'It was the scream of a man in the extremist agony of pain and terror. His eyes still stared into the soldier's face, but the fury had left them like a flame suddenly extinguished.' These stories are a macabre celebration of the ingenuity of murder. Victims meet their ends in ways which are sometimes gruesome, sometimes tragic, but always imaginative -- involving methods as diverse as sword swallowing, triggered bank vaults, and exploding sweets. In some cases the murderer makes a critical slip, allowing a sufficiently cunning detective to solve the crime, but in at least one the perpetrator succeeds in committing the perfect murder ... a chilling but curiously admirable act, which has a breathtaking subtlety in its execution. Jack Adrian's collection brings together stories by well-known writers in the genre, such as L. T Meade, Robert Eustace, and Tennyson Jesse, and rarer stories which have for decades been unavailable to readers.