It is February, 1929. Cyrus Skeen is hired by an Austrian aristocrat whom Skeen calls a "One-Worlder Gadabout," Count Paul Axel Heinrich Joachim von Wormuth-Esterhazy, of Vienna, to find out who is trying to kill him. He gives Skeen a list he has compiled of twenty attempts to murder him, including flowerpots are dropped from above, a bottle of poisoned schnapps is given to him in a "welcome basket," and nearly being run over by a speeding automobile. The Count has three suspects who may want him dead: consular officials from the German and Austrian consulates in San Francisco, and an elusive...

It is March, 1929. Cyrus Skeen is called to New York by his father, Garnett Skeen, to attend to some trust fund affairs. Skeen's detective agency is subsidized by a trust fund his father set up years before, but his mother, Eleanor "Nellie" Skeen, wishes to set up her own trust fund for her son. A daughter of an Oklahoma oil magnate, she is "very well situated" in terms of wealth. Skeen's parents, however, are driving to Nags Head in the Outer Banks of North Carolina to spend the rest of the winter. The elder Skeen tells his son that he must prove his existence for a new bank officer who will...

It is late April, 1929. Cyrus Skeen has concluded his case in The Janus Affair involving the murder of a prominent commercial artist by apprehending the murderers of an advertising agency's office manager. He has just seen off his wife, Dilys, on a train to visit some relatives back East near Boston. She will be gone for about a week and a half, until early May. Skeen is visited in his office at Skeen Investigations one Monday morning by a seventeen-year-old boy, William Yeager, who asks Skeen to find his girlfriend, Darla Rampling, whom he last saw two weeks previously. What at first...

It is April, 1929. Cyrus Skeen is recovering from his startling escapade in New York City, where he journeyed in March to attend to some of his father's business. There he met a captivating opera singer for whom he developed an affection almost bordering on love. But he loves Dilys much more. The singer introduces him to a concept, "metaphysical importance." Dilys is that to him. Dilys is interviewing models for her new studio. One of them is the irrepressible Valda Redfern. But no sooner does Skeen return than he is asked by Erno Janus, the head of a San Francisco advertising agency,...

It is late June, 1929. Cyrus Skeen has concluded his case in Stolen Words, in which he exonerated a prominent novelist of the charge of murder, even though the author had plagiarized other authors with the cooperation of the now defunct publisher. Skeen's artist wife, Dilys, has returned from a visit to relatives back East in Massachusetts, and was preparing to work on her first painting. Skeen's new secretary, Lucy Wentz, is quick on the uptake, and is working out fine. But now a new nemesis has confronted Skeen, an unknown person who is killing people who have committed horrendous crimes....

It is early December, 1929. Cyrus Skeen has concluded his case in The Chameleon, in which he uncovered a cell of the Nazi Party near Stanford University in Palo Alto, a college town south of San Francisco. But into his life come two Germans, one a Hollywood director, another an operative of a Marxist "think tank" in the midst of relocating from Germany, which is becoming more hostile to Communists and other fellow travelers. They are twin brothers and both wind up dead early on in the case. One is supposed to have murdered the other, and attacked Clara Reyes, Skeen's loyal and resourceful...

This is the twentieth Cyrus Skeen detective novel. Skeen and his artist wife, Dilys, plan to have a quiet Christmas together, but then Skeen is suddenly invited to speak before a sociology class about his "Trichotomy" article in the American Mercury, which appeared in August to great acclaim. His essay is about criminal motives and the psychology of recidivists, or repeat offenders. He has finished the second part of the essay, which will appear in the spring. Skeen, a noted private detective with an impeccable and effective record of dealing with recidivists, agrees to field questions from...

This is a collection of my most recent columns on Rule of Reason and edwardcline.blogspot.com., chiefly on the subject of Islam's incursions on the West and especially in the United States. The incursions are made possible mainly at the invitation of corrupt, cravenly cowardly, and reality-denying dhimmis in Europe and in America. Other guilty parties have as their conscious goal the subjugation and destruction of the West. Not all of the essays discuss or are even remotely related to Islam. I have included a handful of pieces on political correctness and the decrepit state of our culture....