Daniel Stashower

Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters

Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, Charles Foley

• 2008 Edgar-Critical/Biography winner
• 2007 Agatha–Nonfiction winner
• 2008 Anthony-Critical nominee
• 2008 Macavity-Nonfiction nominee
• Score: 32.58

This remarkable annotated collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s previously unpublished private correspondence offers unique insight into one of the world’s most popular authors. For the first time, Conan Doyle emerges from the shadow of Sherlock Holmes, revealing a man whose character and exploits rival that of his famous creation. In particular, Conan Doyle’s correspondence with his mother exposes his endless search for fulfillment and success outside the Holmes stories.

Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

Daniel Stashower

• 2000 Edgar-Critical/Biography winner
• 1999 Agatha–Nonfiction winner
• 2000 Anthony-Critical nominee
• 2000 Macavity-Nonfiction nominee
• Score: 32.5

This fresh, compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship to his often stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and George Bernard Shaw, Conan Doyle lived a life as gripping as one of his adventures. Exhaustively researched and elegantly written, Teller of Tales sets aside many myths and misconceptions to present a vivid portrait of the man behind the leg of Baker…

The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe and the Invention of Murder

Daniel Stashower

• 2007 Anthony-Critical nominee
• 2007 Edgar-Fact Crime nominee
• 2007 Macavity-Nonfiction nominee
• 2006 Agatha–Nonfiction nominee
• Score: 24.57

On July 28, 1841, the battered body of a young woman was found floating in the Hudson River. It was soon discovered to be the lovely Mary Rogers, a twenty-year-old cigar salesgirl who had gone missing three days earlier. By nightfall, news of the girl’s death had spread and sent Manhattan into a spasm of horror and outrage. A year later, as public interest in the case began to wane, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe sent his famous detective, C. Auguste Dupin, on the case of a lifetime: to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”

Author Daniel Stashower deftly captures the drama and mystery of New York in the mid-nineteenth century, illuminating the spellbinding crime that transformed a city.

The Houdini Specter: A Harry Houdini Mystery

Daniel Stashower

• 2002 Anthony-Paperback nominee
• Score: 6.52

In 1898, the Great Houdini’s confidence in his own abilities is matched only by the indifference of the paying public. Now the master escape artist has the opportunity to make a name for himself—by exposing the tricks of the medium Lucius Craig, darling of New York’s gullible society set. Though he can easily re-create Craig’s ghostly trickery, Harry and his brother Dash can’t explain how the medium manages to conjure up a “spirit” while tied to a chair by Houdini himself—or how the apparition is able to stab a séance attendee to death and disappear with seven…

The Floating Lady Murder: A Harry Houdini Mystery

Daniel Stashower

• 2001 Anthony-Paperback nominee
• Score: 6.51

Now You See Her…Now You Don’t

It’s difficult to gain the public’s attention in turn-of-the-century New York—even if you are the greatest escape artist the world has ever seen. So the young performer who calls himself Harry Houdini must be content, for the time being, working for the internationally renowned Keller, the “Dean of American Magicians.” But tragedy strikes at the inaugural performance of the master’s most astonishing illusion, the Floating Lady, when Keller’s levitating assistant plummets abruptly to the ground, apparently to her death. Yet an…