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...

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...