"ONE OF THE GREAT SERIES OF MODERN DETECTIVE STORIES" So wrote Ellery Queen in the late 1940's when he introduced American readers to the writings of Vincent Cornier (1898-1976). Cornier's detective, Barnabas Hildreth, created for a British magazine in 1933, was not only an agent of the British Secret Service but was also known as "The Black Monk," and he faced (and solved) some of most bizarre cases ever to confront a sleuth a bullet fired three centuries earlier wounds a man; an ancient Egyptian curse strikes the members of an archeological expedition; a man is transformed into stone; an ancient Aztec cloak laughs; and other extraordinary tales. The Duel of Shadows is the 31st in Crippen & Landru's "Lost Classics" series: new collections by great writers of traditional mysteries. It is edited by British scholar and researcher, Mike Ashley, who his best known for his many Mammoth Book of anthologies.