Our heroine, Mary Eliska Girl Detective, is a well-to-do young lady whose grandfather Albert Stricklin is a newspaper publisher in Piedmont, California, who supports her as a reporter for his paper The Piedmont Star, aware that she likes to dabble in detective work. Flying in her airplane and driving her jalopy "Calamity Jane", Mary Eliska joins with her three best friends: nieces Jacqueline Gray ("Jax") and Marlow Ray, and nephew news photographer Liam McAdam to solve the occasional case out of curiosity and sometimes to earn money separately from her family. Mary Eliska Girl Detective gives life to my daughter born sixty-two years ago, March 10, 1963, whose life was cut short in Clifton Springs New York September 12, 1963. She has charming manners, oscillates between tomboyishness and a feminine ideal. She knows law and manifests moral righteousness. Often she wears enviable dresses. Mary Eliska's detective stories and unsolved mysteries I have re-written from the public domain tales by Carolyn Keene (always a pseudonym), Anna Katharine Green, Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson, Frances Crane, Hulburt Footner and anonymous writers about Penny Parker, Mary Louise, Nancy Drew, and others. There's evil lurking among the wealthy people in their mansions. Mary Eliska Girl Detective gets on the trail of a lad named Nick, a wellborn gent who is pretty slick at black-mailing people who're old and sick. If they don't come through, they pop off quick. Well, anyway, after being captured by the arch villain and his social registrite accomplices, Mary Eliska Girl Detective and her secretary Jax escape with the help of two gentlemanly gunmen, take refuge with genial recluse, Betsy Pryor, and set a trap for Nick. Mary Eliska Girl Detective to the rescue!