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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Bones in London," Edgar Wallace intricately weaves a captivating narrative that blends crime, mystery, and social commentary set against the backdrop of early 20th-century London. Employing his signature fast-paced storytelling and vivid imagery, Wallace deftly encapsulates the city's vibrant duality'—its alluring charm juxtaposed with its underlying corruption. Through an engaging plot that unfurls through a series of thrilling twists, Wallace confronts the reader with the darker aspects of urban life as the protagonist navigates a treacherous path to uncover buried secrets in the bustling metropolis. Edgar Wallace, a prolific English writer and journalist of the early 1900s, was well-acquainted with the gritty realities of London, having experienced both the highs and lows of life in the city. His background as a crime reporter contributed significantly to his capacity for creating intricate plots infused with realism. Wallace's exploration of societal issues is informed by his own observations, leading to his reputation as a leading figure in the development of the detective genre. For readers who delight in intricately constructed mysteries flavored with social critique, "Bones in London" is a must-read. The novel not only entertains but also invites reflection on the moral complexities of its characters, making it an essential addition for enthusiasts of classic crime fiction. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Bones in London
Table of Contents
Introduction
A buoyant innocent collides with the sharp-edged machinery of a great metropolis, challenging the balance between good intentions and the gamesmanship of profit and prestige.
Bones in London is a comic adventure by the prolific British author Edgar Wallace, set amid the bustle of London’s streets, offices, and clubs. Issued during the interwar years of the early twentieth century, it shifts a familiar figure from Wallace’s earlier stories into a metropolitan arena. The result blends light satire with city comedy, trading jungle trails for the labyrinth of the City and its schemes. Readers encounter a lively portrait of modern London as a place of spectacle and calculation, where reputation, rumor, and sudden opportunity can raise or topple a newcomer in a single afternoon.
At the center is Bones—well-meaning, impulsive, and irrepressibly energetic—drawn into enterprises that promise quick success in the capital’s competitive world. The premise is simple and inviting: a naïf with resources and nerve confronts the seasoned tacticians of finance and society. Wallace delivers rapid scenes, brisk dialogue, and cheerful reversals, crafting a reading experience that favors pace and amusement over brooding introspection. The mood is high-spirited, with a gently satirical edge that pokes fun at bluster, pretension, and the jargon of business without losing affection for its characters or for the bustling theater of the city itself.
Beneath the comedy lies a cluster of themes that still feel immediate: the ethics of enterprise, the seductions of publicity, the ambiguity of expertise, and the fine line between confidence and credulity. The novel treats London as a stage on which appearances matter, and where timing, nerve, and a touch of luck can rival formal credentials. It asks what counts as wisdom in a culture driven by speed and promotion, and whether decency can be an advantage rather than a liability. In doing so, it provides both entertainment and a wry reflection on how modern markets reward style as fiercely as substance.
Bones himself is the principal draw: a comic figure whose generosity and impulsiveness keep him one step from disaster and, often, one step from triumph. Wallace sets him against a gallery of operators, clerks, and social gatekeepers who test his judgment and expose the rituals of the city’s commercial life. The delights here are in the misunderstandings, near-misses, and creative recoveries that follow from his headlong approach to opportunity. Yet the humor rarely turns cruel; the narrative preserves a fundamentally warm view of human foibles, suggesting that candor and courage can sometimes outmaneuver calculation and that good faith, however unfashionable, retains a certain power.
Within Edgar Wallace’s body of work—famed for thrillers and for the widely read "Sanders" cycle—this novel showcases his versatility. Instead of criminal conspiracies or colonial outposts, the action unfolds in boardrooms, back offices, and dinner tables, using the machinery of everyday commerce as a source of suspense and comedy. The brisk, accessible prose and episodic momentum that distinguished Wallace’s popular fiction are fully present, but directed toward satire as much as sensation. Bones in London thus serves as a bridge between adventure and social observation, highlighting the author’s instinct for story while inviting readers to enjoy the choreography of chance, chatter, and competitive wit.
For contemporary readers, the book offers two rewards: lively escapism and a period lens on how modernity reshaped ambition and trust. Its comic scrutiny of hype, hustle, and the performance of competence feels strikingly current in an age of branding and rapid speculation. At the same time, the narrative reflects attitudes and assumptions characteristic of its era, which thoughtful readers may wish to consider alongside its pleasures. Those drawn to urbane capers, character-driven humor, and nimble plotting will find it a welcoming entry point into Edgar Wallace’s fiction—and an engaging reminder that the human appetite for risk and reassurance rarely goes out of style.
Synopsis
Augustus Tibbetts, nicknamed Bones, arrives in London after colonial service, eager to reinvent himself in the bustling world of finance. His boundless energy, quick tongue, and untested confidence set the tone as he joins forces with his seasoned friend, Captain Hamilton. Together they step into the City, a maze of offices, exchanges, and discreet clubs, and take over a modest concern that gives them a foothold among brokers and promoters. The move marks a shift from frontier pragmatism to metropolitan calculation, with Bones’s impulsive style clashing, often comically, with the formal routines and guarded manners of London’s business elite.
The pair secure offices, hire clerks, and learn the rhythms of board meetings, prospectuses, and calls for capital. Bones, fascinated by the spectacle of speculation, plunges into deals with disarming candor, while Hamilton measures risks and keeps tempers even. Their circle expands to include social ties and steady counsel, notably from Hamilton’s family, which anchors Bones when enthusiasm threatens to outrun prudence. Early encounters with veteran financiers reveal both opportunity and peril: enthusiasm attracts invitations, but naivete attracts designs. The City’s unwritten codes become a second education, and Bones’s cheerful disregard for convention frequently unsettles adversaries and allies alike.
A struggling entertainment venture becomes Bones’s first serious test. Lured by the promise of rapid returns and public goodwill, he takes on a near-failed enterprise bedeviled by clever paper and nervous creditors. A promoter seeks to shift liabilities onto the newcomers, but Bones’s erratic inquiries unsettle the scheme, exposing weaknesses in the fine print. The episode introduces the pattern of the book: an apparently straightforward bargain conceals a contrivance, while Bones’s blend of blunt questions and accidental timing upsets the expected outcome. He discovers the value of publicity, learns to read balance sheets with care, and begins to suspect the motives behind friendly advice.
The next foray involves mining shares and a fashionable bucket-shop, where prices move on rumor as much as on ore. Bones enters boldly, only to find himself amid a choreographed rise and fall designed to harvest small investors. He responds with an unorthodox counter, appealing to transparency and common sense rather than secret signals. The tactic complicates the plans of operators who rely on panic and silence. Through this, Bones develops a reputation for unpredictable fairness, while Hamilton quietly closes loopholes and steadies the firm. The encounter deepens the theme of appearance versus substance that threads through the City’s polished corridors.
As their name circulates, admiration mixes with resentment. A loose alliance of sharpers takes notice, probing Bones’s habits, testing his impulse to act before calculating consequences. Hamilton urges caution, reminding him that charm cannot replace caution in a market that prizes information. Social engagements overlap with business, and Bones’s generous instincts lead to ventures that carry moral as well as financial stakes. The City proves to be a theater where character is currency: allies emerge from unexpected quarters, and those who scoff at the newcomers’ methods begin to wonder whether unconventional candor can upend conventional strategy.
A transportation scheme follows, tied to vehicles, depots, and contracts whose value rests on inflated figures. Promises of monopolies and guaranteed routes mask creative accounting and hidden encumbrances. Bones insists on inspecting assets in person, turning due diligence into a comic procession through garages, sheds, and ledgers. What begins as bluster becomes a habit of verification, frustrating those who count on deference to paperwork. The venture broadens the narrative’s scope from the Stock Exchange floor to the city’s streets and docks, showing how numbers meet reality. It also tests loyalties within the office, where a misplaced signature could bind them to ruin.
By now, patterns of maneuver are in place. Disparate adversaries begin to coordinate, seeking a decisive check on Bones’s advances by engineering pressure on a core holding. Rumors circulate, credit tightens, and a placed article hints at impending collapse. Bones answers by widening his circle, asking blunt questions in public and inviting scrutiny rather than shunning it. Hamilton cultivates dependable bankers and legal minds, preferring structure to surprise. The strategy shifts from isolated skirmishes to a campaign: disclosures are timed, reserves marshaled, and contingencies weighed. The City, which once seemed merely theatrical, reveals its dependence on confidence and character.
The confrontation arrives in a sequence of tense days, measured by fluctuating prices and crowded boardrooms. Bones faces a choice between clever expedients and plain dealing, aware that one misstep could unwind months of improvisation. Threads from earlier ventures tighten: a promoter returns, a contract resurfaces, and a promise made in haste acquires new weight. Public and private stakes overlap, drawing in friends whose advice now carries consequence. The resolution turns on how truth is told and to whom, with outcomes that alter reputations as much as balance sheets. The scene clarifies the book’s central contest between showy cunning and straightforward resolve.
In the aftermath, the enterprise stands altered, and so does Bones. He retains his buoyant manner but gains an appetite for method, recognizing that levity and discipline need each other in a world fueled by trust. Relationships within his circle settle into a more durable pattern, hinting at personal developments without insisting on them. London, once daunting, becomes navigable terrain, its perils lessened by open dealing and timely allies. The book closes on the promise of further ventures, suggesting that optimism, when anchored to fairness, can survive the City’s elaborate games, and that integrity remains the surest hedge against panic and pretense.
Historical Context
Set in the immediate aftermath of the Great War and published in 1921, Bones in London unfolds in the City of London at the hinge between empire and modern finance. Its streets—Threadneedle Street, Lombard Street, and Throgmorton Street—frame a world of promotion houses, brokers, and law offices where paper empires rise and fall. The protagonist, Hamilton "Bones," arrives from imperial service in West Africa into this dense metropolitan arena, and the narrative mines the tension between colonial habits and city savvy. London in 1919–1921 was a capital wrestling with demobilization, volatile markets, and shifting social hierarchies, conditions that the novel converts into comedic intrigue.
The immediate postwar settlement created the social and economic weather of the book. Between late 1918 and 1920, nearly five million British servicemen were demobilized, flooding labor markets and offices. A short-lived boom in 1919–1920 was followed by the sharp 1920–1921 slump, when unemployment climbed above two million (peaking in 1921). In 1921 the British Legion was formed from veterans organizations to advocate for ex-service welfare, while the Geddes Committee (1921–1922) prescribed austerity that would bite into public spending. The novels ex-officer hero, and the swarm of opportunists around him, register these pressures: the scramble for salaried respectability, speculative shortcuts, and the precariousness of new fortunes.
The culture of promotion and financial speculation in the Square Mile is a central historical mirror. The London Stock Exchange, long associated with Throgmorton Street, presided over a feverish new-issue boom in 1919–1920 as companies sought capital after wartime controls. Earlier scandals—most famously the Marconi affair of 1912–1913 involving ministerial share dealings—had already sharpened public suspicion of insiders. Without robust modern securities regulation, promotional circulars, rumor, and the financial press could swing prices. Wallaces plot echoes this environment: naive capital, faddish ventures, and plausible salesmen betting on lax oversight and the credulous faith of investors newly arrived from the trenches or the colonies.
The books most formative historical stratum is Britains late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial system in West Africa, the matrix from which "Bones" emerges. The Berlin Conference (1884–1885) codified European spheres of influence on the Niger, enabling the chartered Royal Niger Company (granted 1886) to consolidate treaties inland. In 1900 the Crown assumed the Companys territories, creating the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria while the Niger Coast Protectorate became Southern Nigeria; both were amalgamated in 1914 under Governor-General Sir Frederick Lugard. Lugards model of indirect rule—governing through existing chiefs—became doctrine, later theorized in his The Dual Mandate (1922). Parallel institutions, notably the West African Frontier Force (raised in 1897), projected military authority along the river systems that Wallace fictionalized in his earlier "Sanders" tales. This administrative and martial machine, with its rhythms of patrol, palaver, and punitive expeditions, shaped the ethos of colonial officers: brisk decision-making, paternalistic confidence, and a belief that order could be imposed by will and ritual. Bones in London transforms that ethos into comic friction. The skills that made a district officer effective—command presence, moral suasion, an appetite for improvisation—prove risky in the City, where paper, not paddles, moves power, and where law, not fiat, arbitrates conflict. The novels recurrent misunderstandings, the faith in uniformed honor confronting memorandum-bound clerks and solicitors, and the misreading of "tribal" dynamics in metropolitan form (syndicates, boards, and prospectuses), all draw their energy from this imperial backstory. At the same time, the presence of African service as unremarkable biography for London professionals in the 1910s–1920s reflects how deeply empire fed the metropoliss careers, capital, and imaginations.
Mass journalism and publicity, integral to City speculation, also inform the novels world. The Financial Times (founded 1888) and The Economist (1843) catered to investors, while Lord Northcliffes Daily Mail (1896) perfected popular news and advertising techniques that made financial promotions and reputation-making swift. Before comprehensive advertising standards, impresarios could orchestrate stunts, sponsored interviews, and ghosted testimonials to float ventures. Wallace, a former reporter for the Daily Mail and war correspondent in South Africa, knew these methods intimately. The books satire of press-fueled enthusiasms and the breathless launch of City schemes reflects the synergy between headline-making and capital-raising in interwar London.
Evolving policing and fraud law formed the hard edge to City adventurism. The Criminal Investigation Department (formalized in 1878) and the distinct City of London Police oversaw the Square Miles financial crimes, operating under statutes such as the Larceny Act 1916, which consolidated offenses including obtaining by false pretences. The police strikes of 1918–1919, followed by the Police Act 1919 (which banned police unionization and established the Police Federation), foregrounded public anxieties about order and authority. Wallaces plotlines of flimflam and arrest, and casual nods toward "the Yard," mirror a city where confidence tricksters flourished but faced an increasingly professional investigative apparatus.
Shifts in class and gender roles supply additional historical texture. The Representation of the People Act 1918 enormously expanded the electorate (enfranchising all men over 21 and many women over 30), while the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 opened professions and the civil service to women. The Addison Act (Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act) 1919 sought "homes fit for heroes," encouraging suburban expansion that fed commuter culture into the City. The Post Offices 1912 nationalization of the telephone network modernized office communication, multiplying typists and clerks. Bones in London reflects this clerical metropolis: secretaries, telephones, and ledgers shape transactions, and newly mobile classes test manners, speech, and authority in boardrooms and tea rooms.
As social and political critique, the book lampoons the speculative ethos of postwar capitalism and the complacencies of imperial character when transplanted to London. It exposes how lightly regulated markets reward artful promotion over production, how class deference enables fraud, and how the rhetoric of public service can be repackaged as private gain. By pitting an ex-colonial officer against City tacticians, the narrative interrogates the myth that imperial virtues seamlessly fit metropolitan modernity. It suggests the need for institutional vigilance—legal, journalistic, and civic—against mendacity, while quietly indicting a society that sent men to govern abroad and returned them to a capital governed by paper illusions.
