Inside the Lines

Inside the Lines by Earl Derr Biggers

Jane Gerson, an American buyer for Hildebrand's New York department store, meets a British officer calling himself Captain Woodhouse aboard the Calais-Paris express on July tenth, 1914, as talk of impending war spreads across the Continent. He warns her to leave Europe quickly, but she insists on completing her buying trip. Woodhouse then travels not to Egypt, as he claimed, but to Berlin, where he meets a German agent named Louisa, who reveals a Wilhelmstrasse plot: a drunken, disgraced former spy named Billy Capper is to be sent as a decoy toward Malta while the real "Woodhouse"—a German operative using the number Nineteen Thirty-two—impersonates the actual Captain Woodhouse, an English signal officer being transferred to Gibraltar, and takes his place there to seize control of the harbor's mine-detonating switches when the British fleet arrives. Nineteen Thirty-two shadows Capper to Alexandria, steals his Wilhelmstrasse ticket while he is drunk, and delivers it to Doctor Emil Koch, the ring's local head. Koch and his agents kidnap and drug the genuine Captain Woodhouse, exile him to the desert, and send the impostor on to Gibraltar as "Captain Woodhouse." Capper, penniless and suspicious after losing his ticket, follows on the same ship, unknowingly trailed himself. In Gibraltar, the impostor is welcomed into the garrison by General Sir George Crandall and reconnects with Louisa, now posing as a cigar-selling girl named Josepha, and with Almer, proprietor of the Hotel Splendide, both fellow operatives; Almer holds signal-tower plans and coordinates the plot to seize Room D, where the harbor mines can be detonated. Meanwhile, Jane, caught in the chaos of Paris after Germany's declaration of war, secures emergency help from the American ambassador's wife and flees south by car through military checkpoints toward Gibraltar. At the Hotel Splendide she unexpectedly meets "Woodhouse" again; he denies knowing her, then privately begs her to keep their earlier acquaintance secret, which she reluctantly promises. Billy Capper, also arrived in Gibraltar, publicly threatens Woodhouse and confronts Louisa in her lodgings, but his nerve fails him. Jane is taken in by Lady Crandall, the governor's wife, who arranges her passage home on the steamer Saxonia and unknowingly draws Woodhouse into the household's social circle. Capper goes to General Crandall and denounces "Woodhouse" as a German impostor and Josepha as a Wilhelmstrasse spy, but offers no proof; the general, skeptical yet unsettled, has him deported toward Paris while quietly ordering his aide, Major Bishop, and his Indian servant Jaimihr Khan to investigate discreetly, including a covert search of Woodhouse's quarters. Almer, learning through a coded message hidden in a quinine capsule that an informer has denounced Woodhouse and Louisa, tries to warn Woodhouse by writing an invisible message on a cigarette left for him—only for the cigarette to pass, through an innocent chain of hospitality, into Jane's hands and then a young tourist's, with Jane secretly reading the vanishing warning as it burns and destroying the evidence. Torn between suspicion of Woodhouse's true loyalties and her growing feelings for him, Jane is subjected to pointed questioning by General Crandall, who has guessed she and Woodhouse met before Gibraltar. She keeps her promise of silence. At a tea that afternoon at Government House, arranged by Crandall as a trap to test the impostor's knowledge of Gibraltar and expose him, Jane finally confronts Woodhouse directly, telling him she suspects what he truly is and that his enforced promise has entangled her in his danger, while he tacitly acknowledges the truth without confirming it outright, leaving her caught between exposing him and protecting him.

By Earl Derr Biggers · First published 1930 · Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Adventure · 19 chapters · 71,672 words

First lines

"I had two trunks -- two, you ninny! Two! _Ou est l'autre? _"

The grinning customs guard lifted his shoulders to his ears and spread out his palms. "_Mais, mamselle -- -- _"

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Inside the Lines is listed on Textopian as a novel by Earl Derr Biggers, dated 1930 CE.

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mystery · detective · crime · suspense · thriller · fiction · literature · investigation · plot twist · character development · historical · American literature

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