The Golden Web 1911

 

THE GOLDEN WEB (1911)

The contrast in personal appearance between the two men, having regard to the relative positions, was a significant thing. The caller who had just been summoned from the waiting room and was standing before the others table, hat in hand, a little shabby, with ill-brushed hair and doubtful collar...

 So we meet our protagonists. Once companions in Africa their lives have diverged. Stirling Deane is the head of a huge mining corporation, while Basil Rowan has failed in life and is mortally ill. Rowan asks Deane for help to ensure that his sister's future is secure. Deane refuses to employ him in a regular post and Rowan explains that he is desperate and will undertake any assignment.
It so happens that there is a dispute about the ownership of an African gold mine. Deane was visited a few days before by Richard Sinclair. This man had a document which seemd to suggest that he had title to the mine.
Deane sends Rowan to meet with the down-at-heel and drunken Sinclair saying that the return of the title would be worth £10,000 to him.

                An electric Brougham as mentioned in the book.
A struggle ensues in the hotel room, Sinclair dies and Rowan is convicted of murder.
Deane has a crisis of conscience knowing that if he had spoken up the result would have been a conviction for manslaughter.
He is approached by Rowan's sister Winifred, who has visited the condemned cell and learnt what occurred. Rowan has told her that the papers must be in the hotel room.
Meanwhile Deane goes to the seaside to recuperate upsetting his fiance and there meets Ruby Sinclair a vivacious but bored young woman who lives with her tedious uncle. She is of course a relative of the dead man.
In due course she goes to London in great poverty and teams up with another mine claimant who has arrived from Africa to meet his friend Sinclair.
Deane bribes a porter to get a key to the hotel room; as he searches it Winifred enters on the same mission! The paper is discovered...and after the usual vicissitudes everybody ends up living happily ever after.
5/10


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Written as Anthony Partridge, a name that Oppenheim used several times in his early writing career.