Simon

Simon is a mystery novel by J. Storer Clouston. A Procurator Fiscal in Scotland, being responsible for public prosecutions, needs to be a fairly hard-minded lawyer. Simon Rattar is an older lawyer of just this type. Along with holding the office of Procurator Fiscal in his small town, he also serves as factor for the estate of the local laird, whose wider clan is well represented in the vicinity. Naturally, when one of Rattar's esteemed clients is murdered in strange circumstances, the local gossips struggle to make sense of the killing, and the police aren't much the wiser either. J. Storer Clouston's sleuth, called in when the slow-witted rural detective fails to make progress, is the monocled and gentlemanly F. T. Carrington, anticipating by some years the first appearance of that more famous and aristocratic monocle-wearer, Lord Peter Wimsey. With its wry humor and gently satirical eye on small-town gossip and provincial detection, Simon offers a lighter, more comic take on the golden age mystery, anchored by a memorably fastidious amateur sleuth. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)