Famed French detective Monsieur Bencolin comes out of retirement to solve a crime of passion in Golden Age mystery master John Dickson Carr’s sophisticated and surprising novel London lawyer Richard Curtis is sent to Paris by one of the firm’s senior partners to handle a delicate case. Revelations about playboy Ralph Douglas’s former mistress, the stunning redhead Rose Klonec, threaten Douglas’s impending marriage. But upon Curtis’s arrival in Paris, a body is discovered alongside not one but four different murder weapons. To save his client from the gallows, Curtis turns to the brilliant Monsieur Bencolin. Only this suave, devilish detective is ideally suited to unravel a case this strange with so many contradictory clues and passionately motivated suspects. The Four False Weapons is the 5th book in the Monsieur Bencolin Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

It is no ordinary murder case that brings the famed French detective Monsieur Bencolin out of retirement, but one that involves a midnight rendezvous on a steamy Paris night, a broken love affair, and four different murder weapons found in the secret villa where the body is discovered. Rose Klonec, whose corpse bears the mark of a particularly horrible wound, had connections - and old lovers - throughout Paris, and soon the number of suspects grows to match the number of possible weapons ...

John Dickson Carr is known as the master of the “locked-room” mystery—the “impossible crime.” But Carr also wrote short stories, radio plays, essays, introductions, and book reviews. S. T. Joshi has written the first full-length study of Carr’s entire work and pays particular attention to this author’s three best-known detectives: Henri Bencolin, Dr. Gideon Fell, and Sir Henry Merrivale.

Golden Age mystery author John Dickson Carr displays his mastery of the historical mystery in this thrilling tale of courtship and punishment in Regency-era England To inherit her family fortune, beautiful Miss Caroline Ross must marry before her twenty-fifth birthday. But she has found only two breeds of husband: violent drunks and irresponsible dandies. To evade wedded agony, she chooses a spouse not long for this world—a convicted murderer with just a few hours left until his date with the hangman. But clever, cold-hearted Caroline does not yet realize it is her neck around which the noose is tightening and that she risks facing a life sentence far grimmer than one at Newgate jail.

Hailed by Agatha Christie as “the king of the art of misdirection,” John Dickson Carr draws readers into a thrilling tale of a family’s hunt for an inheritance hidden in a haunted New Orleans mansion Before he became a commodore in the Confederate Navy, Serena Hobart’s grandfather was a treasure hunter who combed the bottom of the sea in search of Spanish gold. In 1927, after her father dies, Serena wants nothing more than to be rid of Delys Hall, the commodore’s rambling old New Orleans mansion, which has been nicknamed “Deadly Hall” because some pretty awful things have occurred there, including murder. When her relatives hear rumors that there may be gold hidden in the old house, they will stop at nothing to keep it in the family. Serena’s childhood friend Jeff Caldwell senses that Serena is in danger and wants to protect her. But there are many dark corners in Deadly Hall, maybe even ghosts, and certainly relatives who can dream up a thousand ways to kill.

Christopher Kent, worth a quarter of a million pounds yet without a penny in his pocket, stands hungrily in Piccadilly one snowy morning, looking up at the huge hotel, when a piece of card bearing a number floats down to him. He enters and is served with breakfast, giving the waiter the room number. Then an unlucky chance compels him to go up to room 707. Inside a woman lies murdered in a trunk. Kent needs to prove his innocence fast, and calls in Dr Gideon Fell to investigate - but there's been another murder, and Dr Fell must figure out what connects them in order to find the guilty party.

This was the first bibliography and guide to the American mass market paperback book, and it remains one of the most definitive. The major index is by author, and lists: author, title, publisher, book number, year of publication, and cover price. The title index lists titles and authors only. The publisher index provides a history of that imprint, with addresses, number ranges, and general physical description of the books issued. This is the place that all study of the American paperback must begin.