Publisher's Synopsis
A collection of 12 stories published serially in The Ludgate, London, Jun 1897 to May 1898, in which the criminal mastermind, Felix Gryde, conducts his nefarious criminal work -- theft, kidnapping, ransom, assassination, fraud -- and he never gets caught. The author's introduction: "The history of famous detectives, imaginary and otherwise, has frequently been written, but the history of a famous criminal-never. "This is a bold statement, but a true one all the same. The most notorious of rascals know that sooner or later they will be found out, and therefore they plan their lives accordingly. But they are always found out in the end. And yet there must be many colossal rascals who have lived and died apparently in the odour of sanctity. Such a character would be quite new to fiction, and herein I propose to attempt the history of the Sherlock Holmes of malefactors. "Given a rascal with the intellect of the famous creation in question, and detection would be reduced to a vanishing point. It is the intention of the writer to set down here some of the wonderful adventures that befell Felix Gryde in the course of his remarkable career." Fred Merrick White (1859-1935), a British author of many novels and short stories under the name "Fred M. White," was born in 1859 in West Bromwich, a small town near Birmingham, England. The record of his birth indicates that his first name was actually "Fred" - not, as is often assumed, "Frederick." His second name "Merrick" was the maiden name of his mother, Helen, who married his father, Joseph, in West Bromwich in the September quarter of 1858. Before becoming a full-time writer, Fred M. White followed in his father's footsteps and worked as a solicitor's clerk in Hereford. By 1891, Fred M. White, then 31 years old, was working full-time as a journalist and author. The First World War and his 2 sons' war-time experiences as junior officers in the British military evidently influenced Fred M. White's writing during and after this conflict. His novel The Seed Of Empire, published in 1916, describes some of the early trench warfare in great detail-the places and happenings are historically accurate. A number of novels published in the 1920s describe the social changes caused by the war and the difficulties of ex-soldiers in fitting back into normal civilian life. Perhaps best known for his "Doom of London" stories, in which that city experiences a series of devastating catastrophes, Fred M. White produced a huge body of short stories and novels, mainly in the genres of crime, romance and science fiction. He was an avid golfer, which shows in some of his novels, along with fly-fishing and the card game of Bridge.