detective stories Archives

Bill the Bloodhound

March 1, 2019 By P. G. Wodehouse in Old Stories Tags: detective stories, P.G. Wodehouse, theatre

There’s a divinity that shapes our ends. Consider the case of Henry Pifield Rice, detective. I must explain Henry early, to avoid disappointment. If I simply said he was a detective, and let it go at that, I should be obtaining the reader’s interest under false pretences. He was really only a sort of detective, a species of sleuth. At Stafford’s International Investigation Bureau, in the Strand, where he was employed, they did not require him to solve mysteries which had baffled the police. He had never measured a footprint in his life, and what he did not know about [Read More]

The Safety Match (Pt. 2)

January 14, 2019 By Anton Chekov in Serials Tags: murder, marriage, anton chekov, detective stories, mystery, russia

Part 2 A fortnight passed. It was morning. The magistrate Nicholas Yermolaïyevitch was sitting in his office before a green table, turning over the papers of the “Klausoff case”; Dukovski was striding restlessly up and down like a wolf in a cage. In the second part of Chekov’s story of murder and investigation, the authorities press the suspects to confess and follow the trail to an unlikely co-conspirator. Read more tales like this in Masterpieces of Mystery in Four Volumes: Detective Stories, which is available at Project Gutenberg. “You are convinced of the guilt of Nicholas and Psyekoff,” he said, [Read More]

The Safety Match

January 11, 2019 By Anton Chekov in Serial Pilots, Serials Tags: anton chekov, detective stories, mystery, vodka

Part 1 On the morning of October 6, 1885, in the office of the Inspector of Police of the second division of S— District, there appeared a respectably dressed young man, who announced that his master, Marcus Ivanovitch Klausoff, a retired officer of the Horse Guards, separated from his wife, had been murdered. While making this announcement the young man was white and terribly agitated. His hands trembled and his eyes were full of terror. Anton Chekov famously advised storytellers that a gun introduced in the first act should go off by the third. Here it’s a safety match, and [Read More]