Edgar Wallace

The Avenger Edgar Wallace

CAPTAIN MIKE BRIXAN had certain mild and innocent superstitions. He believed, forexample, that if he saw a green crow in a field he would certainly see another green crowbefore the day was out. And when, at the bookstand on Aix-la-Chapelle station, he sawand purchased a dime novel that was comprehensively entitled "Only an Extra, or thePride of Hollywood", he was less concerned as to how this thrilling and dog-earedromance came to be on offer at half a million marks (this was in the days when markswere worth money) than as to the circumstances in which he would again hear or read theword "extras" in the sense of a supernumerary and unimportant screen actress. The novel did not interest him at all. He read one page of superlatives and, turned forrelief to the study of a Belgian time-table. He was bored, but not so bored that he could interest himself in the sensational rise of the fictitious Rosa Love from modest obscurity toa press agent and wealth. But "extra" was a new one on Michael, and he waited for the day to bring its inevitablecompanion. To say that he was uninterested in crime, that burglars were less thrilling than golfscores, and the record of murders hardly worth the reading, might convey a wrongimpression to those who knew him as the cleverest agent in the Foreign OfficeIntelligence Department.