Out of the Darkness: A John Bartley Mystery - Paperback

by Charles J. Dutton (Author)

A John Bartley Mystery
When the famous detective John Bartley is approached about looking into the case of two men convicted of a robbery, he is at first reluctant to involve himself in such a commonplace crime; that is until he discovers that the details of the evidence used to convict the men bears a striking resemblance to an obscure English case from the previous century in which two men were wrongly convicted on manufactured evidence. But upon commencing his investigation, he finds himself with not one, but two mysteries to solve, when the alleged victim of the robbery is found dead in his bedchamber. He must determine if the two cases are related while also discovering the identity of the murderer. His task is made more difficult by the fact that in the first case he is confronted with too much evidence while in the second there appears to be too little.

Author Biography

Charles J. Dutton (1888-1964) was an American writer of mysteries. He was educated at Brown University and later studied at Albany Law School and the Defiance Theological Seminary. After graduation he worked for a while as a newspaper columnist. He wrote numerous works of fiction that were published in magazines both in the U.S. and Great Britain. In the early 1930's he moved to Des Moines, Iowa where he assumed the post of minister for the First Unitarian Church. He wrote some fifteen mystery novels. Appearing in nine of these was the private detective John Bartley. Bartley was followed by Professor Harley Manners, a criminal psychologist who was featured in six novels. The two characters overlap in the book Streaked With Crimson. One of the things that set Dutton apart from other mystery writers of the period was his interest in the psychology of the criminal mind. He was also fascinated by old books and ancient history, subjects which play parts in a number of his novels.