Showing results by narrator "Peter Wickham" in All Categories

It was an oddly assorted company of passengers that boarded the S.S. Chetwynd in Hong Kong and Singapore to take passage to Freemantle. 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 indescribable fury of the storm that hit.

Written in 1916 against the backdrop of the First World War, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism explains the flaws and power of capitalism, which inevitably lead to monopolies, imperialism and colonialism. Lenin develops Marx’s theories of political economy, which had been put forward 50 years earlier in Das Kapital. He goes on to argue that imperialism is the most advanced state of capitalism, characterised by the domination of monopolies on an international scale, with the export of capital leading to the big imperialist powers carving up the world.

Hector Langdon volunteered for service in the army in World War I when he was no more than 17 years old, though he gave his age as 20. It was the kind of reckless action he was to take all his life, much to the regret of his solicitor father who wished him to follow in the same profession. So he drifted from one occupation to another after the war, never really settling down. It seemed he had to be forever on the move. Until he met Eva Gray, and even that meeting was to lead in the end to tragedy.

There were five dead men in the cabin of the boat, lying under six fathoms of Caribbean water. But the men had not been drowned: they had been shot through the head at close range. John Fletcher had gone down to photograph a sunken ship, but he took photographs of the boat and its cargo of dead men instead. Soon he is having trouble with the island police, a private army of thugs and two CIA agents. Now Fletcher wishes he had followed his first impulse and said nothing to anyone....

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 whilst carrying a million pounds of gold bullion. In the lifeboat is a man with a question mark tattooed on his left forearm; but he can shed no light on the situation because his memory has gone - or so he claims. Two other survivors from the Valparaiso, Rains and Jones, have doubts about the man's professed amnesia.

The hot summer has brought several kinds of trouble to the monastery at Wickit, and Pip the orphan and Perfect the stone gargoyle find themselves up to their eyebrows in it all! What is the king's man really doing at Wickit? Will the Black Bog give up its secrets? And will the Beautiful Norse girl find Johan Shortleg's long-lost buried treasure?