Max The Detective Cat The Phantom Portrait

With a beautifully fluffy tail and a keen nose for adventure, Max the Detective Cat is ready for any mystery... The entire theatre company have travelled to Lord Fawley's castle to put on a show for his daughter's Halloween birthday ball! Rehearsals start well, but soon some ghostly goings-on and talk of a family curse have the actors in a panic. Never fear - Max the detective cat is on the case, and his whiskers are prickling with suspicion that these strange events have more to do with jewels than ghouls... Beautifully illustrated throughout by Nicola Kinnear, Max the Detective Cat is perfect for readers aged 7+. Check out all of Max's adventures! The Disappearing Diva, The Phantom Portrait and The Catnap Caper.

With a beautifully fluffy tail and a keen nose for adventure, Max the Detective Cat is ready for any mystery... Max, chief mouse hunter at the Theatre Royal, is up to his whiskers in his first mystery! Max notices that famous singer Madame Emerald is acting strangely. Why is her maid so terrified? And what kind of singer doesn't like to sing in public? Soon Max is trapped in a complicated web of crime, dashing round dancers' legs and over the rooftops of London in a race to catch a clever thief... Beautifully illustrated throughout by Nicola Kinnear, Max the Detective Cat is perfect for readers aged 7+. Check out all of Max's adventures! The Disappearing Diva, The Phantom Portrait and The Catnap Caper.

With a beautifully fluffy tail and a keen nose for adventure, Max the Detective Cat is ready for any mystery... The pampered cats of Paris are being kidnapped! Could it have something to do with a singing competition that is gripping the city? Max knows he has to solve the mystery and bring them home. Especially as he's fallen in love with one of the victims... Beautifully illustrated throughout by Nicola Kinnear, Max the Detective Cat is perfect for readers aged 7+. Check out all of Max's adventures! The Disappearing Diva, The Phantom Portrait and The Catnap Caper.

With a beautifully fluffy tail and a keen nose for adventure, Max the Detective Cat is ready for any mystery... Max, chief mouse hunter at the Theatre Royal, is up to his whiskers in his first mystery! Max notices that famous singer Madame Emerald is acting strangely. Why is her maid so terrified? And what kind of singer doesn't like to sing in public? Soon Max is trapped in a complicated web of crime, dashing round dancers' legs and over the rooftops of London in a race to catch a clever thief... Beautifully illustrated throughout by Nicola Kinnear, Max the Detective Cat is perfect for readers aged 7+. Check out all of Max's adventures! The Disappearing Diva, The Phantom Portrait and The Catnap Caper.

Now updated with new material that brings the killer's picture into clearer focus. In the fall of 1888, all of London was held in the grip of unspeakable terror. An elusive madman calling himself Jack the Ripper was brutally butchering women in the slums of London’s East End. Police seemed powerless to stop the killer, who delighted in taunting them and whose crimes were clearly escalating in violence from victim to victim. And then the Ripper’s violent spree seemingly ended as abruptly as it had begun. He had struck out of nowhere and then vanished from the scene. Decades passed, then fifty years, then a hundred, and the Ripper’s bloody sexual crimes became anemic and impotent fodder for puzzles, mystery weekends, crime conventions, and so-called “Ripper Walks” that end with pints of ale in the pubs of Whitechapel. But to number-one New York Times bestselling novelist Patricia Cornwell, the Ripper murders are not cute little mysteries to be transformed into parlor games or movies but rather a series of terrible crimes that no one should get away with, even after death. Now Cornwell applies her trademark skills for meticulous research and scientific expertise to dig deeper into the Ripper case than any detective before her—and reveal the true identity of this fabled Victorian killer. In Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, Cornwell combines the rigorous discipline of twenty-first century police investigation with forensic techniques undreamed of during the late Victorian era to solve one of the most infamous and difficult serial murder cases in history. Drawing on unparalleled access to original Ripper evidence, documents, and records, as well as archival, academic, and law-enforcement resources, FBI profilers, and top forensic scientists, Cornwell reveals that Jack the Ripper was none other than a respected painter of his day, an artist now collected by some of the world’s finest museums: Walter Richard Sickert. It has been said of Cornwell that no one depicts the human capability for evil better than she. Adding layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds, Cornwell shows that Sickert, who died peacefully in his bed in 1942, at the age of 81, was not only one of Great Britain’s greatest painters but also a serial killer, a damaged diabolical man driven by megalomania and hate. She exposes Sickert as the author of the infamous Ripper letters that were written to the Metropolitan Police and the press. Her detailed analysis of his paintings shows that his art continually depicted his horrific mutilation of his victims, and her examination of this man’s birth defects, the consequent genital surgical interventions, and their effects on his upbringing present a casebook example of how a psychopathic killer is created. New information and startling revelations detailed in Portrait of a Killer include: - How a year-long battery of more than 100 DNA tests—on samples drawn by Cornwell’s forensics team in September 2001 from original Ripper letters and Sickert documents—yielded the first shadows of the 75- to 114 year-old genetic evid...

Film noir is more than a cinematic genre. It is an essential aspect of American culture. Along with the cowboy of the Wild West, the denizen of the film noir city is at the very center of our mythological iconography. Described as the style of an anxious victor, film noir began during the post-war period, a strange time of hope and optimism mixed with fear and even paranoia. The shadow of this rich and powerful cinematic style can now be seen in virtually every artistic medium. The spectacular success of recent neo-film noirs is only the tip of an iceberg. In the dead-on, nocturnal jazz of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, the chilled urban landscapes of Edward Hopper, and postwar literary fiction from Nelson Algren and William S. Burroughs to pulp masters like Horace McCoy, we find an unsettling recognition of the dark hollowness beneath the surface of the American Dream. Acclaimed novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher explores the cultural identity of film noir in a seamless, elegant, and enchanting work of literary prose. Examining virtually the entire catalogue of film noir, Christopher identifies the central motif as the urban labyrinth, a place infested with psychosis, anxiety, and existential dread in which the noir hero embarks on a dangerously illuminating quest. With acute sensitivity, he shows how technical devices such as lighting, voice over, and editing tempo are deployed to create the film noir world. Somewhere in the Night guides us through the architecture of this imaginary world, be it shot in New York or Los Angeles, relating its elements to the ancient cultural archetypes that prefigure it. Finally, Christopher builds an explanation of why film noir not only lives on but is currently enjoying a renaissance. Somewhere in the Night can be appreciated as a lucid introduction to a fundamental style of American culture, and also as a guide to film noir's heyday. Ultimately, though, as the work of a bold talent adeptly manipulating poetic cadence and metaphor, it is itself a superb aesthetic artifact.

Edgar G. Ulmer is perhaps best known today for Detour, considered by many to be the epitome of a certain noir style that transcends its B-list origins. But in his lifetime he never achieved the celebrity of his fellow Austrian and German émigré directors—Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak. Despite early work with Max Reinhardt and F. W. Murnau, his auspicious debut with Siodmak on their celebrated Weimar classic People on Sunday, and the success of films like Detour and Ruthless, Ulmer spent most of his career as an itinerant filmmaker earning modest paychecks for films that have either been overlooked or forgotten. In this fascinating and well-researched account of a career spent on the margins of Hollywood, Noah Isenberg provides the little-known details of Ulmer’s personal life and a thorough analysis of his wide-ranging, eclectic films—features aimed at minority audiences, horror and sci-fi flicks, genre pictures made in the U.S. and abroad. Isenberg shows that Ulmer’s unconventional path was in many ways more typical than that of his more famous colleagues. As he follows the twists and turns of Ulmer’s fortunes, Isenberg also conveys a new understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and beyond.

Arthur Woodbury is tired of being called fat. When he orders a weight-loss device from a comic book, he suddenly finds himself trapped in REM World, the endangered realm of dreams. He has to save REM World, or the future will cease to exist!