Showing results by narrator "Terry Wale" in All Categories

Sometimes, in his own mind, Keele referred to himself as “The Booking Clerk”. This was a rather macabre private joke since the tickets he issued were all one-way. Yet whatever he was called, his was a profitable occupation. The time came, however, when he wished to leave it. Miss Rona Wickham had entered his life, and the role he played hitherto was incompatible with his association with her. Unfortunately, he found that getting out was not as easy as he had hoped.

Harry Banner turns up in London one November evening having just got back from Venezuela. He wants to see Robert Cade, a man he'd known six years earlier in Buenos Aires. He needs to ask him for a small favour: to keep a parcel until he calls back for it. The trouble is, Banner never does call back. The next morning he is found dead in his hotel room with a stab wound to his chest.

The drug trade route stretched from London across Europe and part of Asia to the borders of Afghanistan. Investigating one part of it cost the life of a police detective name George Lacon. Although his death was reportedly suicide, Detective Inspector Marler felt certain it was murder. But to trace the murderers proved a difficult task.

Victorian London is gripped by fear as a serial killer slays an apparently random victim on Hampstead Heath every month. Two men begin to suspect a mysterious link between the victims: Major Henry Steele and ex-sergeant Mason have been discreetly retired from Military Intelligence and now work as private investigators, and are helping Scotland Yard hunt the so-called Heath Maniac.

When Sergeant Fred Mason of the Maritime Royal Artillery eventually locates his new ship SS Radgate, he finds the little coaster quite a contrast to his previous posting. Despite the difficulties of working during the London bombing raids, the crew must get themselves ready for the invasion of France. Through the confusion, agony and bloodshed of D-Day, against the ever-present threat of mines, bombs and shells, the story switches from London to the Normandy beaches and Mulberry harbour as the crew weathers storms and tragedies.

English adventurer Harvey Landon is alone in New York - wanted by the police and with only a few dollars in his pocket. Then Theodore Cranefield offers him a job that he can't afford to refuse. Soon he is driving south with a gunman named Gregg to a rendezvous in Florida with the so-called El Aguila, Ramon Arturo Alvarez, and the tough young Pete. The drama swiftly moves across the hurricane-swept Gulf of Mexico to a country shortly to be ravaged by a volcanic eruption, an earthquake and a revolution....

When a convoy of 45 ships tries to make it from Halifax to England, it finds progress sabotaged by an onslaught of enemy submarine torpedoes. Terror strikes the crews who are forced to witness their comrades drowning or becoming human torches amid the burning oil spilling from the ships. Engine failure forces the SS Regal Gesture to drop out of the convoy and make her way across the hostile waters alone and undefended.

Alan Caley was far from delighted to receive a phone call from his old school pal Chuck Brogan, inviting him to lunch. It was some time since he had last seen Brogan and he remembered that the man had taken part in a gold robbery and been sent to prison for a number of years. Caley was reluctant to accept, Brogan was persuasive and hinted that the meeting might turn out to be to Caley's advantage - financially.

When a valuable cargo ship is abandoned in the mid-Atlantic, Captain Barling of the SS Hopeful Enterprise has his own special reasons for wishing to tow it into port. But is he justified in risking men's lives for the sake of his own desires? Shipmate Adam Loder thinks it is nothing but a wild goose chase and chief engineer Jonah Madden is worried about his ailing engines; but Charlie Wilson is hiding a deeper concern.

The late Mr Lionel Bygood, who looks, to all intents and purposes, like an old-fashioned sort of gentleman, has been bashed in the head with a bronze statue, in what Doc Cameron describes as 'our old friend the Frenzied Attack'. It soon emerges that Mr Bygood was a philanthropist, well-known locally for giving help and advice to all who needed it, from all walks of life.

What could make a successful, happily married man shoot himself? What could make a young artist on the brink of fame throw himself from a window to his death? These are the questions that are faced by Chief Inspector Lamb and his sergeant, Cogan. Neither victim left a note behind, and it appears that nothing untoward had occurred in the weeks preceding their deaths. But something must have led them to take such drastic action, and Lamb intends to find out what it was.

1796: Nathan Peake, captain of the frigate Unicorn is sent with a small squadron to help bring Venice into an Italian alliance against the French. He establishes a British naval presence, harrying the French corsairs that swarm out of Ancona. While Nathan confronts the politics in Venice, his mission is further complicated by the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte's aide-de-camp, Junot. Meanwhile, in Venice, French troops move into the city. Nathan learns that Bonaparte is negotiating a peace deal with the Austrians - Britain's only remaining ally. Worse, the Spanish are about to ally with the French.

Captain Nathan Peake survives a ferocious battle off Brittany, only to be cast into the even more dangerous waters of Post-Revolutionary Paris. There he encounters two of the most beautiful and scandalous courtesans in history and Napoleon Buonaparte. Returned to the command of the frigate Unicorn, Nathan is sent to join another young glory-seeker, Captain Horatio Nelson, in a bid to wreck Buonaparte’s plans for the invasion of Italy, and save its treasures from the invading French hordes.

When chimney sweep Tom Wasp is handed a pawn ticket by his friend Eliza Hogg on the day before she is due to be hanged in Newgate, both he and his apprentice Ned are mystified when the reclaimed item turns out to be a sailor doll. It is no ordinary doll, however. This one holds a secret that has the two most notorious gangs in London’s East End, the Rat Mob and the Nichols, at each other’s throats. When Dinah, the daughter of the leaders of the Rat Mob, is found murdered Tom resolves to find her killer.

Who was Inspector Frederick Abberline, the lead detective in the Jack the Ripper case? Why did he and his fellow policemen fail to catch the most notorious serial killer of Victorian England? What was he like as a man, as a professional policeman, one of the best detectives of his generation? And how did he investigate the sequence of squalid, bloody murders that repelled - and fascinated - contemporaries and has been the subject of keen controversy ever since? Here at last in M. J. Trow’s compelling biography of this preeminent Victorian policeman are the answers to these intriguing questions.

Among the coral outcrops of the island of Rota in the Marianas Island, off the Philippines, lies the wreck of a Spanish galleon, the Santa Margarita. Here we are told a tale of the disastrous last voyage, beset by an extraordinary sequence of typhoons and storms, of the Santa Margarita on her way to Acapulco in the spring of 1601.

Steven Drury, a respectable barrister, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Returning to his car after a late-night party, he is knocked to the ground. He catches a clear glimpse of his assailant’s face when the man opens his car door to flee. It is enough for him to identify his attacker, Daniel Fitch, in a police line-up. But, unluckily for Drury, Fitch was running from a robbery gone wrong, one in which he murdered a jeweller. Fitch isn’t going to go down without a fight.