The Dangerous Game

A telegram comes up with the breakfast tray at the Hotel St. George in Corfu. To anyone reading over his shoulder it concerns a cargo of currants shipped from Zante to London. Charles Seton Darville reads it twice, chuckles into the mirror while he brushes his hair, and goes back to the novel he owes his publishers.

He is the most translated English novelist alive — Arabic, Chinese, every bookstall on five continents — and a Prime Minister has said of him that he knows more of the underworld of Europe than any living Englishman. That is not a remark about his research. The wandering that gives his thrillers their local colour is also how Britain keeps its eyes and ears open, and nobody in the hotel lounge suspects the second half of his life.

The handsome young woman at the window table has a husband whose nationality nobody can quite place, and she is carrying a secret worth a war. Darville works out that the quickest way to take it from her is to let her believe he has fallen in love with her. He is wrong about how quick, and wrong about who is playing whom.

Published in England as Hidden Hands. Le Queux wrote spy fiction the way a man writes who had really met the people in it.