From the Preface - In these modern times of breathless hurry and great combines, when birth counts for nothing; when fortunes are made in a day and credit Is lost in an hour, men’s secrets are sometimes very strange ones. It is one of these which I have here revealed; one that will, I anticipate, both startle and puzzle the reader. The mystery is, in fact, one taken from the daily life about us, the truth concerning it having hitherto been regarded as strictly confidential by the persons herein mentioned, although I am now permitted by them to make the remarkable circumstances public.

The Earl of Saxham was vastly annoyed when his son, Guy, fell in love with a “penniless nobody,” and announced that he would marry her against all opposition. He determined to separate the lovers; to which end he persuaded an influential friend in the Foreign Office to secure an appointment for Guy in the Embassy at Madrid. He little knew that he was sending his son into the centre of a hotbed of anarchism, that Guy’s footsteps were to be dogged by a vindictive and revengeful woman, that his life was to hold many a thrilling moment and not a few narrow escapes.

Paul Pickering is a doctor without a fixed practice, and when an old sea captain asks him to join a voyage around the Mediterranean, that's finally an exciting prospect for him. The journey goes well until they spot a most strange vessel somewhere off the coast of Algeria. It is an old Elizabethan craft that looks to have been submerged for hundreds of years and recently bubbled back up to the surface. The men board it and find that it had been hermetically sealed all these centuries, all contents intact. But it does not, as first hoped, contain gold. The men find barely legible manuscripts and a mysterious old man, who appears to be as old as the vessel itself... - Summary by Carolin

The aptly titled "Tangled Trails, A Western Detective Story" takes the listener through a web of curious incidents revolving around the murder of a prominent man in Denver. Kirby Lane was quite obviously the guilty party in the murder of his uncle. Lane, among others, had had a falling out with his uncle, the victim James Cunningham. But there were some who believed his nephew to be innocent of the hideous crime. Lane feared the guilty party to be a female bronco rider whom he had befriended, as her presence at the scene of the crime was quite evident, albeit only to him...

Detective-Mystery stories based on real cases solved by government agents. Created initially in 1865, the U.S. Secret Service continued to expand over the years, particularly following the assassination of President McKinley in 1901. The episodes in this compilation are comprised of authentic stories, dramatized, while remaining true to the actual incidences. - Summary by Roger Melin

In 1918, Anthony Trent, a well-educated young man in his late twenties, lives an unsatisfactory life in a New York boarding house. He writes successful crime fiction stories, but this doesn't pay enough for him to do the things he wants. Things change when he starts to put his knowledge of crime to a practical use... It gets him into serious trouble before long. (This work was first published in the USA in 1918, and falls under the Rule of the Shorter Term). The sequel to this book, The Secret of the Silver Car, is also available on Librivox.