Frank Burgoyne, newly rich through inheritance, falls madly and improbably in love with a beautiful but mysterious Russian and becomes unwittingly and unknowingly embroiled in an international plot punctuated by a series of murders. Burgoyne suffers several bewildering experiences, including incarcerations in Russia and England, and he is constantly questioning his love’s motivations and fealty.
Then it’s an entire mystery? „Yes, Phrida.” „But it’s astounding! It really seems so utterly impossible,” declared my well-beloved, amazed at what I had just related. „I’ve simply stated hard facts.” „But there’s been nothing about this affair in the papers.” „For certain reasons the authorities are not exactly anxious for any publicity. It is a very puzzling problem, and they do not care to own themselves baffled,” I replied.
A large, square wooden veranda covered by a red and white awning, above a wide silent sweep of flowing river, whose huge rocks, worn smooth through a thousand ages, raised their backs about the stream, a glimpse of green feathery palms and flaming scarlet poinsettias on the island opposite, and beyond the great drab desert, the illimitable waste of stony, undulating sands stretching away to the infinite, and bathed in the blood-red light of the dying day.
Let me gaze down the vista of the tristful past. Ah! there are things that cannot be uttered; there are scenes that still entrance me, and incidents so unexpected and terrible that they cause me even now to hold my breath in horror. The prologue of this extraordinary drama of London life was enacted three years ago; its astounding dénouement occurred quite recently.
”Yes! I’m not mistaken at all! It’s the same woman! „ whispered the tall, good-looking young Englishman in a well-cut navy suit as he stood with his friend, a man some ten years older than himself, at one of the roulette tables at Monte Carlo, the first on the right on entering the room–that one known to habitual gamblers as „The Suicide’s Table.” „Are you quite certain? „ asked his friend. „Positive. I should know her again anywhere.” „She’s very handsome. And look, too, b...
So strange, indeed, were all the circumstances, and so startling the adventures that befell me in my search after truth, that until to-day I have hesitated to relate the narrative, which is as extraordinary as it is unique in the history of any living man. If it were not for the fact that a certain person actively associated with this curious drama of our latter day civilisation, has recently passed to the land that lies beyond the human ken, my lips would have perforce sti...
The Ambassador’s office was indeed a very thankless one, while my own position as second secretary of the Paris Embassy was a post not to be envied, even though it is popularly supposed to be one of the plums of the diplomatic service. With Paris full of spies endeavouring to discover our secrets and divine our instructions from Downing Street, and the cabinet noir ever at work upon our correspondence, it behoved us to be always on the alert, and to have resort to all manne...
”Of course the transaction is a purely private one. There is, I suppose, no chance of the truth leaking out? If so, it might be very awkward, you know.” „None whatever. Your Excellency may rely upon me to deal with these people cautiously. Besides, they have their own reputation to consider–as well as ours.” „And how much do you say they offer? „ asked His Excellency in Italian, so that the English servants, if they were listening, should not understand. „If you accept thei...
A short but interesting detective story. Dick Martin plans for an early retirement from the police force seeking a quite life. His final job is to bring in Lew Pheeney, wanted in connection with a bank robbery. When Lew confesses to trying to open a dead man’s tomb, however, Martin has a mystery he must unravel. He races to find the connection between an attractive young librarian, a mad scientist and the vanished heir to a vast fortune, as everyone becomes entangled in a w...
The master mystery-story teller presents an omnibus of his spine-chilling stories. „The Edgar Wallace Reader of Mystery and Adventure” is a collection of short stories that include „On the Witney Road”, „The Pick-Up”, „Kid Glove Harry”, and thirteen others. Edgar Wallace was a British novelist, playwright, and journalist who produced popular detective and suspense stories and was in his time „the king” of the modern thriller. Wallace’s literary output – 175 books, 24 plays,...
„The Council of Justice” is the sequel to much-lauded „The Four Just Men”, a novel which caused a sensation way back in 1905 by encouraging readers to guess the mystery ending. The Four Just Men, in this second of Wallace’s ingenious series of thrillers, pit themselves against The Red Hundred, an organization dedicated to international anarchy, led by the charismatic and beautiful assassin, the Woman of Gratz. As always, the avengers’ methods are meticulously planned and ru...
Edgar Wallace’s 1931 novel „The Devil Man” is the mysterious and thrilling story of Charles Pearce, an small, unnerving, musician, gifted but terribly boastful. Pearce is physically repulsive, tiny in stature, but a Samson in strength. Woman can’t resist him, but they don’t know the real Pearce. He is also a burglar. And a murderer. There is a baffling mystery that someone urgently needs to solve... Full of dispense, action and amusing characters, „The Devil Man” constitute...
An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945, which states that some Jews in Eastern Europe took revenge on their former captors while overseeing over 1,000 concentration camps in Poland for German civilians. The book provides details of the imprisonment of 200,000 Germans „many of them starved, beaten and tortured” and estimates that „more than 60,000 died at the hands of a largely Jewish-run security organisation.”
During and after the First World War, Edgar Wallace wrote several story and article series for the Glasgow Sunday Post, a weekly newspaper founded in 1915 by the Scottish shipping and media magnate David Couper Thomson. Some of these series were published under Wallace’s own name, others – including the present work – under the house-author name of „John Anstruther”. The story „The Elusive Dud” is fast-paced with some surprising twists, well written and great to read. Walla...
One of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, Edgar Wallace was an immensely popular author, who created exciting thrillers spiced with tales of treacherous crooks and hard-boiled detectives. „The Double” is a story about a man who encounters his unknown double and the trouble that arises. When Dick Staines joined the police force the big case of the day had been the Staines murder. The only clue was an unknown thumb-print, the case was never solved. Ten years ...
1931 Edgar Wallace novel. The story begins with following the Arranway family and various people that touch their life. Sketchley, where the Coat of Arms roadhouse stands, is a place of strange happenings. A complicated trail of theft, arson and blackmail culminates in murder at the Coat of Arms roadhouse and T. B. Collett, the crack Scotland Yard detective, must cope with a cast of stock company suspects and an incompetent local detective. Little by little you can see that...
Edgar Wallace established his reputation as a writer of detective thrillers, a genre in which he wrote more than 170 books, with the publication of „The Four Just Men”. Moreover, the author was a wholehearted supporter of Victorian and early Edwardian values and mores, which are now considered in some respects politically incorrect. In England, in the 1920s, Wallace was said to be the second biggest seller after the Bible. „The Day of Uniting” by Edgar Wallace was originall...
Edgar Wallace’s novels always have an endearing quality about them that is not so easy to define. „Daughters of the Night” is hard to explain in a few words, but there are the usual Edgar Wallace characters: the hero, the heroine, the suspicious but beautiful woman who is somehow involved in the whole plot, the hard-faced and fiendish villain and a chivalrous one. Jim Bartholomew is a young manager of a branch of the South Devon Farmers’ Bank with a love of hunting, horses ...
Fashionable Londoner James Morlake is a gentleman with many secrets and several particularly valuable skills – like terrorizing bankers across the city. His Moorish servant Mahmet has some secrets to hide as well, particularly when his employer gives him the odd task to perform in the dead of night in dark London. A collection of short stories from Edgar Wallace featuring a private detective who tracks down blackmailers. When you do reach the end you will anxiously await a ...
Best remembered for penning the screenplay for the classic film „King Kong”, author Edgar Wallace was an astoundingly popular luminary in the action-adventure genre in the early twentieth century. Born into poverty as an illegitimate London child, joining the army at 21, he was a war correspondent during the Second Boer War for Reuters and The Daily Mail. This early work by Edgar Wallace was originally published in 1923. „The Books of Bart” is a novel of relationships and d...
Edgar Wallace is continuing to introduce readers to Mr. J. G. Reeder, one of the least glamorous of all fictional detectives. Mr. J. G. Reeder is neither a police detective nor an amateur crime-fighter, nor is he a private detective. In fact he is employed by the Bank of England, and acts as a kind of consultant to Scotland Yard. This is vintage Wallace, with no great depths but a good deal of humor and plenty of engaging goings-on along Wallace’s beloved Thames. Wallace wa...
An excellent crime novel which contains a cunning villain, love, revenge and locked room murder by the master of British thrillers. The hero John Lexman, is a mystery writer, like the author himself, and is married to a lovely woman who hides a secret. The Greek aristocrat, Remington Kara is stunningly handsome and immensely rich and he nurses an unrequited passion for Lexman’s wife. When Lexman gets himself into financial problems with an Albanian moneylender, the plot beg...
In this 1923 mystery by Edgar Wallace, Jesse Trasmere is thrifty and does not trust banks, so he keeps all of his money in his prison-like house. Although his nephew, Rex Lander, receives a generous allowance from his uncle, it is not enough for his extravagant lifestyle. Trasmere breaks with routine and informs his valet, Walters, that he is going out of town for a while to avoid an acquaintance from his past. One day he turns up dead, in a completely locked vault, the onl...
Set in England at the turn of the 20th century, Wallace’s crime novel „The Daffodil Mystery” follows the mysterious circumstances under which shop owner Lyne was found dead in Hyde Park, murdered undoubtedly! The clues were numerous but contradictory... The murdered man is an unsavory character who is called on the carpet by the investigator he tries to hire to frame the girl Odette Rider. Detective Jack Tarling and his trusted Chinese assistant become involved in helping t...
