248 complete mysteries, every one free to listen to. Search by title or place, or choose a detective below.
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Violet Strange
A will has vanished. Not stolen from a safe. Not burned in a grate. Simply gone — from a house where it must still be, leaving a family facing ruin and a set of children whose entire future turns on a single sheet of paper that nobody can find.
by Anna Katharine Green
1 hr 1 minNo. 239
Violet Strange
A box of embroidered linen arrives with the wrong name upon it. A limousine draws up outside a house of mourning. And the silliest little belle of the season walks into a murder room and begins, very sweetly, to count the marks upon the floor.
by Anna Katharine Green
53 minNo. 208
Violet Strange
Content note: This 1915 mystery involves the death of a young child as part of its plot. It's presented unabridged and without graphic detail, but listeners who find that subject distressing may prefer to skip this one.
by Anna Katharine Green
49 minNo. 178
Violet Strange
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 bruises blackening her wrists told another story and the gossip never stopped; now Roger comes to Violet with a confession, a plea, and a secret hidden in the rocks along his family's coast — an old grotto fitted for gambling and ruin, and now said to be haunted by a spectre no one can explain — and to clear an innocent man she must go where the police never looked, into the grotto and into a grief long mistaken for guilt; this is the work of Anna Katharine Green, the American novelist often called the mother of the detective novel who was writing best-sellers a decade before Sherlock Holmes, and her most beguiling creation the society debutante no one suspects, from The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Anna Katharine Green wrote it more than a century ago, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
by Anna Katharine Green
59 minNo. 168
Violet Strange
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 sapphire pendant that once belonged to Marie Antoinette, the thefts trailing the same handsome family of girls from house to house until cruel suspicion settles on one innocent daughter, and to catch the real thief Violet must set a trap baited with a single golden slipper; this is the work of the woman who came before Sherlock Holmes — Anna Katharine Green, often called the mother of the detective novel, who was writing best-sellers a decade before Conan Doyle reached Baker Street and whom both Doyle and Agatha Christie openly admired — from The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, presented complete and unabridged, exactly as Anna Katharine Green wrote it more than a century ago, from the Midnight Archive — Nocturnal Tales' library of the classic detective stories that built the genre.
by Anna Katharine Green
47 minNo. 163