The Green Rust

A dying millionaire asks his lawyer to find the niece he has never met, the girl who stands to inherit his fortune, and soon afterward he is stabbed to death in his sickbed. That killing opens Edgar Wallace’s 1919 thriller and pulls an American detective, Beale, into something much larger than an inheritance case. Dr. van Heerden, the physician who wants to marry the missing heiress, means to punish the Allied powers for Germany’s defeat by wiping out their entire wheat harvest with a poison only he knows how to make: the Green Rust. Wallace keeps the pace fast and the incidents thick, braiding the search for one young woman into a race against a weapon that could starve a continent. Early crime fiction with a villain who anticipated the bioterror plots of a later century.