Two plus two makes four, not some of the time, but all of the time. That's the creed of The Thinking Machine, Jacques Futrelle's classic crime and puzzle solver, who uses logic to solve mysteries and the power of his focused mind to think through knotty situations. This first volume has 27 short stories, including the famous "escape from prison" puzzle, The Problem of Cell 13.

Two plus two makes four, not some of the time, but all of the time. That's the creed of The Thinking Machine, Jacques Futrelle's classic crime and puzzle solver, who uses logic to solve mysteries and the power of his focused mind to think through knotty situations. This second volume has 21 short stories, and the novel, The Chase of the Golden Plate.

There are many types of mysteries, but one stands out over all the others: the ones involving a Locked Room. Over the years, every mystery writer worth his salt has tried to come up with the one that tops all the rest: the secret compartments, doors locked from the inside, confused timelines, etc. It's all been tried over and over. Jacques Futrelle set the standard with his Problem in Cell 13, and John Dickson Carr raised it a bit in his The Hollow Man, and Gene Grossman throws his hat into the ring - not with a mystery taking place in a locked-room, but with a murder that takes place in a...

Jacques Heath Futrelle (1875 - 1912) was an American journalist and mystery writer. He is best known for writing short detective stories featuring Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, also known as "The Thinking Machine" for his application of logic to any and all situations. Returning from Europe aboard the RMS Titanic, Futrelle, a first-cabin passenger, refused to board a lifeboat insisting his wife board instead. His wife remembered the last she saw of him... he was smoking a cigarette with John J. Astor. Written in 1909 Elusive Isabel is set in Washington, D.C. It is a spy novel about...

"The Chase of the Golden Plate" from Jacques Futrelle. American journalist and mystery writer (1875-1912).

"The Diamond Master" from Jacques Futrelle. American journalist and mystery writer (1875-1912).

There were thirty or forty personally addressed letters, the daily heritage of the head of a great business establishment; and a plain, yellow-wrapped package about the size of a cigarette-box, some three inches long, two inches wide and one inch deep. It was neatly tied with thin scarlet twine, and innocent of markings except for the superscription in a precise, copperplate hand, and the smudge of the postmark across the ten-cent stamp in the upper right-hand corner. The imprint of the cancellation, faintly decipherable, showed that the package had been mailed at the Madison Square...