Classic Mystery Collection - Illustrated - Crime Suspense Detective fiction. (100+ works) including The Complete Collection of Sherlock Holmes ... Agatha Christie Sax Rohmer & more (mobi) Read online

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  List of Works by Author

  List of Works in Alphabetical Order

  List of Illustrations

  Authors' Biographies

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  List of Works by Author

  Honore De Balzac An Historical Mystery

  John Buchan The Thirty-Nine Steps

  Egerton Castle The Baron's Quarry

  Edmund Clerihew Bentley Trent's Last Case

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  The Man Who Knew Too Much

  The Man Who Was Thursday

  Father Brown:

  The Innocence of Father Brown

  The Wisdom of Father Brown

  The Incredulity of Father Brown

  The Secret of Father Brown

  The Scandal of Father Brown

  Robert Erskine Childers Riddle of the Sands

  Agatha Christie

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles

  The Secret Adversary

  Wilkie Collins

  The Dream Woman

  The Haunted Hotel

  "I Say No."

  The Moonstone

  Miss or Mrs.?

  The Queen of Hearts

  The Traveller's Story of a Very Strange Bed

  The Woman in White

  Charles Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drood

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  The Mystery of Cloomber

  The Complete Collection of Sherlock Holmes

  A Study in Scarlet

  The Sign of Four

  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

  The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  The Return of Sherlock Holmes

  The Valley of Fear

  His Last Bow

  The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

  Anna Katharine Green

  Agatha Webb

  Initials Only

  The Millionaire Baby

  The Mill Mystery

  The Mystery Of The Hasty Arrow

  A Strange Disappearance

  Arthur Griffiths

  The Rome Express

  Thomas Hardy The Three Strangers

  Jacques Futrelle

  Elusive Isabel

  The Problem of Cell 13

  Gaston Leroux The Mystery of the Yellow Room

  Marie Belloc Lowndes The Lodger

  Alan Alexander Milne The Red House Mystery

  Edgar Allan Poe

  The Murders in the Rue Morgue

  The Mystery of Marie Rogêt

  The Purloined Letter

  Ernest Robertson Punshon The Bittermeads Mystery

  Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood

  The Bat

  The Circular Staircase

  The Confession

  Dangerous Days

  The Man In Lower Ten

  The Street Of Seven Stars

  Sax Rohmer

  Bat Wing

  Dope

  The Insidious Dr. Fu-manchu

  The Return of Dr. Fu-manchu

  The Golden Scorpion

  Melvin Linwood Severy The Darrow Enigma

  Chester K. Steele The Golf Course Mystery

  Burton Egbert Stevenson The Gloved Hand

  Robert Louis Stevenson The Pavilion on the Links

  Rex Stout Under The Andes

  A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | L | M | N | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | Y Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

  The Adventure of Black Peter

  The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton

  The Adventure of The Abbey Grange

  The Adventure of The Beryl Coronet

  The Adventure of The Blue Carbuncle

  The Adventure of The Copper Beeches

  The Adventure of The Dancing Men

  The Adventure of The Empty House

  The Adventure of The Engineer's Thumb

  The Adventure of The Golden Pince-nez

  The Adventure of The Missing Three-quarter

  The Adventure of The Noble Bachelor

  The Adventure of The Norwood Builder

  The Adventure of The Priory School

  The Adventure of The Second Stain

  The Adventure of The Six Napoleons

  The Adventure of The Solitary Cyclist

  The Adventure of The Speckled Band

  The Adventure of The Three Students

  Agatha Webb

  Authors' Biographies

  The Baron's Quarry

  Bat

  Bat Wing

  Biography of Agatha Christie

  Biography of Anna Katharine Green

  Biography of Arthur Conan Doyle

  Biography of Charles Dickens

  Biography of Edgar Allan Poe

  Biography of Edmund Clerihew Bentley

  Biography of G. K. Chesterton

  Biography of Gaston Leroux

  Biography of Honoré De Balzac

  Biography of Jacques Futrelle

  Biography of John Buchan

  Biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Biography of Robert Erskine Childers

  Biography of Sax Rohmer

  Biography of Thomas Hardy

  Biography of Wilkie Collins

  Bittermeads Mystery

  The Boscombe Valley Mystery

  Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

  A Case of Identity

  Circular Staircase

  The Crooked Man

  Confession

  Dangerous Days

  Darrow Enigma

  Dope

  Dream Woman

  Elusive Isabel

  Father Brown

  The Final Problem

  The Five Orange Pips

  The 'Gloria Scott'

  Gloved Hand

  Golden Scorpion

  Golf Course Mystery

  The Greek Interpreter

  Haunted Hotel A Mystery Of Modern Venice

  His Last Bow

  Historical Mystery (the Gondreville Mystery)

  Hound Of The Baskervilles

  I Say No.

  Incredulity Of Father Brown

  Initials Only

  Innocence Of Father Brown

  Insidious Dr. Fu-manchu

  List Of Illustrations

  Lodger

  Man In Lower Ten

  Man Who Knew Too Much

  Man Who Was Thursday

  The Man With The Twisted Lip

  Memoirs Of Sherlock Holmes

  Mill Mystery

  Millionaire Baby

  Miss Or Mrs.?

  Moonstone

  Murders In The Rue Morgue

  Murder In Westminster

  The Musgrave Ritual

  Mysterious Affair At Styles

  Mystery Of Cloomber

  Mystery Of Edwin Drood

  Mystery Of Marie Rogêt

  Mystery Of The Hasty Arrow

  Mystery Of The Yellow Room

  The Naval Treaty

  Pavilion On The Links

  Problem Of Cell 13

  Purloined Letter

  Queen Of Hearts

  The Red-headed League

  Red House Mystery

  The Resident Patient

  Return Of Dr. Fu-manchu

  The
Return Of Sherlock Holmes

  Riddle Of The Sands

  The Reigate Puzzle

  Rome Express

  A Scandal In Bohemia

  Scandal of Father Brown

  Secret Adversary

  Secret Of Father Brown

  Sign Of The Four

  Silver Blaze

  The Stock-broker's Clerk

  Strange Disappearance

  Street Of Seven Stars

  Study In Scarlet

  Thirty-nine Steps

  Three Strangers

  Traveller's Story Of A Very Strange Bed

  Trent's Last Case

  Under The Andes

  Valley of Fear

  Wisdom of Father Brown

  Woman in White

  The Yellow Face

  ________

  Go to Start

  List of Illustrations

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

  Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, by Signey Paget (1860-1908)

  A Study In Scarlet 24 illustrations by Richard Gutschmidt (1902)

  The Adventure of The Three Students 2 illustrations by Sidney Paget (1904)

  The Adventure of The Abbey Grange 2 illustrations by Sidney Paget (1904)

  The Adventure of Black Peter 2 illustrations by Sidney Paget (1904)

  The Adventure of The Blue Carbuncle 8 illustrations by Sidney Paget (1892)

  The Boscombe Valley Mystery 5 illustrations by Sidney Paget (1891); 1 illustration by Josef Friedrich (1906)

  The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge 2 illustrations by Arthur Twidle (1908)

  The Adventure of the Cardboard Box 2 illustrations by Sidney Paget (1892)

  The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton 2 illustrations by Sidney Paget (1904)

  The Adventure of the Dancing Men 2 illustrations by Sidney Paget (1903)

  The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez 2 illustrations by Sidney Paget (1904)

  The Hound of the Baskervilles Sidney Paget's illustration of the Hound

  The Millionaire Baby by Anna Katharine Green

  The Mystery of The Hasty Arrow by Anna Katharine Green

  The Rome Express by Arthur Griffiths

  Elusive Isabel by Jacques Futrelle. Illustrations by Alonzo Kimball

  [Illustration: The handwriting was unmistakably that of a woman.]

  [Illustration: He Found Himself inspecting the Weapon from the Barrel End.]

  [Illustration: A long tense silence when eye challenges eye.]

  [Illustration: "You think he will weaken; I know he will not."]

  [Illustration: In a stride Mr. Grimm was beside her.]

  Edgar Allan Poe

  The Murders in the Rue Morgue

  Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley, 1895.

  The Gloved Hand by Burton Egbert Stevenson

  [Illustration: Sparks fell upon the shoulders of two white-robed figures]

  [Illustration: "I'm lawyer enough to know," he said, "that a question like that is not permissible"]

  [Illustration: "Oh, Master, receive me!"]

  [Illustration: "I knew that I was lost"]

  ________

  Go to Start

  Authors' Biographies

  Honore De Balzac

  John Buchan

  Edmund Clerihew Bentley

  Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  Robert Erskine Childers

  Agatha Christie

  Wilkie Collins

  Charles Dickens

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Anna Katharine Green

  Thomas Hardy

  Jacques Futrelle

  Gaston Leroux

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Sax Rohmer

  ________

  Go to Start

  Honoré de Balzac

  Portrait of Honoré de Balzac, after an 1842 daguerreotype by Louis-Auguste Bisson

  Biography | Family | Early life | First literary efforts | "Une bonne spéculation" | La Comédie Humaine and literary success | Work habits | Marriage and later life | Writing style | Realism | Characters | Place | Perspective | Legacy | Works

  Honoré de Balzac (May 20, 1799 - August 18, 1850) was a nineteenth-century French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.

  Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multi-faceted characters; even his lesser characters are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. Inanimate objects are imbued with character as well; the city of Paris, a backdrop for much of his writing, takes on many human qualities. His writing influenced many famous authors, including the novelists Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Henry James and Jack Kerouac, as well as important philosophers such as Friedrich Engels. Many of Balzac's works have been made into films, and they continue to inspire other writers.

  An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting himself to the teaching style of his grammar school. His wilful nature caused trouble throughout his life, and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was apprenticed as a legal clerk, but he turned his back on the law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician. He failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie Humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience.

  Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal drama, and he lost more than one friend over critical reviews. In 1850, he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime paramour; he died five months later.

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  Family

  Honoré de Balzac was born into a family which had struggled to achieve respectability. His father, born Bernard-François Balssa, was one of eleven children from a poor family in Tarn, a region in the south of France. In 1760 the elder Balzac set off for Paris with only a louis in his pocket, determined to improve his social standing; by 1776 he had become Secretary to the King's Council and a Freemason. (He had also changed his name to that of an ancient noble family, and added - without any official cause - the aristocratic-sounding de.) After the Reign of Terror (1793-94), he was sent to Tours to coordinate supplies for the Army.

  Balzac's mother, born Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, came from a family of haberdashers in Paris. Her family's wealth was a considerable factor in the match: she was eighteen at the time of the wedding, and Bernard-François fifty. As British writer and critic V. S. Pritchett puts it, "She was certainly drily aware that she had been given to an old husband as a reward for his professional services to a friend of her family and that the capital was on her side. She was not in love with her husband."

  Honoré (so named after Saint Honoré of Amiens, who is commemorated on May 16, four days before Balzac's birthday) was actually the second child born to the Balzacs; exactly one year previous, Louis-Daniel had been born, but he lived for only a month. Honoré's sisters Laure and Laurence were born in 1800 and 1802, and his brother Henry-François in 1807.

  Early life

  Immediately after his birth, Honoré was sent to a wet-nurse; the following year he was joined by his sister Laure and they spent four years away from home. (Although Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau's inf
luential book Émile convinced many mothers of the time to nurse their own children, sending babies to wet-nurses was still common among the middle and upper classes.) When the Balzac children returned home, they were kept at a frigid distance by their parents, which affected the author-to-be significantly. His 1835 novel Le Lys dans la Vallée features a cruel governess named Miss Caroline, modeled after his own caretaker.

  At the age of eight Balzac was sent to the Oratorian grammar school at Vendôme, where he studied for seven years. His father, seeking to instill the same hardscrabble work ethic which had gained him the esteem of society, intentionally sent very little spending money to the boy. This made him the object of ridicule among his much wealthier schoolmates.

  Balzac had difficulty adapting himself to the rote style of learning at the school. As a result, he was frequently sent to the "alcove", a punishment cell reserved for disobedient students. (The janitor at the school, when asked later if he remembered Honoré, replied: "Remember M. Balzac? I should think I do! I had the honour of escorting him to the dungeon more than a hundred times!") Still, his time alone gave the boy ample freedom to read every book which came his way.

  Balzac worked these scenes from his boyhood - as he did many aspects of his life and the lives of those around him - into La Comédie Humaine. His time at Vendôme is reflected in Louis Lambert, his 1832 novel about a young boy studying at an Oratorian grammar school at Vendôme. The narrator states: "He devoured books of every kind, feeding indiscriminately on religious works, history and literature, philosophy and physics. He had told me that he found indescribable delight in reading dictionaries for lack of other books."

  But though his mind was receiving nourishment, the same could not be said for Balzac's body. He often fell ill, finally causing the headmaster to contact his family with news of a "sort of a coma". When he returned home, his grandmother said: "Voilà donc comme le collège nous renvoie les jolis que nous lui envoyons!" ("Look how the academy returns the pretty ones we send them!") Balzac himself attributed his condition to "intellectual congestion", but his extended confinement in the "alcove" was surely a factor. (Meanwhile, his father had been writing a treatise on "the means of preventing thefts and murders, and of restoring the men who commit them to a useful role in society", in which he heaped disdain on prison as a form of crime prevention.)

  In 1814 the Balzac family moved to Paris, and Honoré was sent to private tutors and schools for the next two and a half years. This was an unhappy time in his life, during which he attempted suicide on a bridge over the Loire River.