely believed myself to be under a curse, and not only myself, but my whole family and every individual who bore my name." |
| The Corpus Delicti by Melville Davisson Post |
"Hence is it, that if one knows well the technicalities of the law, one may commit horrible wrongs that will yield all the gain and all the resulting effect of the highest crimes, and yet the wrongs perpetrated will constitue no one of the crimes described by the law. Thus the highest crimes, even murder, may be committed in such manner that although the criminal is known and the law holds him in custody, yet it cannot punish him. ... This is the field into which the author has ventured, and he believes it to be new and full of interest." |
| Captain of the Polestar by Arthur Conan Doyle |
"September 11th.--Lat. 81 degrees 40' N.; long. 2 degrees E. Still lying-to amid enormous ice fields. The one which stretches away to the north of us, and to which our ice-anchor is attached, cannot be smaller than an English county. To the right and left unbroken sheets extend to the horizon. This morning the mate reported that there were signs of pack ice to the southward. Should this form of sufficient thickness to bar our return, we shall be in a position of danger, as the food, I hear, is already running somewhat short. It is late in the season, and the nights are beginning to reappear." |
| The Case of the Golden Bullet by Frau Auguste Groner |
"Joseph Muller, Secret Service detective of the Imperial Austrian police, is one of the great experts in his profession. In personality he differs greatly from other famous detectives. He has neither the impressive authority of Sherlock Holmes, nor the keen brilliancy of Monsieur Lecoq. Muller is a small, slight, plain-looking man, of indefinite age, and of much humbleness of mien. A naturally retiring, modest disposition, and two external causes are the reasons for Muller's humbleness of manner, which is his chief characteristic. One cause is the fact that in early youth a miscarriage of justice gave him several years in prison, an experience which cast a stigma on his name and which made it impossible for him, for many years after, to obtain honest employment. But the world is richer, and safer, by Muller's early misfortune. For it was this experience which threw him back on his own peculiar talents for a livelihood, and drove him into the police force. Had he been able to enter any other profession, his genius might have been stunted to a mere pastime, instead of being, as now, utilised for the public good. " |
| The Case of the Lamp that Went Out by Frau Auguste Groner |
"But suddenly her voice died away, the colour faded from her flushed cheeks, her eyes opened wide and she stood as if riveted to the ground. With a deep breath as of unconscious terror she let the burden of the milk cans drop gently from her shoulder to the ground. In following the bird's flight her eyes had wandered to the side of the street, to the edge of one of the vacant lots, there where a shallow ditch separated it from the roadway. An elder-tree, the great size of which attested its age, hung its berry-laden branches over the ditch. And in front of this tree the bird had stopped suddenly, then fluttered off with the quick movement of the wild creature surprised by fright. What the bird had seen was the same vision that halted the song on Anna's lips and arrested her foot. It was the body of a man - a young and well-dressed man, who lay there with his face turned toward the street. And his face was the white frozen face of a corpse." |
| The Case of the Pocket Diary Found in the Snow by Frau Auguste Groner |
"A quiet winter evening had sunk down upon the great city. The clock in the old clumsy church steeple of the factory district had not yet struck eight, when the side door of one of the large buildings opened and a man came out into the silent street." |
| The Case of the Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study by Frau Auguste Groner |
"The sun rose slowly over the great bulk of the Carpathian mountains lying along the horizon, weird giant shapes in the early morning mist. It was still very quiet in the village. A cock crowed here and there, and swallows flew chirping close to the ground, darting swiftly about preparing for their higher flight. Janci the shepherd, apparently the only human being already up, stood beside the brook at the point where the old bridge spans the streamlet, still turbulent from the mountain floods. Janci was cutting willows to make his Margit a new basket." |
| The Case of the Registered Letter by Frau Auguste Groner |
"Oh, sir, save him if you can - save my poor nephew! I know he is innocent!" |
| The Crystal Stopper by Maurice LeBlanc |
"Arsene Lupin may have finally met his match in Deputy Daubrecq, a cunning detective who foils Lupin's most cunning roberies, thefts, and even a kidnapping. Can the world's greatest thief get his act together, save his arrested men from the guillotine, and recover his lost honor? A thrilling adventure from the author of Arsene Lupin, Arsene Lupin vs. Herloch Sholmes, and The Hollow Needle!" |
| The Bittermeads Mystery by E. R. Punshon |
"That evening the down train from London deposited at the little country station of Ramsdon but a single passenger, a man of middle height, shabbily dressed, with broad shoulders and long arms and a most unusual breadth and depth of chest." |
| The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart |
""You've got to get him, boys - get him or bust!" said a tired police chief, pounding a heavy fist on a table. The detectives he bellowed the words at looked at the floor. They had done their best and failed. Failure meant "resignation" for the police chief, return to the hated work of pounding the pavements for them - they knew it, and, knowing it, could summon no gesture of bravado to answer their chief's. Gunmen, thugs, hi-jackers, loft-robbers, murderers, they could get them all in time - but they could not get the man he wanted." |
| The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart |
Before Agatha Christie, there was Mary Roberts Rinehart. She wrote this wonderful mystery "of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply does not depend on a tank on the roof." |
| The Confession by Mary Roberts Rinehart |
"I am not a susceptible woman. I am objective rather than subjective, and a fairly full experience of life has taught me that most of my impressions are from within out rather than the other way about. For instance, obsession at one time a few years ago of a shadowy figure on my right, just beyond the field of vision, was later exposed as the result of a defect in my glasses. In the same way Maggie, my old servant, was during one entire summer haunted by church-bells and considered it a personal summons to eternity until it was shown to be in her inner ear." |
| The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart |
"Heaven and earth," sang the tenor, Mr. Henry Wallace, owner of the Wallace garage. His larynx, which gave him somewhat the effect of having swallowed a crab-apple and got it only part way down, protruded above his low collar." |
| Dangerous Days by Mary Roberts Rinehart |
"Natalie Spencer was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess. Like most women of futile lives she lacked a sense of proportion, and the small and unimportant details of the service absorbed her. Such conversation as she threw at random, to right and left, was trivial and distracted." |
| The Clue of the Twisted Candle by Edgar Wallace |
"The 4.15 from Victoria to Lewes had been held up at Three
Bridges in consequence of a derailment and, though John Lexman
was fortunate enough to catch a belated connection to Beston
Tracey, the wagonette which was the sole communication between
the village and the outside world had gone."
|
| An Aspirant for Congress by Patrick Henry Woodward |
"A few years ago, the "Hon." John Whimpery Brass, of Georgia, one of the "thoughtful patriots" of the period, who now and then found time to lay aside the cares of statecraft to nurse little private jobs of his own, allured by the seductive offers of "Wogan & Co." of New York City, wrote to that somewhat mythical concern proposing to become their agent for the circulation of the "queer." Even after receiving the first installment of their wares, the honorable gentleman did not comprehend that the firm dealt exclusively in sawdust, not in currency. He wrote again, complaining that, after a journey of sixty miles over a rough road to the nearest reliable express office, he found nothing but a worthless package, marked "C. O. D.," awaiting him. Did Wogan & Co. distrust either his parts or fidelity?" |
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