Great Mysteries of History [antikvár]

PREFACE Is fact really stranger than fiction? You can read James Bond thrillers and marvel at the intricacies of plot, technology, and daring. You can thrill to the old-fashioned prowess of detectives like Sam Spade and Mike Shayne. You can struggle along with the ageless Ellery Queen and Perry Mason as they solve one mystery after another in a world of murder and mayhem. And the clues fall cleverly into place at the end. The unsolved mysteries of history have no such endings. But they have real beginnings. Maybe that's what makes them seem so much stranger. Certainly it makes them all the more exciting. Everyone, of course, has his own selection of "favorites" among these unsolved mysteries. Not all of them are represented here. This collection is necessarily limited by the twin criteria of mysteriousness and greatness implicit in the title. The very nature of mystery accounts for the fact that no attempt has been made to offer solutions. At best, it would be risicy scholarship; at worst, presumptuous. The cases remain unsolved. To qualify as "great," however, the mysteries must not only be unsolved. They must, it seems, involve persons celebrated in the course of history or events of some real meaning for history. Amy Robsart and Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, for example, were anything but celebrities in their time. Neither has succeeded to fame in the centuries since. But each died under circumstances so suspect as to threaten the very security of the English crown and the uneasy head thereof. With the lost dauphin and the Man in the Iron Mask, it's quite another story. Each had a certain claim to historical importance in his own right. But the greatness of the mysteries surrounding them today derives mainly from the continuing strength of popular interest. These are romantic