[Pulpmeister]

Dornford Yates (William Mercer, 1885-1960) wrote two different streams of books, overlapping, which were huge best sellers between the Wars.

The first were amusing short stories of an independently wealthy family headed by Bertram "Berry" Pleydell, who lived in a happy world of eternal English sunshine and an unlimited supply of Rolls-Royces.

The second stream was the action thriller or "shockers". These usually took place either in the Pyrenees or southern Austria, and involved master criminals, sinister castles, treasure, and a beautiful woman in distress. Some of these thrillers had Jonah Mansel, one of the cast of the "Berry" stories, as protagonist. Others were independent.

Incidentally, for Yates fans, four more Yates thrillers can be found in the "epub" section of this forum.

This is one of the "independent" thrillers, with a reasonably high body count, set in the wilds of Carinthia, a region of southern Austria. It must be said that it rather more closely resembles Ruritania (or any other mythical central European kingdom) than real-world 1930s Austria.

Two well-heeled British travellers, touring Carinthia in the inevitable Rolls-Royce, stumble on evil goings-on and murder, encounter a beautiful Austrian aristocrat under threat, and bring it all to a conclusion with a dramatic hand-to-hand fight to the death in a darkened room in a sinister schloss.

This edition has been created from the text of the serial version, rather than the book. I haven;t been able to find a copy of the book to see if there are any noticeable differences. The cover I have created uses one of the illustrations which accompanies the serial.