Synopsis
Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.
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Présentation de l'éditeur
“ Mufti, by ‘Sapper’ [Cyril McNeile], is an example of English best-seller fiction, with an ironic flair for dialogue conspicuously lacking in the American product. and with an indifference to happy ending which the cisatlantic practitioner does not share. It is an adept piece of catering, well prepared.” — Dial, Vol. 67 “ Mufti is an after the war book despite the fact that every bit of it, except the epilogue, takes place before the armistice. It has a perfect right to its title although the hero never once appears out of uniform. He faces his problem of after-the-war-what in the summer of 1918 when a wounded arm sends him back to England for hospital care and convalescence. Before the war he had been "what is generally described as a typical Englishman." Now he finds his standard of values completely changed. He wants something different but he doesn't in the least know what he wants. He tries to find out from all sorts of people, from a labor leader who he meets at luncheon, from the ex-lodge keeper of a big country house where he used to week-end, from a country baronet, from the hardware nobleman to whose convalescent hospital he is sent, and especially from two girls. It is with the entrance of the second girl that the author gets more interested in his story than he does in his problem though he never altogether loses sight of that. Galsworthy once remarked that he wrote his novels by "rounding his characters up within the ring fence of an idea" and then letting them work out their own salvation, or words to that effect. That is the method which Cyril McNeile employs in Mufti and it is a good method. Cyril McNeile, by the way, is known to many people in America as well as in England through war stories which he wrote under the name of "Sapper". — The Independent, Vol. 100
Biographie de l'auteur
Sapper is the pen name of Herman Cyril McNeile, born in 1888 at the Naval Prison in Bodmin, Cornwall, where his father was Governor. He served in the Royal Engineers (popularly known as sappers ) from 1907-19, being awarded the Military Cross during World War 1. He started writing in France, adopting a pen name because serving officers were not allowed to write under their own names. When his first stories, about life in the trenches, were published in 1915, they were an enormous success. But it was his first thriller, Bulldog Drummond (1920) that launched him as one of the most popular novelists of his generation. It had several amazingly successful sequels, including The Black Gang, The Third Round and The Final Count. Another great success was Jim Maitland (1923), featuring a footloose English sahib in foreign lands. Sapper published nearly thirty books in total, and a vast public mourned his death when he died in 1937, at the early age of forty-eight. So popular was his Bulldog Drummond series that his friend, the late Gerard Fairlie, wrote several Bulldog Drummond stories after his death under the same pen name, which had by then become synonymous with fast-paced, intelligent thrillers and complex, vibrant characters.
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