The Stretton Street Affair

Hugh Garfield, a young electrical engineer newly home from the war, is stopped on a London street one night and led into the Stretton Street mansion of Oswald De Gex, an immensely rich and secretive financier. There he is offered five hundred pounds to sign a certificate stating that a young woman has died of natural causes. The night ends with Garfield drugged and his memory in pieces, unsure of what he actually witnessed. William Le Queux published this mystery in 1922, building the puzzle around a poison called orosin, a suspicious death, and a pursuit that carries Garfield across Europe to Madrid and Segovia. It rewards readers who like the tangled, quick-moving crime fiction of the early 1920s, with Le Queux at his most conspiratorial.