"The Most Imaginative Detective Stories of Our Times" So wrote Ellery Queen about The Curious Mr. Tarrant, an extraordinary collection of detective stories by Charles Daly King (1895-1963). The cases solved by Trevis Tarrant, during the early 1930's, assisted by his manservant (who is in actuality a Japanese spy) include locked rooms, headless corpses, a vanishing harp, and newly built but haunted house, and other bizarre events. With the encouragement of Ellery Queen, King wrote four additional stories about Mr. Tarrant, some of them becoming "curiouser and curiouser." They include the case of a Hollywood star who disappears from a locked suite of rooms, in a house surrounded by detectives, and the murder solved only because of the absence of a fish. These additional stories along with the original six tales are included in The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant. Introductiuon by Edward D. Hoch **

C. Daly King's debut mystery is a tale of murder, travel, and psychiatry set aboard a luxury transatlantic linerThe smoking room on a transatlantic cruise ship is bound to be a hotbed of activity — but it's less common for it to be the site of a murder. Yet, when the lights flicker aboard the luxury Meganaut, making its way from New York to Paris, this is precisely what happens; in the darkness, a gunshot rings out, and when the light is restored, a man is found dead. The situation becomes all the more curious when it's discovered that the deceased had apparently ingested cyanide just seconds before being penetrated by the bullet. Luckily, for the other passengers, there are two detectives aboard the Meganaut, ready to leap into action. There are also four psychiatrists, and those psychiatrists convince the captain to let them take a stab at solving the crime, using their professional understanding of the human psyche to determine who...

"A very thrilling story...[with] a real surprise midway in the book, and a double-barreled shock at the end ... the reader's interest is never allowed to flag." –The New York TimesCaptain Michael Lord of the New York City Police is the target of desperate shots fired on board a twin-engine plane, where a premeditated murder has already taken place. Will the dashing detective survive the assault? Will anyone emerge alive from the now-plummeting aircraft? And who killed the famous surgeon that the captain was guarding?This ingeniously constructed novel begins with an epilogue, concludes with a prologue, and offers a "Clue Finder" that reveals forty hints even the sharpest armchair detective may have missed. Originally published in 1935, this long-unavailable thriller dates from the Golden Age of detective fiction, when mysteries were judged by the cleverness of their crimes and the resourcefulness of their sleuths. The twisting plot, impossible murder,...