Book description
Mr Marble is in serious debt, desperate for money to pay his family's
bills, until the combination of a wealthy relative, a bottle of
Cyanide and a shovel offer him the perfect solution. In fact, his
troubles are only just beginning. Slowly the Marble family becomes
poisoned by guilt, and caught in an increasingly dangerous trap of
secrets, fear and blackmail. Then, in a final twist of the knife, Mrs
Marble ensures that retribution comes in the most unexpected of ways ...
First published in 1926, C. S. Forester's gritty psychological
thriller took crime writing in a new direction, portraying ordinary,
desperate people committing monstrous acts, and showing events
spiralling terribly, chillingly, out of control.
Cecil Scott Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith
(27 August 1899 - 2 April 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame
with tales of naval warfare. His most notable works were the 11-book
Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the
Napoleonic era, and The African Queen (1935; filmed in 1951 by John
Huston). His novels A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours were jointly
awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He began
his career with the crime novels Payment Deferred and Plain Murder, now
reissued in Penguin Modern Classics along with The Pursued, which was
lost for over 60 years.
