Audiobook · read by volunteers
Angel of Terror
Edgar Wallace (1875–1932)
Read by Lee Elliott · 41 chapters · 6 h 42
About the book
Jean Briggerland is young and so beautiful that men will do anything for her, and that is exactly what makes her dangerous. In Edgar Wallace’s crime thriller, an angelic face hides a ruthless mind, and the more the police and the amateur investigators learn about her, the more difficult it is to prove anything. The novel turns the old convention that goodness shows in the face on its head, and builds a long cat-and-mouse game of suspicion, secret plans, threats and desperate courage. Wallace, who wrote at tremendous speed and with a journalist’s feel for pace, keeps the plot turning through forty-one short chapters. Lee Elliott reads with fluency and a good sense of tension. If you enjoy classic crime fiction, with a villain who is hard to forget, this is a fast and entertaining listen.
Introduction
Edgar Wallace was born in 1875 and died in 1932. He was a prolific English writer of thrillers, crime novels and plays, and he was one of the most widely read authors of the 1920s. He first made his name with The Four Just Men in 1905, and in the 1920s his books sold in enormous numbers, many of them adapted for the stage and later for the cinema. He also worked as a journalist and screenwriter, and he is associated with the early development of King Kong for the cinema.
The Angel of Terror was published in 1922. Fiction of the period often treated beauty as the outward sign of a good heart, and wicked characters tended to look the part. Wallace plays with this expectation by creating a heroine, or rather a villainess, who is every bit as angelic in appearance as she is sinister in character. That contrast gives the book its distinctive flavour.
Wallace’s method was to dictate or write very quickly, and his novels often have a headlong momentum, with short chapters and frequent changes of scene. The style is direct, and the plot works through coincidence and sudden reversals as much as through careful deduction. Readers should bear in mind that the language and attitudes belong to the early twentieth century.
This LibriVox version has forty-one chapters and lasts about six hours and forty minutes. It is read by volunteer Lee Elliott. It will suit anyone who likes classic detective fiction, the atmosphere of the 1920s and the old-fashioned pleasure of a thriller that keeps you guessing.
Public domain
Edgar Wallace died in 1932: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text