Hämärän huoneen arvoitus

Hämärän huoneen arvoitus by Edgar Wallace is a detective novel written in the early 20th century. It blends a foggy London “dark room” menace with a daring high‑society jewel theft, drawing police, crooks, and millionaires into the same web. Central players include cool Scotland Yard man Dick Shannon, the sardonic thief‑informant Slick Smith, socialite Dora Elton and her determined sister Audrey, and the enigmatic magnate Lacy Marshalt. Expect trap‑rigged houses, embassy glitter, and back‑alley violence to collide in a swift, twisty crime tale. The opening of the novel shows a drunken courier, Laker, storming into the booby‑trapped lair of the sinister “Malpas”; lights fail, shots crack, and soon after police haul from the Thames a dead man with a facial scar. At a U.S. Embassy ball, Shannon tries to head off a warned plot against the visiting Queen of Finland’s diamond necklace, sparring with the wry Slick Smith—yet the jewels are stolen in the fog after the event. We meet Lacy Marshalt, a hard South African millionaire fixated on both his odd neighbor and a country girl, Audrey Bedford, who has just abandoned a failed chicken farm. After Shannon briefly helps her en route, Audrey reaches London to stay with her sister Dora; inside Dora’s sleek Curzon Street home, Dora, her husband Martin Elton, and Big Bill Stanford argue over moving the hot diamonds and decide the unwitting Audrey will carry them.

Summary written by Project Gutenberg, by machine.