Professor Charles Lexington led a placid and uneventful life until he
made the mistake of discovering a way by which lead could be turned into
gold. A Mr. Bowry volunteered to help the Professor capitalize the
discovery, and from then on things began to happen. Before Professor
Lexington got back to Earth he had been a match seller on the streets of
London, an end man in a minstrel show, an inmate of a charitable
institution, and a plumber.
Here is just such a combination of insoluble mystery and waggish humor
as brought unending delight to readers of Shadowed and the other
Chesterbelloc tales in which laughter was crossed with diabolic plot.
This tongue-in-cheek puzzler will tickle your funnybone and tax your
ingenuity.
Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, and
raised in England. Educated in Birmingham before voluntarily serving his
military term of service in France, Belloc then returned to England to
study History at Baliol College, Oxford where he graduated with a
First-class degree.
Writing on everything from poetry to war and travel in between, Belloc
has been called one of the Big Four of Edwardian Letters, along with H.
G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and G. K. Chesterton, all of whom debated
each other into the 1930s. Belloc was closely associated with
Chesterton, and Shaw coined the term Chesterbelloc for their
partnership.
A deeply religious Catholic, Belloc wrote considerably about his faith,
and throughout his literary career he was concerned with the problems of
social reform. He was a political activist and an MP for Salford from
1906 to 1910 for the Liberal party, and his written non-fiction work
criticized both capitalism and aspects of socialism.
