First Person Paramount

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Pages: 198

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About this book

Agar Hume has a gift for copying voices and mannerisms, but his stage career leaves him hungry and penniless in London. An employment agent sends him to Sir William Dagmar's house in Curzon Street to apply for work as a valet. Hume enters a room crowded with dusty books, studying its owner with the trained eye of a performer. His powers of observation become part of the story's machinery.

Ambrose Pratt tells this adventure novel through Hume's own account, making disguise and assumed identity central to its suspense. In a later scene, Hume outfits a hotel waiter in his own clothes, sends him out with a message and tries to slip past the men watching his room. The close attention to wigs, gestures, accents and suspicious followers gives the book a particular appeal for readers interested in impersonation and quick thinking under pressure.