Edgar Wallace

“ The busy who pinched me last time told me that if I went on the way I was going, they'd have to build a new wing on to the Yard to hold my—what did you call it?—dosher?"
"Dossier," corrected Mr. Meister. "You'll remember, Haggitt? The liberty of some of your friends depends upon strangers being kept out of this room."
"I get you," said Haggitt, experiencing for the first time an identity of interest with his master.
Haggitt accepted the ancient fiction without hesitation. Would Mary? He was on the point of finding out when Haggitt came back with a letter. ”

“ There's a whole lot of ships and cars and God-knows-what leaving this country every day. Take one, Meister. There's an expedition going up to the North Pole—join it! Or get yourself lost in one of those African forests—there are wilder beasts in Deptford than you'll find in the jungle. ”

“ Mr. Meister was genuinely annoyed at his servant's munificence, for the lawyer was as mean in little as he was in great matters.
At first he thought that the letter was from a client. The handwriting was big and more or less illiterate. But he had a shock when he tore open the envelope and read the first words:
I want you to come to Graydon Hall Mansions, Battersea. Come as soon as you can. I've got something important to say to you. Maybe I'm being a life-saver. I'll expect you at one o'clock. It was signed "Cora Milton."
Meister's hand went up to his mouth. A trap? It could hardly be that. ”

“ Ninety-nine out of every hundred men who break the law are victims of some stupid obsession, but there is a kink in the anti-social mind which seems to have been provided by nature for the undoing of its host. Meister's kink was his infatuation for a girl who was young enough to be his daughter, and too good a woman to be anything else.
Police circles were certain that he had "shopped" John Lenley, but police circles did not know the trouble he had had to induce a weak but honest man to take the first step, and in offering that inducement, Meister had betrayed himself hopelessly. ”

“ But this little country's good enough for me, and Deptford is my ideal home."
He was making for the door when with a quick movement she placed herself between him and the exit.
"You're not going yet. You can take your hand away from your hip, Meister, because there's no rough house coming. If there was, you're fat enough to deal with me with your hands. My boy's a killer, Lew, and he's after you, and will never be a happy man till he gets you. ”

“ Next in order, he dreaded that life with which his clients were so familiar: the life in the drab prison buildings, where men sit in their lonely cells for sixteen hours out of twenty-four, if they did not go mad. Two men had it in their power to send Lewis Meister before a judge. The first was the Ringer, and for the moment he did not count as an agent of justice ”

“ And then, in a more serious tone: "Meister, there is danger—Arthur is here. Everybody knows that; the police know it, you know it. You've put a new set of bars on to your window, fixed new bolts on your doors."
"Who told you that?" asked Meister.
"My eyes," she answered curtly. "I've been past your place and seen the workmen going in and out. You've got a man to watch your house, too ”

“ He stood wondering at his own success. The old "proof-in-the-envelope" trick that had served so many poverty-minded dramatists, and she a product of the twentieth century, a woman who had read and reasoned! ”