Red Aces is a collection of three crime stories featuring Edgar Wallace’s detective Mr. Reeder. The opening introduces young bank clerk Kenneth McKay, in love with Margot Lynn, and his father George, brooding over a lost fortune and schemes to recover it. It is worth listening for its classic detective puzzle and period mystery atmosphere.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
RED ACES BEING THREE CASES OF MR. REEDER by EDGAR WALLACE H&S HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED LONDON [DEDICATION] TO MY FRIEND AND SECRETARY R.G. CURTIS
CONTENTS
RED ACES
KENNEDY THE CON. MAN
THE CASE OF JOE ATTYMAR
RED ACES
CHAPTER I
Wƒŧƿ a young man is very much in love with a most attractive girl he is apt to endow her with qualities and virtues which no human being has ever possessed. Yet at rare and painful intervals there enter into his soul certain wild suspicions, and in these moments he is inclined to regard the possibility that she may be guilty of the basest treachery and double dealing.
Everybody knew that Kenneth McKay was desperately in love. They knew it at the bank where he spent his days in counting other people’s money, and a considerable amount of his lunch hour writing impassioned and ill-spelt letters to Margot Lynn. His taciturn father, brooding over his vanished fortune in his gaunt riverside house at
Marlow, may have employed the few moments he gave to the consideration of other people’s troubles in consideration of his son’s new interest. Probably he did not, for George McKay was entirely selfcentred and had little thought but for the folly which had dissipated the money he had accumulated with such care, and the development of fantastical schemes for its recovery.
All day long, summer and winter, he sat in his study, a pack of cards before him, working out averages and what he called “inherent probabilities,” or at a small roulette wheel, where, alternately, he
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