The collection of the famous writer-historian A.P. Levandovsky includes essays and stories, which are connected by the fact that they are all true stories, clearly proving that strict truth is sometimes more striking than the most sophisticated fiction. And one more thing: almost all of them contain an element of a detective story, a mystery that the author is trying to solve. In general, the sketches cover a wide range of times (from the 9th to the 19th centuries) and different aspects of life. The reader will get acquainted with a unique white elephant, which in some way determined the international relations of the 9th century, and with a cruel child killer, who became the prototype of a character from Perrault’s fairy tale, and with an attempt to unravel the mystery of the theft of the famous diamond necklace of Marie Antoinette, and with the most famous of the 19th conspiracies century, which almost cost the crown and life of Napoleon I. For a wide range of readers.