The Black Gang

Sapper

May 2010 · House of Stratus

About this ebook

Although the First World War is over, it seems that the hostilities are not, and when Captain Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond discovers that a stint of bribery and blackmail is undermining England’s democratic tradition, he forms the Black Gang, bent on tracking down the perpetrators of such plots. They set a trap to lure the criminal mastermind behind these subversive attacks to England, and all is going to plan until Bulldog Drummond accepts an invitation to tea at the Ritz with a charming American clergyman and his dowdy daughter.

About the author

Sapper' is the pen name of Herman Cyril McNeile, born in 1888 at the Naval Prison in Bodmin, Cornwall, where his father was Governor. He served in the Royal Engineers (popularly known as ‘sappers’) from 1907-19, being awarded the Military Cross during World War 1. McNeile started writing in France, adopting the pen name because serving officers were not allowed to write under their own names. When his first stories, about life in the trenches, were published in 1915 they were an enormous success. But it was his first thriller, ‘Bulldog Drummond’ (1920) that launched him as one of the most popular novelists of his generation. It had several amazingly successful sequels, including ‘The Black Gang’, ‘The Third Round’ and ‘The Final Count’. Another great success was ‘Jim Maitland’, featuring a footloose English sahib in foreign lands. Sapper published nearly thirty books in total, and a vast public mourned his death in 1937, at the early age of forty-eight. There are several feature films of his work.