Yellow Claw

London, 1915. Fog rolls through empty streets as detective writer Henry Loureaux returns to his apartment to find a woman murdered on his floor, a cryptic note in her hand addressed simply to 'Mr. King.' Inspector Dunbar of Scotland Yard takes the case, but the investigation takes a turn when the legendary M. Gaston Max, Paris's master of disguise, arrives uninvited to lend his talents to the hunt. What begins as a straightforward murder inquiry spirals into something far more sinister: a web of orientalist menace, hidden identities, and a criminal mastermind whose reach extends into the highest circles of London society. As the body count rises and Loureaux's own butler Soames disappears, the detectives race against time to unmask Mr. King before he strikes again. The novel pulses with the anxious energy of World War I London, where foreign threats seem to lurk in every shadow and no one is who they claim to be. This is early pulp crime fiction at its most exuberant: a locked-room mystery wrapped in espionage thriller, populated by brilliant detectives and villains who operate in the city's darkness. It laid groundwork for an entire genre of exotic menace thrillers and served as source material for one of Britain's earliest gangster films.