Novelist, short-story writer, memoirist, and journalist Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947) was one of the most prolific and bestselling writers of her day. Unlike her contemporary and sometime-rival Agatha Christie, she is now largely unknown and almost entirely out of print. This collection of short stories brings Lowndes’s most popular, distinctive, and culturally and artistically significant works of short fiction to modern audiences for the first time. These stories are selected from various periods in Lowndes’s writing life, varied publication venues, and different genres. Each demonstrates her subtlety and skill as a story-teller, as well as her pervasive thematic interest in gender issues, the trials of marriage, and the nature of criminality.