Arthur Cecil Gask (10 July 1869—25 June 1951), dentist and novelist, was born on 10 July 1869 at St Marylebone, London, fourth of five children of Charles Gask, merchant, and his wife Fanny, née Edis.He began writing crime fiction while waiting for his patients and in 1921 paid for the publication of his first novel, The Secret of the Sandhills, which was an immediate success.Over a period of forty years Gask wrote over thirty books as well as contributing ...

He began writing crime fiction while waiting for his patients and in 1921 paid for the publication of his first novel, The Secret of the Sandhills, which was an immediate success.H. G. Wells, an admirer of Gask's work, corresponded with Gask. Wells regarded The Vengeance of Larose (1939) as Gask's "best piece of story-telling...It kept me up till half-past one."Most of his novels described the activities of a detective, Gilbert Larose, in solving crimes. Gask's work was tra...

“We may say what we will, Mr. Larose,” remarked the thin scholarly looking man in a rather regretful tone, “but evil in a jeweled setting is less repugnant to the human mind, than when met with in sordid surroundings, and crime among the well-to-do is more intriguing than breaches of the law among the lower classes.”“That is quite true, Mr. Jones,” replied the smiling young man opposite to him. “Wrong doing amongst educated and refined people seems always to have more element of adv...

A large sum of money was stolen from a London bank and hidden in an old mill in a lonely and unfrequented part of Essex. It is found by two men already deep in crime, and the dreadful murder of one of them follows.Gilbert Larose, the one-time great international detective, when discovery seems well-nigh impossible, nevertheless, picks up the trail—almost from what he hears in the whisperings of the wind—and it leads him to an important country gentleman living in an historic mansion...

Gilbert Larose is again called from retirement to solve a mystery—if anything, a mystery more baffling than those which have made his name in the past. Six murders in seven weeks and Scotland Yard is helpless. The crimes give no clue—not even a similarity of method to connect them. Just the whine of a bullet, the stab of a knife or the crash of a bludgeon, and the murderer has slunk back into the blackness of the night. Six times in seven weeks a coroner's jury returns the verdict “Murder ...

Dr. Methuen's beautifully appointed consulting-room, with, all evidence about it of how successful his practice must be, was not infrequently the stage upon which poignant tragedies of life were set, and the curtain had just been rung up upon one more.A patient had been told he was suffering from the rather rare disease of myeloid leukaemia, a persistent increase of the white corpuscles of the blood, and that there was no hope for him. Medical science knew of no cure or, indeed, of...

The detective had been watching for four days before he realised suddenly that the house was inhabited.It was a sinister-looking house that stood alone upon a lonely shore in South Australia, and it lay by the margin of the waves in a little sandy cove between the dip of two high hills.It was a place where few men came, for it was cut off from the distant townships by long, barren wastes of rock-strewn land.There were no roads nor tracks within many miles of it, and...

“Gentlemen,” barked out the small wizened man, “money talks.”Nine men were seated at a long table in a very large room, where, except for a small and carefully shaded light directly above the head of the man who had spoken, everything was in complete darkness.But although the hour was midnight, and the door was locked and the windows were closely shuttered and draped over with thick curtains, there was nothing in a way suspicious or sinister about the room itself.It wa...

PROFESSOR PARIS STARBANK, for so he called himself, had a long string of letters after his name, but they did not indicate diplomas which had been granted to him by any recognised university or college and were quite worthless as far as his ability in any walk of life was concerned. Their meaning was of course, unintelligible to most people, but they meant that he belonged to the Society of Natural Healers, was a member of the Dietetic Brotherhood, and had joined the Union of Universal The...

An attractive and aristocratic-looking girl of apparently quite ordinary origin has always had good reason to believe she was not the daughter of her mother's husband. Losing both her parents, she seeks her fortune in London, makes her way into the social world and marries into a titled family. Then, through no fault of her own, she becomes involved in the death of a scoundrel who was attempting to blackmail her. Thanks to the help of the one-time great detective, Gilbert Larose, she at fi...

One beautiful summer's evening a young man was bicycling slowly along the Military Road that runs between the great Outer Harbour of South Australia and Glenelg. The road was one very seldom used and wound a lonely, sinuous way among the sandhills by the sea.Dusk had just fallen and the young man was riding slowly and anxiously along. He was not anxious because the surface of the road was shockingly uneven and bad, but he was troubled because he was riding without a light.H...

Arthur Gask's The Red Paste Murders is a taut interwar detective novel built around a sequence of deaths, false clues, and the ominous significance of "red paste"—imitation gemstones whose apparent triviality masks darker human motives. Written in the idiom of Golden Age crime fiction, the book combines brisk plotting, legal-medical detail, and a taste for sensational revelation. Its style is direct yet atmospheric, balancing puzzle mechanics with melodramatic menace and the moral clarity ...