On the eve of her wedding day, Madeleine Van Norman, a beautiful young lady who is soon to come into her family fortune is found dead, apparently stabbed with an ominous blood-stained letter opener found nearby. Who killed her the cousin who loved her but had been rejected; her fiancé, who was in love with another woman; her secretary, who loved the fiancé; the eccentric spinster who stood to inherit her property? The Clue, published in 1909, is the first book in the Detective Fleming Stone series. It falls squarely in the tradition of two favorite mystery sub-genres the Big House Mystery and the Locked Room Mystery. Detective Fleming Stone is cool and methodical, not unlike his more famous fictional contemporaries, Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes. The twist is that he doesnt appear until the second half of the story.