Publisher's Synopsis
Enter Bryan Devisher, over the side of the ketch in which Mordaunt was taking Mr. Julius Ricardo home to London on the summons of his old friend, Inspector Hanaud of the Paris Surete and the English 'idioms.' Exit, Devisher and Mordaunt. Enter Daniel Horbury. Exit Daniel Horbury-violently, with his throat slit in the garden room of the House in Lordship Lane, with Olivia, his wife, locked in her bedroom upstairs. Enter Septimus Crottle, patriarchal, tough old shipowner; and the Crottle family, at a Sunday evening reading attended by Hanaud and Ricardo. Re-enter Mordaunt and Devisher-in Cairo. Exit Septimus Crottle, mysteriously; re-enter Hanaud, hurriedly; re-enter Sep. .nus, with all the toughness gone. But the house ?n Lordship Lane has never gone out of the story, and the master-craftsman brings us back to it at the end. And, when you read what really had happened in the garden room that night when Olivia drove her husband down to Lordship Lane, you remember the ejaculation of one reviewer, 'What a work of art a thriller can be!' Alfred Edward Woodley Mason was a British author and politician. He authored more than 20 books, including At The Villa Rose, a mystery novel in which he introduced his French detective, Inspector Hanaud. His best-known book is The Four Feathers, which many consider to be his masterpiece, and which has been made into a number of films. Other works include The House of the Arrow, No Other Tiger, The Prisoner in the Opal and Fire Over England. He also contributed a short story, The Conjurer, to The Queen's Book of the Red Cross
