Release date is 2026-05-09

The keyboard of silence -- Unto the third generation -- The money machines -- The flying death -- The thousand facets of fire -- The gilded glove -- The ringing goblets -- The eye of the Seven Devils.

Tim Miller and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

"Thornley Colton" by Clinton H. Stagg is a collection of detective stories written in the early 20th century. It centers on a brilliant blind problem-solver, Thornley Colton, whose acute senses and cool logic unravel intricate crimes with the help of his loyal secretary, Sydney Thames. The cases blend high society settings with clever criminal schemes, emphasizing psychological insight, misdirection, and tightly worked details.

The opening of the book introduces Colton in a fashionable restaurant, where his poise and uncanny awareness foreshadow a coming crime involving a banker, Norris, the opera singer Rhoda Richmond, and a vice-president, Simpson, newly wed to a supposed deaf-mute. When half a million in negotiable bonds vanish from the Berkley Trust, police fix on Norris and Rhoda, even catching her at a South American liner after a mysterious phone summons. Colton methodically widens the lens: he calls in the alarm-company men, questions two elderly watchmen, notes a telltale dusting of sulfur by the safe, and traces a timid “scrubwoman” to a tenement—uncovering quills used for cocaine snuffing. In a staged confrontation, his boy assistant Shrimp delivers a collapsing vaudeville female impersonator—Simpson’s “wife”—and Colton produces the bonds, waterproofed in an ice bag and hidden in a pail of dirty mop water; Simpson is exposed as the calculating thief. The second story begins with a glittering society reception abruptly halted when Dorothy Raelton is found unconscious beside an opium set; press frenzy follows, and Dorothy, despairing, confesses to paying blackmail with her replaced diamond necklace. Colton, rethinking the scene, realizes she isn’t an opium smoker—she doesn’t even know how to “cook” the pill and the bedroom door was locked from the outside—pointing to a deliberate framing and a more sinister blackmail plot that he resolves to pursue. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: New York: G. Howard Watt, 1923