The Big Book of Rogues and Villains by Otto Penzler

Author:Otto Penzler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Rogue: Richard Verrell (Blackshirt)

“His Lady” to the Rescue

BRUCE GRAEME

GRAHAM MONTAGUE JEFFRIES (1900–1982), pseudonym Bruce Graeme, was working as a young literary agent and submitted his own novel to a publisher. When it was rejected, he tried writing a short story, a ten-thousand-word Blackshirt adventure, which was immediately accepted by a magazine, with a commission to write seven more. The British publishing house T. Fisher Unwin used the eight Blackshirt stories to launch a series of cheap “novels” in 1925 and sold more than a million copies of Blackshirt over the next fifteen years. The sequel, The Return of Blackshirt (1927), sold just as well.

Richard Verrell is known as Blackshirt because of the costume he affects when on a safecracking job, dressing entirely in black, including his mask. By day Verrell is a wealthy member of high society; at night he is an audacious burglar. A bestselling author, he continues his life of crime in the name of adventure.

Secure in his anonymity, his tranquility is shattered when his identity is discovered by a beautiful young woman who anonymously calls him on the telephone. Threatening to expose him, she forces him to change from a mere thief to a kind of Robin Hood. He soon thinks of her as his “Lady on the Phone.” By the second volume in the series, they are married with a son, who has similar adventures.

“ ‘His Lady’ to the Rescue” was originally published in New Magazine in 1925; it was first collected in Blackshirt (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1925).

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