Showing results by author "James Pattinson" in All Categories

James Pattinson was best known for his novels of adventure on the high seas, and this short story follows his maritime theme. When a man goes overboard on the M.V. Southern Star with just one witness, Captain Perry and his old friend Barton Rice must investigate.

It was Mrs Croyden who had been taken by the idea of digging up the history of the family. It seemed to be the kind of thing that everyone was doing nowadays. And once started she became more and more enchanted by the project. Even her husband, George, having seen the ancient photograph of a most attractive girl, long since dead, was taken by the project. The snag was that even Great Aunt Maud, the owner of the photograph, had no idea what had happened to the beautiful girl named Isabella. Apparently she had completely vanished and to the rest of the family had simply become “The Unknown”. Would the mystery ever be solved?

Sam Grant is tasked with the job of tracing the vendor of a painting that had come up for sale at a London auction room. Produced by a German Jewish artist who had perished in a Nazi concentration camp, the painting had been stolen from a schloss in Lower Saxony in World War Two. Then it had apparently vanished. Now it has surfaced 50 years later. So who had possessed it in those years? Grant has to find the answer for Gerda Hoffman, an attractive blonde. But the case turns out to be more dangerous and life-threatening than he could have anticipated…

When Detective Sergeant Frank Devon was sent to the West Indian island of St Joseph on an exchange assignment, he was told that it would be more of a holiday in the sun than work. And so it would have been, if he had not started looking beyond the limits of his authorised activities. He began to observe certain goings-on that seemed highly suspicious; but when he reported his findings he was met with either indifference or outright disapproval.

The drug trade route stretched from London across Europe and part of Asia to the borders of Afghanistan. Investigating one part of it cost the life of a police detective name George Lacon. Although his death was reportedly suicide, Detective Inspector Marler felt certain it was murder. But to trace the murderers proved a difficult task.

Kemp blamed himself: he should have kept more closely in touch with his younger sister. Now it appears that Lorna has gone off to Colombia with a man named Roberto Vargas. But Kemp finds the story hard to swallow - there's something fishy about it.

No one could understand why George Calder had committed suicide. He left a note, but it was too cryptic to provide any clue as to the reason. In her determination to solve the mystery behind her husband's death, Margaret Calder turned to an old friend for help. Keith Brooke was only too willing to do what he could, especially as he too had become intrigued by the strange circumstances surrounding George's death. The search for an answer led him to far-flung destinations.

Harry Banner turns up in London one November evening having just got back from Venezuela. He wants to see Robert Cade, a man he'd known six years earlier in Buenos Aires. He needs to ask him for a small favour: to keep a parcel until he calls back for it. The trouble is, Banner never does call back. The next morning he is found dead in his hotel room with a stab wound to his chest.

It was nearing the end of the road for The Merrymakers. Such companies of entertainers touring the towns and villages of East Anglia were finding things more and more difficult. For Howard Layton, player-manager of the troupe, it was a worrying time. But it was the murder of the bright young star of the show that proved to be the hardest blow he had to bear. For Debbie was his own daughter, and he and his wife Gloria had once had ambitious plans for her career on the stage.

When David Sterne went up to London to seek his fortune, Adolf Hitler was rampant and the shadow of impending conflict lay forebodingly over Europe. He was still struggling to make a living when war broke out and he was swept into it. Six years of his life were to be spent in the King's uniform. And so began his dramatic climb to success - with a little help from Frederica Lathwell. Then, of course, there was Angela Street...

Sometimes, in his own mind, Keele referred to himself as “The Booking Clerk”. This was a rather macabre private joke since the tickets he issued were all one-way. Yet whatever he was called, his was a profitable occupation. The time came, however, when he wished to leave it. Miss Rona Wickham had entered his life, and the role he played hitherto was incompatible with his association with her. Unfortunately, he found that getting out was not as easy as he had hoped.

One of the most important attributes of a prospective candidate for the U.S. presidency is that of being clean; not to have any dirt in your background, present or past. Senator William S. Gaullicauder appeared to fit the bill perfectly in this respect. But then a skeleton came rattling out of an English cupboard, threatening the senator’s squeaky clean reputation. The story had to be suppressed, and fast. But competing interests were involved, and violence and murder would ensue.

English adventurer Harvey Landon agrees to help his old Oxford friend, Don Vargas, who is plotting the overthrow of a South American government. The Revolutionaries, however, are without aircraft and, to obtain their supply, Landon volunteers to take a letter out of the country to a mysterious Mr. Delgado in New York. Complications begin as Landon is stalked on board the New York-bound oil tanker by two agents intent on killing him and stealing the letter.

English adventurer Harvey Landon is alone in New York - wanted by the police and with only a few dollars in his pocket. Then Theodore Cranefield offers him a job that he can't afford to refuse. Soon he is driving south with a gunman named Gregg to a rendezvous in Florida with the so-called El Aguila, Ramon Arturo Alvarez, and the tough young Pete. The drama swiftly moves across the hurricane-swept Gulf of Mexico to a country shortly to be ravaged by a volcanic eruption, an earthquake and a revolution....

There were five dead men in the cabin of the boat, lying under six fathoms of Caribbean water. But the men had not been drowned: they had been shot through the head at close range. John Fletcher had gone down to photograph a sunken ship, but he took photographs of the boat and its cargo of dead men instead. Soon he is having trouble with the island police, a private army of thugs and two CIA agents. Now Fletcher wishes he had followed his first impulse and said nothing to anyone....

The search for Arnie Walker was not a job that Sam Grant was particularly keen to undertake. But Miss Gloriana Goldstar was so pressing in her demand that he should do so that it became impossible to refuse. A trip to Amsterdam seemed a pleasant enough prospect but when there are people there intent on bringing your life to an abrupt end, the experience becomes rather less than enjoyable. All he was doing was trying to find Mr Walker and urge him to return to Miss Goldstar's loving arms.

Drake read the obituary for Howard Gray in the Daily Telegraph. It had intrigued him because he had been very close to Gray many years ago, though they had lost touch later for reasons that were certainly not mentioned in the newspaper. A lot that had happened in those early years, things that whoever had supplied the material for the obituary obviously didn't want to see in print. As Drake recalls his adventures with Gray, he wonders who supplied the material.

When a convoy of 45 ships tries to make it from Halifax to England, it finds progress sabotaged by an onslaught of enemy submarine torpedoes. Terror strikes the crews who are forced to witness their comrades drowning or becoming human torches amid the burning oil spilling from the ships. Engine failure forces the SS Regal Gesture to drop out of the convoy and make her way across the hostile waters alone and undefended.

Hector Langdon volunteered for service in the army in World War I when he was no more than 17 years old, though he gave his age as 20. It was the kind of reckless action he was to take all his life, much to the regret of his solicitor father who wished him to follow in the same profession. So he drifted from one occupation to another after the war, never really settling down. It seemed he had to be forever on the move. Until he met Eva Gray, and even that meeting was to lead in the end to tragedy.

The gunners on the Golden Ray were a strangely assorted bunch. There was the professional, Sergeant Willis, in love with his job, Vernon the intellectual, and Miller the tragic communistic misfit who found his Russian Mecca not quite what he expected.