A market collapse turns a polished swindler from millionaire to debtor in a single afternoon. With rent due and pride intact, he does what he does best: finds someone eager for “something for nothing,” then builds a scam fast enough to outrun disgrace.In a rain-soaked Illinois town run by a hard-edged bank president and widow, a worn-out farm becomes the bait. A partner plays the perfect rube, a real-estate fixer sweats under pressure, and a set of “laboratory” letters hints at a f...

Freezing and starving, a nameless young man stumbles into an apartment lobby seeking warmth—but finds a passkey instead. Driven by desperation, he ascends into the building’s silent corridors.Inside his opulent apartment, Thomas Karch sleeps, oblivious to the intruder creeping closer. When the starving man’s frantic quest for food shatters the silence, it collides violently with the hidden tensions of the Karch household. Doomed at Four is a gritty, atmospheric tale of the...

Black Cat Weekly #16 is a special holiday issue, featuring three holiday-themed mysteries for your reading pleasure. We didn’t have any holiday science fiction or fantasy stories on tap this time, but we will definitely try to do better next year. (Decembers are always a bit chaotic at Wildside Press—we also have to get out the year-end royalties for hundreds of authors.)If you are a fan of classic science fiction, you’ll appreciate “The Star Sneak,” by Larry Tritten—a Jac...

Black Cat Weekly #18 is another great lineup of novels and short stories this time, so without further ado—on to the stories!Mysteries / Suspense“Rediscovery,” by James Holding [short story]“Staying Cool,” by Hal Charles [Solve-It-Yourself Mystery]“The Ghost Who Read the Newspaper,” by Vicki Weisfeld [Barb Goffman Presents short story]“Mr. Clackworthy and the Auto Rim,” by Christopher B. Booth [short story]“Kane and Aver...

The International Conference for Sustainable Ecological Engineering Design for Society (SEEDS) brings together experts from around the world to focus on a sustainability agenda and the positive and detrimental changes that are taking place. In addition to addressing technical issues, measuring, monitoring, and evaluating change, emphasis is placed on our environment, infrastructure, and buildings, how they exist in relative isolation, and the possibilities for sustainable integration. The ...

Price controls across many sectors are currently being hotly debated. New controls in the housing market, more onerous minimum wages, minimum prices for alcohol, and freezes on energy prices are very high up the agenda of most politicians at the moment. Even without any further controls, wages, university fees, railway fares and many financial products already have their prices at least partly determined by politicians rather than by supply and demand in the market. Indeed, barely a sector...

A debonair confidence man with a taste for impossible jobs has hit a dry spell. His bank balance is thin, his treasured prospect list is full of tempting marks, and the richest of them all proves to be a pillar of Chicago banking with one very old-fashioned weakness: the ponies. Against the frantic warnings of his superstitious partner, the master swindler resolves to revive a long-dead racket — the notorious wire-tapping scheme — and reel in a fortune.What follows is a con of exqu...

"Christopher B. Booth is almost entirely forgotten today; but in 1910s through the 1930s, he was a prolific author of mysteries and westerns under his own name and the pseudonuym “John Jay Chichester.” Street & Smith’s book publishing arm, Chelsea House, collected a number of his pulp stories in book form, most famously in the volume entitled Mr. Clackworthy. Mr. Clackworthy assembles 9 stories from Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine featuring con man Amos Clackworthy, who preyed on...

Conman extraordinaire Amos Clackworthy was the primary mystery character of Christopher Belvard Booth (1889-1950) in the 1920s. Together with his henchman, the Early Bird, he raised grifting to new levels—and his targets were always those greedy, disreputable businessmen who more than deserved it.

In the frigid winter of Prohibition-era Chicago, a master con artist and his faithful sidekick eye a dilapidated mansion with a legendary past. Once home to the notorious Van Kessler family, the crumbling estate is rumored to hide a fortune in pre-Prohibition liquor. With a clever scheme, they resurrect the long-absent Van Kessler heir, convincing the city’s elite that a reformed rake has returned to pen a moralistic book on temperance.As the staged homecoming draws gawking reporte...

A master grifter takes on the monopolistic ice industry with nothing but wit, bravado, and a wildly implausible home-refrigeration patent. As the scheme spirals into a full-scale operation, complete with staged demonstrations and fake financiers, the line between bluff and business blurs. A sharply comic tale of deception, desperation, and defiance, this satirical romp skewers greed with a grin and a cigar.

When Amos Clackworthy, conman deluxe, spots a billboard proclaiming free factory sites for new industries, he gets off his train to investigate. Sure enough, he finds greedy men out to fleece would-be industrialists. And he can't wait to part them from their money...