Love Insurance

Love Insurance by Earl Derr Biggers

Lord Allan Harrowby, heir to the Earl of Raybrook, arrives shivering at the New York offices of Lloyds to propose an extraordinary insurance policy: he wants underwriter Owen Jephson to insure him for seventy-five thousand pounds against the possibility that his American fiancée, oil heiress Cynthia Meyrick, changes her mind before their wedding, set for the following Tuesday in San Marco, Florida. Jephson, delighted by the novelty, accepts, over the objections of his cautious partner Thacker. Thacker then dispatches his young assistant, Richard Minot, to San Marco to personally guard against any mishap that might scuttle the marriage, over Minot's own mild misgivings about meddling in matters of the heart. Harrowby sails south aboard the yacht Lileth, owned by his blustery new friend Martin Wall; Minot, refused a berth, swims out and boards anyway, only to be thrown overboard by Wall and his sailors. Undeterred, Minot follows by train. En route he shares a frantic, charming ride with a young woman desperate to reach San Marco by one o'clock for the most important luncheon of her life — who turns out, to his dismay, to be Cynthia Meyrick herself, rushing to announce her engagement to Harrowby. Minot, already smitten, resolves nonetheless to honor his promise to Jephson. In San Marco, Minot renews acquaintance with his college friend Jack Paddock, now supplying witty repartee to the socialite Mrs. Bruce for pay, and meets Cynthia's father Spencer Meyrick and her fussy Aunt Mary. The wedding plans are soon threatened by publicity man Henry Trimmer, who produces a shabby claimant — George, a supposed elder Harrowby brother thought long dead in Arizona — and stages a sandwich-board spectacle and later a vaudeville "lecture" recounting convincing details of the Harrowby family estate, Rakedale Hall, to sway public and family opinion. Allan Harrowby refuses to acknowledge George, and Spencer Meyrick, humiliated, threatens to postpone the wedding unless the impostor is removed. Meanwhile, at Mrs. Bruce's dinner party, the celebrated Harrowby diamond necklace, Chain Lightning's Collar, is snatched from Cynthia's hair by a masked figure — who turns out, secretly, to be Harrowby himself, who thrusts the necklace into Minot's keeping for safekeeping without explanation. Minot also learns that Martin Wall is suspected of being an expert jewel thief, having once frozen in temptation alone in a diamond shop. With Trimmer's help, Minot and Wall conspire to spirit George away aboard the Lileth, and Minot separately intimidates Trimmer into agreeing to hand him over — but Trimmer's associate has already vanished, and the scheme grows tangled amid a raging storm at sea. A former Gaiety actress, Gabrielle Rose, arrives in San Marco bearing old love letters from Harrowby and threatens to sue him for breach of promise unless paid off; Minot, working on hints from Jephson's cable, bluffs her into silence by revealing knowledge of her secret prior marriage to a rug-dealing "prince," and she departs. The blackmailing local newspaper, the San Marco Mail, run by the sly Manuel Gonzale, obtains and threatens to publish the same letters; Minot and Paddock recruit the paper's two down-on-their-luck new editors, Howe and O'Neill, to help wrest the letters back by force. That night, aboard the Lileth, Trimmer nearly succeeds in cornering George Harrowby, and Minot, Paddock, and Wall must again spirit him away by launch into a fierce rainstorm, drenched and miserable for hours while waiting for a signal. During the chaos, Chain Lightning's Collar goes missing from Minot's coat, apparently lifted by Wall, then is mysteriously returned to Minot the next morning with a note from Wall. Hotel detectives search Minot for the necklace on suspicion of theft but find nothing, since it had already vanished into Wall's hands. The story continues with Harrowby's secret reasons for wanting the necklace kept from official notice, a tense evening of gambling at Tom Stacy's Manhattan Club where Harrowby wins and loses heavily, and a stunning turn when a Secret Service man, Huntley, denounces Wall by his true criminal name and arrests Harrowby instead — for smuggling the necklace into the country without paying customs duty. Harrowby is ordered north to Jersey City to face a commissioner, jeopardizing the Tuesday wedding entirely, and Spencer Meyrick, disgusted by the mounting scandals, tells Harrowby not to bother returning if he leaves. Amid this crisis, Minot and Cynthia share a charged moment alone on the club's balcony, each sensing the wedding may now never happen — and each, for very different reasons, moved by that possibility.

By Earl Derr Biggers · First published 1914 · Genre: Romantic Comedy, Mystery, Adventure · 22 chapters · 84,353 words

First lines

Outside a gilt-lettered door on the seventeenth floor of a New York office building, a tall young man in a fur-lined coat stood shivering.

Why did he shiver in that coat? He shivered because he was fussed, poor chap. Because he was rattled, from the soles of his custom-made boots to the apex of his Piccadilly hat. A painful, palpitating spectacle, he stood.

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Love Insurance is listed on Textopian as a novel by Earl Derr Biggers, dated 1914 CE.

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romance · comedy · mystery · adventure · love · insurance · relationships · humor · drama · suspense · plot twist · character development

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