The Secret of the Garden

by Arthur Gask

Anyone with money is a god, anywhere. Here, you may be the biggest, vilest, ugliest, most diseased blackguard in the state, but if there's cash behind you, you're respected.

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Arthur Cecil Gask was born at St Marylebone, Middlesex (now London), and trained in dentistry, a profession he continued for the next forty years. He married in 1898 and had four children, then divorced his wife and married his children's nanny in 1909. He came to Australia in 1920 with his second wife and their two sons, establishing a practice in Adelaide. The publication of his first novel, The Secret of the Sand Hills (1921), was self-funded, but when the first edition sold out within weeks a London publisher, Herbert Jenkins, republished it, and it soon became a bestseller. Gask went on to write more than thirty crime and detective novels-averaging one a year-with many of them set in and around Adelaide, including The Red Paste Murders (1923), Cloud the Smiter (1926) and The Shadow of Larose (1930).

Reviews

[Janete on hiatus due health issues]

DNFed in the middle of the Chapter 5 because the main character is addicted to betting on horse racing and started talking and thinking only about it and that subject doesn't interest me at all.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mystery thriller written in 1924. An anti-hero who manages to avoid seemingly inescapable situations.

[Shane Headlam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great little story set in the beautiful city of Adelaide.