... and four other Magnum, the science consultant, detective stories.
Each story has a scientific bend or aspect to it. Magnum is not the typical detective who takes on any interesting case. He only engages when there seems to be a scientific aspect to the case. He doesn't involve himself with the law or right or wrong. His primary interest is to figure out the modus operandi as a scientific consultant. Superbly eccentric, Magnum lives up the Thames at Plumstead Marshes and travels to his laboratories via a high-powered motor launch named "Fifi". He has a brilliant but intensely shy assistant, Ivor Meredith - a Welshman, who does all the analytic work, tests in the lab, and such. The thinking and deducing is the domain of Magnum.
In "The Invisible Bullet" Rittenberg deploys a novel resolution to the locked room mystery. A man is shot twice at point-blank range in a gymnasium, but no one is seen to leave the murder scene. Neither the gun nor one of the spent bullets can be found, but in this latter fact lies the key to the whole mystery.
The stories in this compilation are:
- The Invisible Bullet
- The Mystery of the Sevenoaks Tunnel
- The Queer Case Of The Cyanogen Poisoning
- The Bond Street Poisoning Bureau
- The Mystery Of The Vanishing Gold
1st edition 1914, PDF 70 pages.
word count: 21830 which is equivalent to 87 standard pages of text