20–6428
The story has evidently been suggested by Poe’s “The murders in the rue Morgue.” An American millionaire’s pleasure yacht, touring on the Mediterranean, encounters a derelict yacht, fitted up most luxuriously with every evidence of recent occupancy but not a soul on board. Here’s mystery, and Peter Knight, the millionaire’s secretary and lover of his daughter, Betty, sets himself to unravel it. His rôle as detective proves full of danger but brings to light much past history and romance. An Italian duke of fabulous wealth is discovered to have been the owner of the yacht, and Peter Knight’s father—and thereby hangs a tale of dark plots and poison cups worthy of the middle ages. The outcome of this tale would have been a different one had not a baboon, one of the yacht’s inmates, taken a hand in it to do some of the murdering on his own account. Peter himself barely escapes with his own life, but in doing so is enabled to rescue his beloved Betty who has in the meanwhile fallen into the clutches of the same criminal family.
“A mystery yarn, fantastic and impossible, but quite readable.”
+ − Booklist 16:280 My ’20
“A well-conceived and engaging mystery tale.”
+ Springf’d Republican p11a Ag 1 ’20 280w
ALLISON, WILLIAM. Turnstile of night. il *$1.90 (2c) Doubleday
This tale of mystery begins in India where three white men combine in a successful attempt to gain possession of some priceless diamonds worn as the “breastplate of the seven stars” by an idol in a temple of Buddha. Then the scene shifts to England; two of the treasure seekers are dead, by fair means or foul, and the third is trying to keep for himself the whole treasure, part of which belongs in reality to Honour Brooke, daughter of the one, and Ronald Charteris, nephew of the other adventurer. Loris St Leger, the villain, aided by his wicked old uncle, and using his beautiful cousin as his tool, stops at nothing, and as Honour and Ronald are entirely ignorant of his game or his reasons for playing it, he soon has them completely in his power. But there are some influences at work that he has no knowledge of, which are acting against him, and in the end his evil purposes are defeated, after many harrowing experiences for Honour and Ronald.