The American Magazine was a glossy, lavishly illustrated slick aimed primarily at middle class women readers, filled not only with dastardly murders, but beautiful women and handsome men living the high life, the sweet spice of romance adding to the sordid criminal proceedings.

Here are four clever, sophisticated mysteries from the pages of The American Magazine written by Hugh Wheeler in the early 1950s as Patrick Quentin. Each story takes the reader on a world tour of murder…

The trip begins with Mrs. B.‘s Black Sheep as a European Tour for Girls is quickly disrupted by theft and murder. In Death Freight a world-traveling writer bound for Zanzibar is thrown into a shipboard murder mystery involving an old flame and a pouch of stolen diamonds. The Scarlet Box takes us to Rome where an artist must solve the murder of a famous director to prove the innocence of a young woman he has grown to love. And in The Laughing Man, a San Francisco police inspector is pitted against a would-be serial killer who cackles as he kills.