The King of Diamonds: A Tale of Mystery and Adventure
Louis Tracy
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Nov. 8, 2016)
In The King of Diamonds, Mr. Tracy has given us a masterpiece of fiction. The entire story pulsates with life, love, adventure and mystery, and after every chapter the reader finds himself speculating as to the possible outcome, which, when it is finally reached, is satisfying in the extreme. "This is a daringly improbably story, but so sympathetically and well told that the reader follows it with enthralled and unquestioning interest. Its hero is Philip Anson, whose mother, sister of Sir Philip Morland, Bart., had married the Dieppe agent of a London firm of coal shippers to please herself and had offended her relatives. Husband and wife were seriously injured in a motor accident two years before the story opens. Mr. Ansen died in a few weeks, but his wife survives him in great poverty, without being able to obtain any aid from her brother and his wife. Lady Louisa Morland, who is scheming to induce Sir Philip to make her son by a first marriage heir. However, Mrs. Anson dies under circumstances detailed in the first chapter. Philip starts as a newspaper boy one thunderous evening, and is the means of saving from a carriage accident, caused by the storm, a young girl, Evelyn Atherley, whose uncle, Lord Vanstone, brutally strikes the lad for interfering. However, the boy ultimately profits by his courageous act, as he does by the storm. For, after he gets home to the wretched tenement in Johnson's Mews, Mile End Road, the meteor falls which contains the diamonds giving the title to this sensational tale. Philip makes excellent use of the wealth thus brought to him, and gains the readers good will, as do some other personages of the novel." -The Publishers' Circular and Booksellers Record "Well worth reading. The idea is daringly original in conception, and the plot is worked out with much reckless magnificence as one can only find its parallel in 'Monte Cristo.' But whereas the hero of Dumas' great romance lived for revenge, and triumphantly ticked off his enemies as they perished one by one, Mr. Tracy's hero shows such an example of magnanimity, and exhibits a spirit of charity so exceptionally Christian, that, for the sake of sensational romance, it is to be devoutly hoped, no other hero, will think himself called upon to imitate him....This new idea of 'pardon all round' is admirably managed in 'The King of Diamonds,' where the hero forgives every knave in the pack, much to the admiration, but, it must be added, to the honest indignation of the judicially discriminating Baron." -London Charivari