Long before Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the mystery genre was alive and well in America. The 15 stories collected here are an opportunity to discover a new sleuth from days gone by, including Anna Katharine Green's pioneering girl detective Violet Strange ("The Second Bullet"), Arthur B. Reeves' Clare Kendall ("The Mystery of the Stolen Da Vinci"), Jacques Futrelle's "Thinking Machine" Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen ("The Problem of the Opera Box"), and Melville Davisson Post's shrewd West Virginian backwoodsman Uncle Abner ("The Doomdorf Mystery").