James Pattinson

It was Mrs Croyden who had been taken by the idea of digging up the history of the family. It seemed to be the kind of thing that everyone was doing nowadays....

The gunners on the Golden Ray were a strangely assorted bunch....

Harry Banner turns up in London one November evening having just got back from Venezuela. He wants to see Robert Cade, a man he'd known six years earlier in Buenos Aires....

When David Sterne went up to London to seek his fortune, Adolf Hitler was rampant and the shadow of impending conflict lay forebodingly over Europe.....

The drug trade route stretched from London across Europe and part of Asia to the borders of Afghanistan. Investigating one part of it cost the life of a police detective name George Lacon....

When a lifeboat marked 'Valparaiso I' is discovered, a strange mystery unfolds. The Valparaiso had been sunk by a Japanese submarine nearly a year earlier....

Paul Crane had not altogether liked the look of Skene and West when they turned up at his North Norfolk cottage and made him an offer he could not refuse....

Kemp blamed himself: he should have kept more closely in touch with his younger sister. Now it appears that Lorna has gone off to Colombia with a man named Roberto Vargas....

Two survivors find themselves on board a Russian freighter bound for a secret destination. Slowly it dawns on Brett and his companion that they now know too much for their own good....

When a valuable cargo ship is abandoned in the mid-Atlantic, Captain Barling of the SS Hopeful Enterprise has his own special reasons for wishing to tow it into port. But is he justified?....

It was nearing the end of the road for The Merrymakers. Such companies of entertainers touring the towns and villages of East Anglia were finding things more and more difficult....

English adventurer Harvey Landon agrees to help his old Oxford friend, Don Vargas, who is plotting the overthrow of a South American government....

When Detective Sergeant Frank Devon was sent to the West Indian island of St Joseph on an exchange assignment, he was told that it would be more of a holiday in the sun than work....

In this company, living in such close quarters, there was inevitably a certain amount of friction. But human passions would prove insignificant by comparison when the fury of the storm....

Drake read the obituary for Howard Gray in the Daily Telegraph. It had intrigued him because he had been very close to Gray many years ago....

Sam Grant is tasked with the job of tracing the vendor of a painting that had come up for sale at a London auction room....

Sometimes, in his own mind, Keele referred to himself as “The Booking Clerk”. This was a rather macabre private joke since the tickets he issued were all one-way....