Edwin Balmer William MacHarg 37 min read

As the winter's first blizzard bursts on New York, chief clerk Rentland studies a record that doesn't add up, and the psychological detective Luther Trant takes up the trail.

Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg's 1912 story is a pioneering scientific-detective tale, an early psychological mystery. Clever, prophetic, historically notable. Read it for a founding work of the 'psychological detective' genre, Luther Trant using the new science of the mind and the lie-detector to unmask a hidden criminal.

In its time

Published in 1912, during the 1910s, lost worlds and interplanetary adventure.

Reading it

37 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Frank R. Paul