A collection of short stories:I. Ange MarieII. The modern marauderIII. The shrew of MadridIV. An ethical dilemmaV. The fugitive of Adelphie terraceVI. The battling pacifistVII. Mr Brown and the MadonnaVIII. The dancing GentlemanIX. With a dashX. The chateau of phantasies.Major Andrew Forester is a retired British Army officer, of no discernible occupation, who wanders about Europe, England and the United States in the 1920s. He is looking for adventure, but not outside the bounds of the acceptable. He is willing to skirt the law, but not break it. A bachelor, he has been unsuccessful in love, with a limited income. He stays in out-of-the-way hotels, and smaller pensions, and takes an occasional gamble on the tables at Monte Carlo. His peripatetic life style brings him in contact with scam artists, gold-diggers, art thieves, industrial spies,taxi dancers, and flappers. Sometimes he benefits from these associations, but at other times he is their victim. He does this all with style, impeccable clothing, and a humorous tolerance of human failings.

Ten short stories. Miss Mott is a newspaper columnist, offering advice to readers on various personal matters. Is she now to become a consultant on crime? Of course, her uncle does work at Scotland Yard...In the ten cases, Lucie Mott solves only two-inding a missing woman locked in her own house and recognizing that an apparently philandering husband was actually out thieving--and in a third helps rescue her uncle. In five stories she is saved from her own folly by a supposed criminal known as Violet Joe with whom she immediately falls in love. Three strains of action are interwoven throughout the volume: the romance of Lucie and Violet Joe, the maniacal attraction of the criminal gang leader Meredith for Lucie, and Miss Mott's investigative career. All are neatly tied up in the final case.