Crime Tears On: A Fleming Stone Mystery

313, [1] pp. A locked room mystery featuring the bookish private investigator Fleming Stone, the 52nd volume in the series that included an amazing 61 books! A list of the 52 titles published up to this point appears after the text. The jacket flap notes this work was published on the thirtieth anniversary of Wells's first mystery, The Clue, and that Crime Tears On is her 70th mystery overall (she also wrote the Pennington Wise series). About the author (from Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler's Encyclopedia of Mystery & Detection): "Her Nonsense Anthology (1902) was considered a classic, and her Parody Anthology (1904) remains in print today. A popular parodist, she wrote Ptomaine Street (1921), a full-length parody of Sinclair Lewis, and parodies of Sherlock Holmes. She also edited many collections of mystery stories. Of Miss Wells's 170 books, 82 are mysteries. One of the, The Disappearance of Kimball Webb (1920), was published under the pseudonym Rowland Wright. Her most famous series detective, the scholarly, book-loving Fleming Stone, appeared in sixty-one of the mysteries, beginning with The Clue (1909). He originally appeared in 'The Maxwell Mystery,' in the May 1906 issue of All-Story Magazine. She created ten other detectives, including Kenneth Carlisle, handsome Hollywood star, who gives up his silent-screen career to become a detective; Pennington Wise, a psychic investigator; and Bert Bayliss, socialite private detective. Miss Wells wrote the first instructional manual in the genre, The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913). Her opinion that 'the detective story must seem real in the same sense that fairy tales seem real to children' has been quoted approvingly by Howard Haycraft and others. She inveighed against the use of impossible murder methods, and in her own books bizarre and seemingly supernatural crimes are always given natural explanations.