The Espionage Novel by Holly Roth & Allan Chase & Holly Roth & Richard Telfair

Author:Holly Roth & Allan Chase & Holly Roth & Richard Telfair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, spy, espionage, thriller, adventure
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

THE SHOCKING SECRET, by Holly Roth

Also published as The Content Assignment.

Originally published in 1954.

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DEDICATION

To my Mother—

CHAPTER ONE

The minute I saw those few words at the bottom of one of the long columns in the previous Friday’s London Times I had the answer to the question of what I would do with my life. I had had the answer for two years, of course, but until that hot July morning I hadn’t been able to do anything about it.

The item was at the tail end of a long description of the departure of the Queen Elizabeth. The fact that I was reading column after column of the Times’ exhaustive detail shows the extent of my boredom with life. Morning after morning I sat in my small flat and read the Times like a proofreader, comma by comma. If I got behind, as I currently had, I rushed furiously through the long, gray, outdated columns, impelled, as I dimly knew, by the simple need to fill my life, to seem busy. I was doing free-lance writing, and very successfully, and I think my subconscious defense for the vast waste of time I permitted myself before settling down to work was that I might get a usable idea out of the news. Well, I got one that morning—usable in many senses.

My first impulse was to take off—just take off for America without further to-do. But common sense and financial considerations—the latter being so unavoidable in England these days—held me back. Freelance writing doesn’t pay when you aren’t doing it—most things don’t—but free-lancing is even more dependent upon output than most jobs. And other than the checks I get for my articles, all I have is a few pieces of furniture, a portable typewriter, and two hundred pounds a year from my mother’s estate.

So I called Nigel Lamson. I was put through quickly—I demanded to be put through quickly—and when I got him at the other end of the wire I asked if I could come round and see him immediately. He mentioned that he had appointments, and I mentioned that he and I would never speak, again, and I would never write a line for his paper again, if I didn’t see him before lunchtime. Nigel knows me very well, and he had never heard me take such a tone before. So, more as a friend than as an editor, I suppose, he said, Oh, well—if it was like that. I dressed, leaped into a cab, and was in Fleet Street fifteen minutes later.

Lamson is a very nice chap. He welcomed me into his cubbyhole of an office and gave me a cigarette and time to settle down before he said, “Now, John, what’s it all about?”

I extracted the scrap I had torn off the bottom of Page Four of the previous Friday’s Times. “I’ve been reading the competition again—”

“Not competition. A way of life.”

“—and in their usual extensive report on the sailing of the Queen Elizabeth I came across this item.” I pointed.

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