The Albert Gate Mystery

Four men are found dead inside a guarded London mansion at Albert Gate: the Turkish envoy Mehemet Ali Pasha, his two secretaries, and his confidential servant Hussein, each killed with a long thin dagger or stiletto. The diamonds they brought to London to be cut, among them a big stone known as the hen’s egg, are gone from the safes. Jack Talbot, the Foreign Office assistant under-secretary assigned to look after the party during their stay, disappeared the same evening. Reginald Brett, barrister-at-law and amateur detective, takes the case up alongside Winter of Scotland Yard, and what first reads as robbery turns into a diplomatic emergency that carries the trail to Paris. Tracy published it in 1904, and the Edwardian texture holds: constables at the door, Foreign Office corridors, international nerves.