The H. L. Mencken Murder Case

by Don Swaim

It was a good year for Harry S. Truman. Hamburger was thirty-eight cents a pound. The Fourth Avenue used-book dealers were in full swing. Howard's father had run one of those book stores and Howard had taken over his father's store after his father's death. Howard wasn't really a bookman, and he knew how little financial reward there was in the business. Until it looked as if a very rare manuscript, priceless probably, had come his way. But there was something odd about it. Howard decided to check his treasure out with a fellow in Baltimore, a fellow Howard's believed could solve all literary problems—a man named H.L. Mencken.

The results were most interesting.

174 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Don Swaim is a writer, novelist, journalist, and winner of the 2011 Pearl S. Buck short story prize. His novel, The H.L. Mencken Murder Case (St. Martin's Press), was republished as a trade paperback under the Authors Guild's Back in Print program. Born in Kansas and educated in Ohio, his daily feature "Book Beat" was broadcast on major radio stations through the CBS Radio Stations News Service, and can be heard on the Internet at Wired for Books and at Book Beat:The Podcast. After a career at CBS in New York and Baltimore, Swaim founded the Bucks County Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania. He edits the web's definitive Ambrose Bierce Site. His fiction and articles have been published in small magazines and on the web.