Presented in this volume, in no particular date or subject order, is a collection of some of my Rule of Reason columns. Included are excerpts from two of my Roaring Twenties detective novels, Stolen Words and An August Interlude. The subjects range from Islam to education to immigrations to censorship to our cultural malaise to book reviews. I have also written Sparrowhawk, a popular six-title historical series of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period that has been in continuous publication since 2001. His articles and reviews have been published in The Wall...

In this fifth adventure of Cyrus Skeen, private detective and socialite in San Francisco, it is January 1930, the end of the Roaring Twenties and the beginning of the "Red Decade," when Soviet spies and Communist fellow travelers have begun to infiltrate the government and other institutions in large numbers. During a Nob Hill society party, Skeen and his painter wife, Dilys, befriend a beautiful sculptress who turns out to be a British spy carrying important information about the extent of that infiltration in American and British governments. In A Crimson Overture, one thing leads to...

In Part One, Cyrus Skeen, private detective in 1929 San Francisco, is asked by Charles Gilchrest, chairman of The Daedalus Society, an exclusive men-only club, to go to the The Daedalus Grove, a private enclave north of the city, to determine the nature of some trouble he has been warned about in a cryptic note written by an anonymous member. The note alludes to a controversial Senator from Nebraska and a tariff bill in Congress. It may the overture to a prank or it may be a serious threat to the man's life. Skeen agrees to attend the two-week encampment of the Society in rustic Monte Rio, an...

It is November, 1929. The stock market has crashed. The giddy period known as the Roaring Twenties are about to end. But Cyrus Skeen, private detective, is not too concerned. He never bought on margin or gambled on "sure things" to make a quick buck; his wealth is secure. He is worried that the government may begin to make things worse by intervening with the panaceas of welfare and inflation. Many businessmen and investors made that mistake and have been bankrupted. Ruined, some have committed suicide. Will Rogers commented that speculators were selling window space to men who wished to jump...

The chief villain of We Three Kings is representative of the most bizarre and anachronistic statist at large in 1980, when I finished this novel, and in 2010: a royal Saudi sheik. The heroes who refuse to submit to his will - neither pragmatically, nor politically, nor in terms of Islam (which means "submission") - are Merritt Fury, an American entrepreneur, and a New York City police detective. The enablers who sic the Saudi mujahideen on them are the amoral, pragmatic denizens of the State Department. We Three Kings is about how a single man, moved by the moral principle that one's life and...