The hero is Colonel Bellew.
The Colonel is a retired cavalry officer who wears a monocle and was awarded a VC in the Great War. As the book opens he has fallen on hard times and to make ends meet engineers betting scams that should be beneath an officer and a gentleman. A failed coup at Haydock is the MacGuffin that sends Bellew to Eastern Europe on a mission redolent of Anthony Hope’s or Dornford Yates’s novels. Women, racing, secret documents and skullduggery aplenty provide a rattling yarn with a satisfyingly exciting climax.
WE Norris (1847 – 1925) is little known and little read today. His father was Chief Justice of Ceylon, he went to Eton and was called to the Bar but never practised, instead becoming a prolific writer of novels and short stories. Billy Bellew (1895) is in the Mills and Boon genre. I’m glad I only paid 50p for my copy.
