The Fall of a Dictator

by Arthur Gask

Arthur Cecil Gask (10 July 1869 – 25 June 1951), dentist and novelist, was born on 10 July 1869 at St Marylebone, London, fourth of five children of Charles Gask, merchant, and his wife Fanny, née Edis. Gask, accompanied by his second wife, their two sons, and by a daughter of his first marriage, emigrated to Adelaide, South Australia in 1920, where he set up practice as a dentist. He was among the first in the city to carry out extractions with gas.

303 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Arthur Cecil Gask was born at St Marylebone, Middlesex (now London), and trained in dentistry, a profession he continued for the next forty years. He married in 1898 and had four children, then divorced his wife and married his children's nanny in 1909. He came to Australia in 1920 with his second wife and their two sons, establishing a practice in Adelaide. The publication of his first novel, The Secret of the Sand Hills (1921), was self-funded, but when the first edition sold out within weeks a London publisher, Herbert Jenkins, republished it, and it soon became a bestseller. Gask went on to write more than thirty crime and detective novels-averaging one a year-with many of them set in and around Adelaide, including The Red Paste Murders (1923), Cloud the Smiter (1926) and The Shadow of Larose (1930).

Reviews

[Vikas Datta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvellous tale of espionage and covert activities - creates a breathless pace even it evokes the claustrophobic attitude in a nameless European country where our hero gallantly goes about his secret mission and encounters a splendid cast of characters till all culminates in a gloriously crafted ending. A gem of a tale, that is no less than anything by Eric Ambler or Ian Fleming, or for that matter Alan Furst nearer our time, with the added attraction of reflecting the mores of the times it was written in....