Robert McWade

After a roustabout sailer avoids being shanghaied in 1852 San Francisco, his audacity helps him to arise to a position of power in the vice industry of the infamous Barbary Coast. Bat Morgan is nearly shanghaied on his way to the gold fields of California. Instead he kills Shanghai Duck and becomes a hero in San Francisco's Barbary Coast. He winds up the rich owner of a saloon and gambling hall and is nearly lynched for a murder he didn't commit.

Philo Vance, accompanied by his prize-losing Scottish terrier, investigates the locked-room murder of a prominent and much-hated collector whose broken Chinese vase provides an important clue. Archer Coe has been found dead in his locked bedroom. The cops consider it suicide, but Philo believes otherwise. When the Coroner shows up, he finds that Archer had been hit with a blunt object, stabbed and shot - making suicide unlikely. When the evidence points to his brother, Brisbane is found stabbed to death in the closet. Archer had a number of enemies, any one of which would have been glad to knock him off, but which one did and how did the murder occur in a room looked from the inside. Only one man, the keen, fascinating, debonair detective Philo Vance, would be able to figure out who is the killer. —Tony Fontana <tony.fontana@spacebbs.com> Debonair private eye Philo Vance cancels his sea voyage to Europe when he hears that the wealthy Archer Coe was found dead in his home, an apparent suicide. Philo is soon on the scene of the crime and is quite dubious about suicide as the cause, despite the fact that Coe was found in a room that was locked from the inside. He had run into Cole the previous day at the Long Island Kennel Club and Coe was very much looking forward to the next day's competition and the possibility of his dog winning. It takes only a few minutes for Philo to convince Det. Sgt. Heath that it's murder. Finding the murderer isn't as easy however as Archer Coe was ruthless and had many enemies. —garykmcd

A newspaper editor settles in an Oklahoma boom town with his reluctant wife at the end of the nineteenth century. When the government opens up the Oklahoma territory for settlement, restless Yancey Cravat claims a plot of the free land for himself and moves his family there from Wichita. A newspaperman, lawyer, and just about everything else, Cravat soon becomes a leading citizen of the boom town of Osage. Once the town is established, though, he begins to feel confined again and heads for the Cherokee Strip, leaving his family behind. During this and other absences, his wife Sabra must learn to take care of herself and soon becomes prominent in her own right. —George S. Davis <mgeorges@prodigy.net> 40 years of social and urban progress in American life from 1889 to 1929 are seen through the life of a progressive newspaper editor/lawyer in Oklahoma, and the wife who resents his longing for the excitement of the frontier in the years after the Oklahoma land rush. —scgary66