Vintage Mysteries--In the Fog

In the Fog
by Richard Harding Davis (1901)

In the Fog is a quick read along the lines of an old spy thriller.  Some of the characters introduced remind me a bit of Christie's foreign spies in her earlier works.

The frame story is that of 5 men sitting in The Grill Club the evening after the great fog of 1897.  The Grill captured my attention immediately as it "dates back to the days when Shakespeare's Theatre stood on the present site of the "Times" office.  It has a golden Grill which Charles the Second presented to the Club...The members, when they write letters at the Club, still use sand to blot the ink."  One can't get much more ye olde respectable club than that.

One of the men, an MP wearing a black pearl in his tie, desires to keep Sir Andrew from keeping his date at the House that night, knowing that Sir Andrew's speech with carry a bill prejudicial to black pearl's interests.  One of the other diners, who were all unacquainted with one another, begins to tell the company of a fantastic crime that happened just the night before in the historic fog.  The story involved the African explorer, Chetney, and a Russian princess, Zichy.  Sir Andrew is riveted, and we listen along as a second diner then retells his own encounter with Zichy, and a third picks up where the first had left off.

The writing is quite nice and the characters are colorful, if unbelievable.  The book strains a little too hard after becoming the ideal spy thriller.  It was a good read, but I wouldn't exactly go posting off to the bookstore to find Davis's other novels.