Detective Story Magazine, December 18, 1926

This issue of Detective Story Magazine from December 18, 1926 contains two novelettes and two serials alongside five short stories and an article on crime history. The featured novelette "Doomed at Four" by Christopher B. Booth follows a desperate, starving vagrant who steals an apartment-house pass-key to find food. Breaking into a third-floor apartment, he gorges himself from the ice box on roasted chicken, only to be discovered by the homeowner, Thomas Karch, a wealthy contractor. Karch shoots the intruder, but the shooting triggers a darker impulse: seeing the dead vagrant as an opportunity, Karch resolves to murder his obese, aging wife. The serial "Crime Island" by Madeleine Sharps Buchanan and "The Green Shadow" by Herman Landon continue from previous installments. Short stories include "Where Was Lady Luck?" by Philip Hubbard and pieces by Frederick Ames Coates, Roland Krebs, Donald Van Riper, and John Baer. Edward H. Smith's article "Forgers and Forgery" explores the Ketchum gold checks case.