Who killed Kansas oil man Ralph "Lucky" Loundon and disposed of his body in a strawstack outside Wichita, that "Peerless Princess of the Plains"? The list of suspects is large and includes some of the most prominent people in the city. Fortunately, the brilliant amateur detective Steven Steele is on hand to crack the case. With Bill, his old college friend (and ever-faithful chronicler), in tow, Steele is soon on the hunt for a clever and conniving killer. Steele's mettle is tested but in the end he catches his quarry-though not before another murder takes place Originally published in 1936...

That British mysteries from the Golden Age of detective fiction (customarily defined as the period between the First and Second World Wars) were not only aesthetically but ideologically conservative has long been a commonplace of mystery genre criticism. In The Spectrum of English Murder, Curtis Evans challenges this view by looking at the detective fiction of Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher and G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, a trio of popular British crime writers from the Golden Age. Although Aubrey-Fletcher, a Great War veteran and member of his country's traditional gentry elite, and the...