The Room With the Tassels...

"And you propose to find out who and how?" said Braye.
"If I live up to my reputation, I must do so. There are but two kinds of detectives. Effective detectives and defective detectives. It is the aim of my life to belong to the former class, and here's my chance to make good."

Thus the reader is introduced to Pennington "Penny" Wise ("Every possible joke regarding my name has already been made...") and his teenaged sidekick, the enigmatic Zizi, a girl with a quirky sense of humor and a mysterious background.

When a group of friends decides to go "ghost hunting" and rents an abandoned country manor house with a history of hauntings, they quickly begin to wonder if they have gotten more than they bargained for. Strange sounds, objects moved from room to room... and soon, a menacing apparition that visits any who occupy "the room with the tassels," where a murder is said to have occurred years before, and the corpse is said to have vanished while locked in that room.

But when death strikes - precisely at 4:00, as the ouija board predicted - the little group divides over whether something supernatural - or something sinister but quite mortal - is at work, help arrives, in the form of Pennington Wise and Zizi, his indispesable little assistant.

Wells' mysteries sometimes involved an occult or macabre element, and an almost Gothic tone and The Room With the Tassels is an example, featuring - apparently - a murderous ghost in a remote, long-empty country manor-house with a history of the corpses of murder victims vanishing from a securely locked room.

It falls to Pennington Wise and Zizi to solve the triple mystery: who is the murderer, how was it done, and how does a body disappear from a locked room?

Carolyn Wells...

Carolyn Wells (1862-1942) was a prolific writer of poems, mysteries, children's literature, and humor. Born in Rahway, New Jersey, she suffered from hearing loss caused by scarlet fever when she was six, but went on to graduate high school as class valedictorian.

Wells' early publications were mainly humorous verse, but in 1909 she published the first of her 82 detective and mystery novels, while continuing to publish humor, verse, and producing two popular series of novels intended for girls, the "Marjorie Maynard" and "Patty Fairfield" stories. Her "Technique of the Mystery Story" (1913) remains a well-regarded study of the genre, considered the first "how to" guide to writing myseteries, and in 1937 she published an autobiography, "The Rest of My Life". Wells died in New York City in 1942.