Nocturnal Tales: Mystery Audiobooks and Crime Stories

For the first time in her life Violet Strange takes a case not for money but for a face — across a crowded musicale she sees a young man marked by a sorrow so deep it stops her heart mid-beat, Roger Upjohn, heir to an old Massachusetts family and the most whispered-about name in society, whose beautiful cold-hearted wife was found dead in her bed of heart failure, the doctors said, though the brui...

The storm has not lifted, the guests have not moved, and the Belgian Detective is ready to explain precisely how a dinner became a death; in Part One a wealthy collector was poisoned at his own table among the silver and orchids, a spoon was exchanged, a glove was found behind the conservatory ferns, and in his breast pocket lay a note promising an announcement before midnight that never came; now...

London, March 1937: an engraved card summons the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion to Harrow Hall in Mayfair — the marble palace of a wealthy collector who made his fortune in the City and spent it on old masters, silver, and social consequence — where the card adds in a bold hand "a matter of some delicacy requires your attention, say nothing to the other guests"; around the gli...

A warning note slipped into a locked apartment, a metal playing card — the seven of hearts — pierced with seven small holes, and a stranger who breaks in to investigate only to shoot himself before he can speak: so begins one of the strangest cases in the Arsène Lupin canon, as the narrator is drawn into a mystery he never asked for and learns his home was once owned by Louis Lacombe, a vanished i...

Pinehurst, North Carolina: pine trees, sand roads, golf courses, and a polished American resort where money attempts not to look vulgar — and where a young bride has just been found dead on a sandy track beyond the pines; Mrs. Eleanor Drayton was thirty-two, handsome, very rich, and married less than six months to a man who brought charm, a good seat on a horse, and very little else, and her last...

By night Violet Strange glitters through New York's most exclusive ballrooms — a petite, fashionable debutante no one would ever take seriously, which is exactly what makes her so dangerous, for in secret she is a paid investigator hired for the cases the police cannot touch; her new problem is a delicious one: a string of jewels keeps vanishing at society receptions, corals and diamonds and a...

Isle of Wight, 1940: the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion answer a desperate letter from a frightened woman at a quiet farm near Godshill, where a blunt farmer dismisses his sister as hysterical, a pale young housekeeper is hated by everyone in the house for reasons no one will say aloud, and a latch in the gun room was opened in the night; when the farm's one honest man is shot dead...

A pawnbroker with flaming red hair answers a newspaper advertisement and finds himself hired by the mysterious Red-Headed League, paid four pounds a week to copy out the encyclopaedia under one absurd condition — that he never leave the office during working hours — until one morning a card on the door announces the League dissolved and no such society ever known to exist; when Jabez Wilson brings...

Ghent, 1919: the war is over but the killing has not stopped — in the countryside around Ghent and Bruges farms are raided, homes broken into, and people shot for resisting, and at each scene the police find the same mark, a scrap of black cloth cut into a triangle; when the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion arrive at the urgent request of an examining magistrate, they learn the gang's...

Havana in the 1930s: a white Art Deco casino blazing with light, American millionaires in cream dinner jackets, Cuban officials with diamond pins, and upstairs behind a locked mahogany door a beautiful young heir lies dead with a knife wound below the heart — Julian Ashcroft, son of a shipping magnate, has been stabbed during a private card game in a room locked from the inside with only his fathe...

To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman — when a masked stranger calls at 221B Baker Street after dark claiming to be the agent of a European royal house, Holmes sees through the disguise before the man finishes his first sentence: the King of Bohemia is about to marry, and a single photograph in the hands of Irene Adler, an opera singer with a brain of the first order and the face of the most...

Welcome to Nocturnal Tales. Tonight, no murder. No body in the library. Just news — and we think you're going to like it. Starting this week, Nocturnal Tales is opening The Midnight Archive : a new series of classic detective stories, presented exactly as their authors wrote them, word for word. The stories that built the genre — the gas lamps, the locked rooms, the impossible alibis — read th...

Chicago in the 1930s: a wealthy English widow walks into police headquarters and asks what it would cost to report a murder before it happened — her own; Mrs. Cynthia Wakeham has taken a house on Lake Shore Drive and surrounded herself with a nephew drowning in gambling debts, an English cousin who quotes Scripture, a private secretary, a spiritualist, a busted lord, and two society girls sniffing...

Nassau glitters like paradise but paradise has always contained a serpent — seven years ago a copper king was murdered in his bedroom at a great white villa, there was a fire, a skull wound, a trial that satisfied no one, and the island chose silence; now an American journalist named Eleanor Armitage has crossed an ocean to ask the questions Nassau wants buried, carrying a notebook, a newspaper cu...

A broken-down coach, a crooked country inn, and a dead man upstairs clutching a card that reads ONE OF US IS ALREADY DEAD — when a motor coach crash strands the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion at The Merry Mourner, a lonely inn at the edge of Brackmere Hollow, they find themselves trapped by a storm with eight strangers and one corpse; the dead man is a blackmailer who summoned this coll...

In quiet St. Mary Mead a flawlessly polite new family settles into village life just as a major London bullion raid shocks the country — the Donovans attend church, volunteer for the fête committee, bring shortbread to newcomers, and are by every outward measure exactly the sort of family a village is lucky to have; but the village sleuth has lived long enough to know that flawless politeness is n...

London, 1936: a young woman stands in the dock at the Old Bailey accused of poisoning her husband with arsenic — Lady Beatrice Langston, clever, composed, and inconvenient, married Sir Hugh Langston three months ago and now the books on toxicology were in her library, the quarrels were overheard, the servants have testified, and the prosecution's case is neat, complete, and very convenient; as...

The Belgian Detective is in Brussels, the flat is quiet, and Captain Hastings has just made the mistake of thinking life is ordinary — Anne Foster arrives at Whitehaven Mansions with a message and Pip, a small golden-chestnut spaniel with the moral authority of a Roman emperor; downstairs a charming man with a red leather dispatch case is raising money for a widows' charity that may not exist,...

Switzerland, 1930s: the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion arrive at the Grand Hôtel Aurora above Lake Geneva for a restful holiday that lasts approximately one cocktail — Lord Edric Mallory, rich, loud, and dangerously in love, is engaged to a Russian countess who has already buried two husbands and shows no sign of remorse, his children despise her, his doctor watches her too closely, his...

Briarwood looks like an ordinary country house — added to in stages, slightly awkward, full of character — but the house doesn't add up: a corridor is too long, a wall holds the cold as if it's hiding space, tradesmen pause as if expecting a door where no door exists, and at night, always at the same time, there comes a soft patient tapping from inside the wall as though someone is signall...

A musketeer, a spaniel, and a murder at the most fashionable charity ball of the season — Captain Hastings is invited to Lady Beatrice Mallory's annual costume ball by the charming Anne Foster and promptly arrives with a borrowed sword, a plumed hat, and Pip the spaniel who was not invited but came anyway; among four hundred guests in masks and finery a man dressed as a harlequin is found dead...

North London: the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion answer a desperate letter from a widow at 19 Marlowe Terrace, a drab narrow house where something has been knocking, scraping, and whispering for weeks — a table moves by itself in the parlour, a thirteen-year-old girl with eyes too old for her face laughs in the dark, and from somewhere inside the walls a dead husband's voice calls h...

New York, 1920s: a shipping magnate's daughter is seized from her Fifth Avenue mansion by masked men claiming to be political radicals, a printed manifesto denounces the kings of commerce, and the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion are summoned by a desperate father only to find a household thick with silence — a fiancé who owns more temper than grief, a family lawyer whose calm borders...

Christmas Eve at Rutherford Hall should have meant candlelight, wreaths, and goodwill — instead it brings anonymous threats, a sudden death, and a pair of identical holly wreaths, one fresh and one quietly wilting, whose presence spreads fear through the household like frost along a windowpane; when the village sleuth accepts an unexpected invitation to spend Christmas at the grand country estate,...

Tehran, 1934: a world-famous American heiress is found strangled in an elegant blue drawing-room after a private quarrel with the heir to the throne, and the city's officials demand discretion before headlines can ignite an international scandal; as the Belgian Detective and his loyal companion move through garden walls, guarded corridors, and immaculate reception rooms, they follow missing lo...