Book description
Hugh Stanton, debonair, curly-headed, “the man with the monocle”,
arrives home from a holiday abroad, walks into London’s show hotel, “The
Parnassus”, and finds himself involved in the strange circumstances
surrounding the death of Savenac, a Balkan Dictator.
Did the beautiful girl who was Savenac’s companion and secretary drop a
poisoned tablet in her master’s wine? Or was it Marco, the head waiter,
Lord Leslake, the Sporting Peer, or one of the others who had approached
the table? Then there is the matter of five million pounds of Balkan
gold hidden in this country, with Scotland Yard keeping a watchful eye
on the efforts of a gang of hi-jackers to get it shipped abroad.
A sparkling story, with Hugh Stanton and Detective-Inspector Curwen in
another battle of wits. Roy Vickers was the author of over 60 crime
novels and 80 short stories, many written under the pseudonyms Sefton
Kyle and David Durham. He was born in 1889 and educated at Charterhouse
School, Brasenose College, Oxford, and enrolled as a student of the
Middle Temple. He left the University before graduating in order to join
the staff of a popular weekly. After two years of journalistic choring,
which included a period of crime reporting, he became editor of the
Novel Magazine
, but eventually resigned this post so that he could develop his ideas
as a freelance. His experience in the criminal courts gave him a view of
the anatomy of crime which was the mainspring of his novels and short
stories. Not primarily interested in the professional crook, he wrote of
the normal citizen taken unawares by the latent forces of his own
temperament. His attitude to the criminal is sympathetic but
unsentimental.
Vickers is best known for his ‘Department of Dead Ends’ stories which
were originally published in Pearson’s Magazine
from 1934. Partial collections were made in 1947, 1949, and 1978,
earning him a reputation in both the UK and the US as an accomplished
writer of ‘inverted mysteries’. He also edited several anthologies for
the Crime Writers’ Association.
