The Ocean Sleuth - Softcover

Drake, Maurice

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798351538716

Publisher: Independently published, 2022

Synopsis

• ‘A complicated and puzzling yarn ingenious worked out… delightful’ New York Times
• First republication of this Golden Age of Crime classic for over a century.
• Maurice Drake’s second detective novel featuring ‘Sherlock of the Sea’ maritime detective Austin Voogdt, who previously was the hero of the hugely successful The Mystery of the Mud Flats.

Midnight, on a stormy night in June, the luxury liner SS Aspasie founders on the rocks off the Lizard Peninsula on the Cornish coast. Austin Voogdt, the ‘Sherlock of the sea’ and his crew of the salvage ship Godwit rescue who they can, but a mystery comes to light after the survivors reach land. How are stolen banknotes from a stash worth £80,000 turning up in circulation when the banker who stole them is supposed to be at the bottom of the Atlantic? Voogdt attempts to outwit Scotland Yard and the French Police, tracking the illicit currency through Cornwall, across the Channel to the cliff-lands of Finistère in Brittany, in search of the criminal and his accomplices…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maurice Drake was born Frederick Morris Drake in Newton Abbot, Devon in 1875. His family ran a famous glass-painting studio near Exeter Cathedral and Maurice took up the family business and became a leading glass-painting artist and authority on medieval stained glass. Alongside his illustrious and learned art publications, Maurice also found time to write seven mystery novels, most with a strong nautical theme. A keen yachtsman, Maurice loved the sea and all things nautical. His first book, The Salving of a Derelict, won The Daily Mail’s first novel prize. His best-selling fourth book, WO2 (later re-titled The Mystery of the Mud Flats and published in Collins’s prestigious Detective Story Club), introduced the author’s principal literary creation, Austin Voogdt, a debonair investigative journalist and occasional sea-hand of Dutch descent. In The Mystery of the Mud Flats and its sequel The Ocean Sleuth, he acts as a maritime detective and becomes known as the ‘Sherlock of the Sea.’ Maurice Drake died of pneumonia aged just 48 in 1923.

PRAISE FOR MAURICE DRAKE

The Salving of a Derelict (US title: The Coming Back of Laurence Averil)
Winner of the Daily Mail Best First Novel

The Doom Window
‘An ingenious plot… for every bit of suspense aroused ample satisfaction is given’
New York Times
‘A strong and original plot’
The Bookman

Wrack: A Tale of the Sea
‘Vivid… a strong and fascinating book’
The Observer

The Mystery of the Mud Flats: A Story of Crime
‘Ingenious detective work, delightful characters, a well written and unusual plot… a rattling good yarn’
New York Times
‘Grips its readers’
The Observer
‘We have not been so gloriously thrilled for several years’
Daily News

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798351538716
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 270