A classic locked room mystery from the genre’s Golden Age by the renowned Australian author of the Chief Inspector Luckraft series. On the day of his wife’s funeral, Robert Turold reveals that he has completed his lifelong quest to prove his family’s noble blood and restore its barony title. His brother and nephew will be his heirs, skipping over his daughter who he believes is illegitimate due to a deathbed confession from his wife. With the granting of a peerage within his reach, Robert has no qualms involving the neglected girl in public scandal—a turn of events that has left the surviving members of his family reeling. High on the Cornish cliffs, Robert’s isolated and imposing Flint House proves the perfect backdrop for a mysterious crime, when he’s found shot in a locked room. While first impressions point to suicide, Robert’s sister is convinced he was murdered. Arriving from Scotland Yard, Detective Barrant suspects Robert’s now-missing daughter, who has fled to London. Mired in past secrets and sins, the case seems to go nowhere and everywhere at once. But the threads of obsession, greed, and revenge will lead to a devious killer, who is soon to be trapped in a web of their own design.
It is as strange a place as any for the meeting -- and for as strange a reason. Sir Henry Durwood, renowned throughout England for his medical understanding of the nervous system, has found his attention caught by a young man exhibiting the oddest peculiarities of motion -- peculiarities that just might signal danger to those nearby. The hotel restaurant's tables are but sparsely occupied. Two nights before, a Zeppelin had dropped a few bombs on the Durrington front, and the majority of hotel visitors had departed by the next morning's train, disregarding the proprietor's assurance that the affair was a pure accident -- a German oversight unlikely to happen again. Off and away the nervous ones went all the same, leaving the big hotel, the long curved seafront, the miles of yellow sand, the high green headlands, the best golf-links in the East of England, and all the other attractions mentioned in the hotel advertisements, to the nerve-proof handful. Yet another hotel guest besides Sir Durwood has noticed the same oddities, in the mysterious hotel guest: and this is Grant Colwyn . . . half English, half American -- and the most famous detective on two continents.
For the twentieth time Miss Meredith asked herself why her nephew had fallen in love with this unknown girl, Violet, from London, who loathed the country. From Miss Heredith's point of view, a girl who smoked and talked slang lacked any sense of the dignity of the high position to which she had been called. She was in every way unfitted to become mother of the next male Heredith -- if, indeed, she consented to bear an heir at all. It was Miss Heredith's constant regret that Phil had not married some nice girl of the county, in his own station of life, instead of a London girl. And now she was unwilling to wear the ancestral pearls, and was leaving them in her jewel box there in her room . . . Such thoughts were immediately dashed from her mind, however -- and she nearly tumbled, descending the staircase in her hurry. Vincent, at the table with the other guests, had risen at the sound of her hurrying feet. Oh, Vincent, I was just coming for you -- something terrible must have happened Miss Meredith began, in a broken, sobbing voice. I was going upstairs to my room -- when I heard the scream, and then the shot. They must have come from Violet's room
The aristocratic Phil Meredith chooses to marry Violet, a working-class girl from London, which raises more than a few eyebrows. However, when Violet decides to throw a party for her friends at her new country residence, she is murdered, leaving the guests in a state of shock. The arrival of two detectives, Merrington and Caldew, sets the investigation in motion. This is swiftly followed by the arrival of America’s greatest private eye, Grant Colwyn. Will he be able to work with the two policemen, or will he rely on his own methods to solve the case? ‘The Hand in the Dark’ is packed with red herrings, twists, and turns, and is sure to have even the most dedicated armchair detective guessing until the last page. Born in Melbourne, Arthur J. Rees (1872 – 1942) was an Australian author and journalist. After a brief spell working for the ‘Melbourne Age’ newspaper, he acted as a reporter for the ‘New Zealand Herald,’ before becoming the editor of the ‘New Zealand Truth.’ During his twenties, Rees left for England, where he worked as a journalist for the ‘London Times.’ It was during this period that he began his literary career, with the publication of ‘The Merry Marauders.’ Rees made his mark as a writer of crime and mystery novels and was most notably praised by the English crime writer, Dorothy L. Sayers.
Val is invited to New Zealand by his Uncle Rufus to help run his business, which he describes to Val as 'control of the New Zealand fruit trade'. Restless Val hopes that his new life will be adventurous and exciting but when he realises that his job is merely selling fruit and veg in a small shop in Auckland he parts from his uncle immediately and looks for adventures elsewhere. When he finds an advertisement for an advance agent to join a travelling theatrical troupe – 'Merry Marauders Dramatic Company' – he feels that he's found what he was looking for. He joins the troupe and their tour around New Zealand begins. As he promises in a letter to his friend, 'One thing is certain; we shall have some adventures on the road that should be worth relating' – this promise is definitely fulfilled. The Merry Marauders is an epistolary novel, first published in 1913, which chronicles the funny misadventures of an accident-prone theatrical troupe touring through the small towns of frontier New Zealand around 1900 and encountering various rogues, setbacks and turns of fortune.
Arthur John Rees (1877-1942) was an Australian journalist, born in Melbourne. His proficiency was in writing crime mystery stories, amongst which are: The Shrieking Pit (1919), The Hand in the Dark (1920), The Moon Rock (1922) and Island of Destiny (1923). He also co-authored two works with John Reay Watson (1872-? ): The Hampstead Mystery (1916) and The Mystery of the Downs (1918).
For the twentieth time Miss Meredith asked herself why her nephew had fallen in love with this unknown girl, Violet, from London, who loathed the country. From Miss Heredith's point of view, a girl who smoked and talked slang lacked any sense of the dignity of the high position to which she had been called. She was in every way unfitted to become mother of the next male Heredith .if, indeed, she consented to bear an heir at all. It was Miss Heredith's constant regret that Phil had not married some nice girl of the county, in his own station of life, instead of a London girl. Such thoughts were immediately dashed from her mind, however and she nearly tumbled, descending the staircase in her hurry. Vincent, at the table with the other guests, had risen at the sound of her hurrying feet. "Oh, Vincent, I was just coming for you something terrible must have happened!" Miss Meredith began, in a broken, sobbing voice. The Hand In The Dark was written in 1920 by Arther John Rees.
Excerpt: Seen in the sad glamour of an English twilight, the old moat-house, emerging from the thin mists which veiled the green flats in which it stood, conveyed the impression of a habitation falling into senility, tired with centuries of existence. Houses grow old like the race of men; the process is not less inevitable, though slower; in both, decay is hastened by events as well as by the passage of Time.The moat-house was not so old as English country-houses go, but it had aged quickly because of its past. There was a weird and bloody history attached to the place: an historical record of murders and stabbings and quarrels dating back to Saxon days, when a castle had stood on the spot, and every inch of the flat land had been drenched in the blood of serfs fighting under a Saxon tyrant against a Norman tyrant for the sacred catchword of Liberty.We are happy to announce this classic book. Many of the books in our collection have not been published for decades and are therefore not broadly available to the readers. Our goal is to access the very large literary repository of general public books. The main contents of our entire classical books are the original works. To ensure high quality products, all the titles are chosen carefully by our staff. We hope you enjoy this classic
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