The Man Who Knew

A body lies in Gray Square, Bloomsbury. Around it gather the witnesses: Constable Wiseman, Frank Merril (nephew of the wealthy John Martin), and May Nuttall, whose father was Martin's closest friend. But it is a small, shabby man in an ill-fitting frock coat and large gold-rimmed spectacles who draws the curious object from the dead man's pocket, a newspaper advertisement. 'At the Yard,' whispers the constable to Frank, 'we call him The Man who Knows.' So begins Edgar Wallace's propulsive thriller, in which secrets fester beneath London's fog and everyone has something to hide. John Minute himself, a paranoid millionaire with a scientist's mind and a mysterious secretary named Jasper Cole, fears for his life, his fortune, and perhaps a young woman whose integrity has entangled her in something far darker than she understands. Wallace, the master of the genre, delivers twists like blade strokes, each one cutting closer to a truth some would kill to keep buried. The result is a genre-defining puzzle box of a novel, dense with atmosphere and aching with the particular loneliness of people who know too much.