The Edgar Wallace Mysteries

Michael Blake has always had his eye on the main chance. A suave, ex-public school type, he seems oddly out of place in the company of small-time racketeers.

Robert Hilary is a public figure, a businessman and a politician. Happily married, Hilary still lets his desire for his new secretary get the better of him.

Ben Arkwright, a co-director in the firm of Arkwright and Gallen, is having an affair with Anna, the strongly willed wife of Ricky Gallen, Ben's partner.

Police believed the murder of Norma Brent to be an open-and-shut case; her lover - a penniless scrap merchant - was discovered holding the ends of the strangulation cord over her lifeless body.

It all began as a hoax, a stunt, a trick on the part of two cynical young journalists to spite society and thwart the Establishment. The idea was to expose the frailty of circumstantial evidence, and they planned to fake a murder. But the plan went disastrously wrong.