William A. Stricklin
Mary Eliska Girl Detective and The Mystery of the Gray Mask originally The Gray Mask a 1920 mystery by Charles Wadsworth Camp (1879-1936) currently in the public domain. Camp was a writer, a critic, and a foreign correspondent who suffered lung damage from exposure to mustard gas during World War I. The Camp detective mystery has been re-written by William A. Stricklin as part of a series of girl detective murder mysteries solved by his daughter as fictional Mary Eliska Girl Detective. This novel follows Mary Eliska who is a New York girl detective in love with the chief’s daughter Margaret (Meg) In this story Mary Eliska Girl Detective and The Mystery of The Gray Mask in response to an unforeseen summons, Mary Eliska hurries along the hallway and opens the chief inspector’s door. As she faces the rugged figure behind the desk, and gazes into those eyes whose somnolence conceals a perpetual vigil, her heart quickens. She had been assigned to the detective bureau less than six months. That brief period, however, had revealed a thousand eccentricities of her chief. The pudgy hand beating a tattoo on the table desk, the lips working at each other thirstily, the doubt that slipped from behind the veil of the sleepy eyes, were all like largely printed letters to Mary Eliska Girl Detective-letters that spelled delicate work for her, possibly an exceptional danger. Through episodic chapters of horror and crimes that follow Mary Eliska Girl and Meg discover crooks and romance. Mary Eliska Girl Detective and her chief’s highly capable daughter Meg usually save one another at the last second, and in this Mary Eliska book perhaps Meg deserved be the main character. This is no book to read in a lonely house, though convinced that if it were begun under such conditions it would be finished after summoning a trusted good friend to keep close company... This book is the sixth published by Authors Press in a series of novels featuring fictional detective Mary Eliska as journalist and amateur sleuth, presented as more capable than the police, in the United States or perhaps in France as Mademoiselle Rouletabille (roule ta bille, or 'Roll your marble') French slang for 'Globetrotter', one who has been around the world and seen it all, expanded to connote a cool-headed, unfazeable, nonchalant person.
