Russian pre-revolutionary detective literature had its own Sherlock Holmes and Herculie Poirot. One of them is the private detective Patmosov, created by the writer Andrei Efimovich Zarin (1862–1929). This book contains stories in which Patmosov investigates a murder with many suspects (“The Fourth”), a mysterious disappearance of a person (“The Lost Artel Man”), and also reveals a gang of card sharpers (“Loss of Honor”).