Dead Men Tell No Tales
Ernest William Hornung
MP3 CD
(IDB Productions, July 6, 2016)
Dead Men Tell No Tales by Ernest William Hornung mixes a wealth-hunting story with a love story streak and some Robinson Crusoe kind of story line, making a great and entertaining adventure story.The protagonist is a man called Cole. He sets off to find his fortune in Australia during the 1851 Gold Rush. He finds only very little of what he came for, so he decides to return to his home in England. He happens to find a ticket for the ship he came on and he boards the ship for the long journey. On the ship, he meets a young lady whom he falls in love with. However, what starts out as a budding love affair soon turns into a tragedy: the ship catches fire and sinks, Cole being the only survivor of the wrecked vessel. He gets home, eventually and that is when the events take a very strange turn. He feels that he is being followed and he is soon dragged into a conspiracy that he eventually reveals, but not until he goes though the most peculiar adventures.Best known for his short stories about A. J. Raffles, an ingenious gentleman thief, Ernest William Hornung was among the most popular novelist in the second half of the 19th century. Several of his stories, including Dead Men Tell No Tales, were inspired by his two-year stay in Australia – he went there to work as a tutor from 1884 to 1886, an experience that was not very long, but provided Hornung with plenty of knowledge about what life was like in Australia and offered him the opportunity to study the Gold Rush period. However, Dead Men Tell No Tales is a great novel not only because it provides a detailed description of the hardships that fortune hunters had to endure while searching for gold, but also because the story is exciting all the way through – you will not want to put this one down till the very end.