The Devil's Admiral
1913
A killer stalks the steamer Kut Sang, and no one aboard is above suspicion. James Augustus Trenholm reflects on the harrowing voyage that began in Manila, where he encountered the dubious Reverend Luther Meeker and a cunning red-headed beggar named Petrak, whose true motives remain obscured beneath mendicant rags. When a sailor turns up murdered, Captain Riggs must navigate a crew fractured by fear and distrust, with Petrak and a man called Buckrow drawing his uneasy gaze. Moore, drawing on his own years as a sailor and war correspondent, transforms the Pacific crossing into a claustrophobic chamber of suspense where every friendly face might conceal a blade. The narrative moves with the swell and crash of the sea itself, building toward revelations that will leave readers gripping the railings of their own imagination.
Editions
X-Ray
“Custom is the first check on tyranny; that fixed routine of social life at which modern innovations chafe, and by which modern improvement is impeded, is the primitive check on base power.””
— Frederick Ferdinand Moore
“The splitting of sovereignty into many parts amounts to there being no sovereign.””
— Frederick Ferdinand Moore
“[A]n ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.””
— Frederick Ferdinand Moore
“The most hopeless idleness is that most smoothed with excellent plans.””
— Frederick Ferdinand Moore
“The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers. According to the traditional theory, as it exists in all the books, the goodness of our constitution consists in the entire separation of the legislative and executive authorities, but in truth its merit consists in their singular approximation. The connecting link is the cabinet.””
— Frederick Ferdinand Moore
“A people never hears censure of itself.””
— Frederick Ferdinand Moore
“The English constitution, in a word, is framed on the principle of choosing a single sovereign authority, and making it good: the American, upon the principle of having many sovereign authorities, and hoping that their multitude may atone for their inferiority.””
— Frederick Ferdinand Moore
“[U]nder a presidential government a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.””
— Frederick Ferdinand Moore
