Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Hamilton Craigie's "The Chain" is a compact city mystery from the first issue of Weird Tales, built less on ghosts than on the fear that ordinary cause and effect has slipped out of reach.

This LitLab miniature begins at Craigie's novelette heading in the March 1923 issue and stops before Merlin Moore Taylor's "The Place of Madness." Its plates follow Quarrier's taxi trap, Marston's criminal pressure, the locked top-floor office, the missing documents, and the clues that make the impossible room practical again.

The edition keeps the solution discoverable without turning every illustration into an answer key. The cover and early plates preserve the pressure of the locked room; later unlocks can afford to show the mechanism more plainly.