Book description
A man will do almost anything when a rich and beautiful woman offers
him fifty thousand dollars just to make a telephone call. But when that
telephone call is part of a fake kidnap plan to extract five hundred
thousand dollars from one of the richest men in the world, only a sucker
would gamble on the deal paying off in his favour.
Harry Barber is a sucker. After three and a half years in jail for a
crime he didn't commit, with no job and no money, he is the perfect
target of a brilliant plan to frame him for the brutal murder of a young
girl. Born René Brabazon Raymond in London, the son of a British
colonel in the Indian Army, James Hadley Chase was educated at King's
School in Rochester, Kent, and left home at the age of 18. He initially
worked in book sales until, inspired by the rise of gangster culture
during the Depression and by reading James M. Cain's The Postman
Always Rings Twice
, he wrote his first novel, No Orchids for Miss Blandish
. Despite the American setting of many of his novels, Chase (like Peter
Cheyney, another hugely successful British noir writer) never lived
there, writing with the aid of maps and a slang dictionary. He had
phenomenal success with the novel, which continued unabated throughout
his entire career, spanning 45 years and nearly 90 novels. His work was
published in dozens of languages and over thirty titles were adapted for
film. He served in the RAF during World War II, where he also edited the
RAF Journal. In 1956 he moved to France with his wife and son; they
later moved to Switzerland, where Chase lived until his death in 1985.
