The All-Story Magazine

Catalog Note: All-Story Magazine This issue features several serialized fiction pieces. "Driven by Fate" concerns an inheritance pursuit with unspecified resolution. "His Brother's Foe, Part II" involves gold and a woman as motivating factors. "The Cricket of Leeds, Part IV" follows a wandering artist across lands as a fugitive seeks vindication. "The Crated Ghost," authorship unclear in the OCR, appears in the table of contents. The primary story presented here, "The Devil's Signature" by James Allen Talbott, is a mystery-detective narrative. A young reporter encounters Major Vandiver and his daughter Ethel, recently returned from Europe with a French maid, Marie le Feyte. During their third day at a mountain estate called Hilltop, the maid is brutally murdered in a locked room—windows latched from inside, door locked. The killing appears motiveless and leaves the household terrorized. The Major offers five thousand dollars for solving the case. The reporter, following a crippled old gardener named Hiram, enters the death room to examine the evidence, beginning investigative proceedings into this locked-room murder.