Book description
At the Universal Advertising Agency on the Strand, London, a murder
is being planned. Three men have been discovered taking bribes and
face the grim prospect of the dole queue, unless they can get rid of
the person who caught them. Their ringleader, thick-set and vicious Mr
Morris, soon discovers that killing is far easier than he thought -
and that he even has a talent for it. He might, he feels, be
superhuman. But as he will discover, there is no such thing as the
perfect crime, and no deed goes unpunished.
Taking us into a 1930s London of grimy back streets, smoky cafes and
shabby rooms, Plain Murder, C. S. Forester's second crime
novel, is a brilliantly atmospheric and gripping portrayal of the dark
heart of a killer.
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.
