The Crime of the French Café and Other Stories

Nicholas CarterProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.6
Word count
267K words
Chapters
27

Tags

English Originals Mystery and Suspense Urban UnderworldCrime SolvingClever SleuthChase ThrillerCriminal PsychologyDetective FictionSuspense TwistSeries StoriesParis SettingExotic Culture

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Crime of the French Café and Other Stories by Nicholas CarterAuthor: Carter, Nicholas (House name),Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Apr 1, 2004

Editor's review

This is a collection of detective short stories by Nicholas Carter (a publisher's house name), centered on the murder at a French café and gathering several mysteries set in urban spaces. The work continues the brisk pace of early popular detective fiction: clues are laid out layer by layer, and the detective closes in on the truth through observation and reasoning, with scenes concentrated in cafés, streets, and inns, rich in everyday atmosphere. For today's readers, its value lies not only in the puzzle-solving itself but in showing what detective narrative looked like in early twentieth-century popular reading—clear character functions, crisp plotting—making it a light sample for understanding the origins of genre fiction. The English original is short, with direct sentences, and also suits readers transitioning into English reading. Read it as a set of short "urban mystery puzzle pieces" viewed together, and notice how the author uses dialogue and detail to drive suspense.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read each story independently; after finishing one, sort out the clues and suspects yourself before checking the ending
  2. Keep pen and paper to note key evidence and character relationships, training attention for推理 reading
  3. If studying English, read for plot first, then revisit dialogue and description to accumulate common expressions
  4. Read several stories in a row and notice the author's recurring patterns for building suspense and revealing the truth

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27

FAQ

Is this book suitable for learning English? Fairly suitable. The original is in English, mostly short pieces, with uncomplicated sentence structures and direct plotting, so it is easy to finish. But it is popular fiction with everyday and narrative vocabulary, not a systematic grammar textbook. Focus on understanding the plot, and organize and memorize expressions that recur.
Do the stories need to be read in order? Not necessarily. Each story is relatively independent, with no strong continuity of characters or cases, so starting anywhere does not hinder understanding. To feel the author's narrative rhythm, read in table-of-contents order; to just try it, pick the title that appeals most.
Why is the author credited with a house name? Nicholas Carter was a house name used by the publisher of the time, with multiple works published under the same name by different writers. Different pieces may therefore differ in style and detail. Notice such differences while reading, but do not evaluate them as the unified work of a single author.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Nicholas Carter Author

Carter, Nicholas is not a real individual but a shared pseudonym created by the American publisher Street & Smith for its detective-fiction lines. The name appeared chiefly in Nick Carter Weekly and the New Magnet Library series, and more than twenty authors wrote under it over time, so the body of work is large and its style shifts with each contributor. Three titles are held here under this name: The Crime of the French Café and Other Stories, With Links of Steel Or, The Peril of the Unknown, and A Woman at Bay Or, A Fiend in Skirts. They center on detective pursuit and suspenseful puzzles, with tight plotting typical of early popular detective fiction. Because the name was shared, public information on the actual writers of individual stories and on publication details is limited and difficult to clarify one by one.