Black Maria

When Ralph Black, chain store magnate, is found shot by his own gun in his locked library in his palatial home, the New York Police Department pronounces it suicide. However, his family members believe he was murdered. His sister in England, Maria Black, M.A., Headmistress of a girls' school, wants to discover the truth. She travels to America, and with her penchant for solving crimes, sets to work to trace the mysterious plot against Ralph. Can she unmask the amazing truth about her brother's death? Or will the first case of "Black Maria" also prove to be her last? Black Maria, Book One.

Maria Black, Head of Roseway College for Young Ladies during World War II, and a textbook solver of crimes, finds herself faced with a problem after her own heart when the strange, haughty Frances Hasleigh, daughter of a somewhat mysterious British Major, enrolls in her school. Within a few days the girl is found hanged in a nearby wood, in circumstances that seem devoid of clues and without motive. Scotland Yard is called in to solve the horrifying crime, but Black Maria has her own unique system of finding a culprit. By degrees, she follows a trail that leads her through a maze of intrigue. And then a second girl is found hanging in a school room...! The second novel in the classic Black Maria series!

Maria Black, M.A., Principal of Roseway College for Young Ladies, does not expect to come face to face with murder in her favorite cinema, when a stranger seated in Number 11 on Row A is found to be dead-shot through the head with a copper bullet! The baffling crime enables her to take on her role of detective and become, once again, Black Maria-the tireless crime solver. Determined to get to the root of the mystery, she works side by side with the stolid Inspector Morgan, local police chief. Together they follow a tangled trail that takes them behind the scenes of a cinema, examining the lives of hardworking folk who strive to maintain the entertainment industry-and eventually leads them into the recesses of a ruthless killer's dark mind. Another riveting classic British mystery torn from the pages of the pulps.

Betty Shapley was a local beauty, for whose charms three young men fell heavily. But she never expected that her coquetry would lead to the sudden and horrifyingly brutal death of one of her admirers, the shy, inoffensive Herbert Pollitt-plus the life of a fugitive for another, Vincent Grey; as well as the role of a murder-case witness for the third, Tom Clayton. Inspector Morgan and Sergeant Claythorne of the local police investigate the death, and suspect that the now-vanished Vincent Grey, against whom the evidence seems overwhelming, was responsible. So Betty, once a pupil of Roseway College for Young Ladies, asks the forbidding Miss Maria Black-"Black Maria" the headmistress detective-to prove Grey's innocence. Another classic mystery tale, the fourth in this spellbinding series.

Maria Black, the woman's school headmistress who doubles as a detective, is invited to attend the engagement celebrations of an ex-pupil of her college. There she finds herself involved in the mysterious suicide of the prospective bridegroom, Keith Robinson. All the circumstances-death by hanging in a locked cellar-support the idea that Keith took his own life. The coroner, too, is satisfied that such was the case-but certain peculiar factors of the death lead "Black Maria" to think otherwise. Aided by her American Bowery companion, "Pulp" Martin, Maria sets out to prove how Keith really died-and in doing so uncovers an ingenious plan of cold-blooded murder. But who is the killer-and why was Keith murdered? This fifth-and final-novel in the Black Maria series is a classic "locked-room" crime novel, one that will leave the reader guessing right up to the last page!