Showing results for "His Story" in Mystery

Wilkie Collins was one of Victorian England's best-loved and best-selling authors, and a crime-fiction pioneer. His enthralling 'sensation novels' such as The Woman in White paved the way for today's thrillers and his tour de force The Moonstone is one of the first, and greatest, modern-detective stories. This collection features dramatisations of these two masterpieces, with star casts including Toby Stephens (The Woman in White) and John Sharp (The Moonstone). Also included are adaptations of three of Collins' other major novels.

Altogether, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four novels and 56 short stories about Sherlock Holmes. Throughout, Dr. Watson (or just Watson) was included as a catalyst for Holmes’s massive ego and mental processes. Eventually, Doyle felt the stories were distracting him from more serious literary work, but he did finally wind it up with the seven stories you’re about to hear. In the words of Watson (Dr. John H. Watson, MD), we have the pleasure of knowing about the declining years, beginning now.

"His Last Bow", the title story of this collection, tells how Sherlock Holmes is brought out of retirement to help the Government fight the German threat at the approach of the First World War. The Prime Minister himself requests Holmes's services to hunt down the remarkable German agent, Von Bork. Several of the detective's earlier cases complete the volume, including "Wisteria Lodge", "The Bruce-Partington Plans", and "The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax".

This collection of eight world-famous cases from Doctor Watson's portfolio illustrates the singular mental faculties of Sherlock Holmes: a body on the London Underground; the strange disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax; a parcel containing some coarse salt and two freshly severed human ears.

Pace's voyage is outward, among strangers, and inward into the fifth direction that is the up-down, in a sweeping, voracious human tale that takes no prisoners, witnesses extreme brutalities and expresses a childlike amazement. Here the route goes from New Orleans, to Chicago to Wyoming to Bay St. Clement, North Carolina, but the geography he is charting is always first and foremost unchartable.

John Lovering Benedict had more than most men - more money, more mansions, more cars, but most of all more women, including three ex-wives with little in common but their extraordinary physiques. For Ellery Queen the question was which one of them had bashed in Benedict's skull with a hunk of iron statuary? The clues were many…but puzzling. All had been planted at the scene of the crime, but by whom, and for what purpose? And who was the last woman in John Benedict's life?

Gathering together in one volume the later exploits of Sherlock Holmes, the world's first consulting detective, His Last Bow includes tales published individually between 1908 and 1917. It also contains one early story, 1892's "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", which, with its themes of adultery, was previously considered too "scandalous" for American audiences.

Anna Katherine Green (1846-1935) was one of the first writers of detective fiction in America and has been called “the mother of the detective novel”. Her style would influence other writers such as Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock is the sixth title in her mystery series and is more a novelette compared to her other books. The story features one of her reoccurring characters, Ebenezer Gryce, who is called in to find out who killed a well-loved and respected citizen in a small community where he had no enemies to speak of.

"His Last Bow" was meant to be the last of the Holmes stories, and is given the subtitle "An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes". Doyle did pen and publish a subsequent collection of stories, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, but all the stories in that collection take place a decade or more before "His Last Bow." The story is unusual in that it is one of only a couple of Holmes stories not written in the first person. This story, though, was written in the third person.