Carol's Notebook

"The Stir Outside the Café Royal" by Clarence Rook I love a good detective story, although this one doesn't quite fit the bill for me. There is not much actual detecting, no showing how the clues are followed. I know nothing about the author other than that he died in 1915. Colonel Mathurin was one of the aristocrats of crime; at least Mathurin was the name under which he had accomplished a daring bank robbery in Detroit which had involved the violent death of the manager, though it was generally believed by the police that the Rossiter who was at the bottom of some long-firm frauds in Melbourne was none other than Mathurin under another name, and that the designer and chief gainer in a sensational murder case in the Midlands was the same mysterious and ubiquitous personage. The story tells how on pleasant, sunny day in London a young American woman, alone in the city, manages to trick this criminal into entering...