The Mystery of the Circular Chamber

A promising young watercolourist is found dead at a lonely riverside inn — no wound, no poison, every organ sound. The coroner records syncope, a word for a cause no one can name. It is not the first death under that roof, and the village has settled on its explanation: the house is haunted.

John Bell — one of fiction's first professional ghost-hunters, and a man whose methods are a physician's rather than a medium's — arrives posing as an amateur photographer. The inn keeps one room for guests: round, papered in a staring pattern, its iron bed fixed into sockets in the bare floor. To learn what killed the others, he must sleep in it.