Death Round the Corner by John Creasey

Author:John Creasey [Creasey, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Agora Books

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Mr. Josiah Long, alias Ruddy Face, alias the policeman, alias (although only after his death) Mr. Nicholas Williams, was, as Beresford needed no telling, a gentleman from America. The voice which he used that evening was as near his own as he could remember, although he told the big man that he used it more for the sake of practice than because it came natural to him. He had aped others so often, and spoken in so many languages, dialects and the argot of a dozen underworlds that he could say with truth that he hardly knew which voice to call his own. He was a man who lived by his wits, but that did not mean that he lived dishonestly. It meant, as Valerie Lester knew, that he gained his livelihood by the same means as Tony Beresford, she suspected, earned his fun.

Josiah Long had experienced more ups and down in his forty-odd years than most people would have experienced in as many decades, if they had lived long enough. He had started life on a Kentucky farm, migrated at the early age of three to Chicago, where his only remaining parent, a small-part actor with consumption, had tried to drink his illness away. Instead, drink had combined with a ruined constitution to make Josiah an orphan what time he was eleven.

Child-acting kept him going until he was fifteen, but he was controlled by an avaricious foster-father who gave him what fiction calls a bad break. Josiah Long had walked out on his foster-father and walked by degrees to Boston. He pecked at journalism, and became a crime-reporter, sandwiching an occasional small part on the stage to help his income.

In 1915, when America had realized that there was a war in Europe likely to last, Josiah had crossed the Big Pond and offered himself to the Foreign Battalion. Unfortunately he was half blind in the left eye, and he was turned down. He joined the staff of the Echo, for able-bodied men were already scarce in England, and a ready-made reporter was a godsend. When the ban on war correspondents was lifted, Josiah Long was amongst the first to go to France. His despatches earned him fame, but gave him no kick. To imbibe the kick, he. borrowed the uniform of a British non-com., and allowed himself to be interned in Germany. At the prison camp he had learned French and Belgian in a dozen varieties, and had managed to pick up a working knowledge of German.

Things still galled him, and he made a spirited protest as an American subject against his captivity, and was allowed to go to the American colony in Berlin. 1917 saw the coming of America into the War. He squeezed out of Berlin before the declaration, and suggested to the American Embassy in London, where he arrived after a circuitous journey through Holland and Belgium, that he was a perfect and ready-made spy.

He was. Josiah Long was the brightest star in the American espionage system during and after the War.

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