If the Brown Lady had never existed plain Dick Selby, an ordinary young man of the lower middle classes, would have developed into a respectable, obscure member of the community. He would have rented a little villa, furnished it on the hire-purchase system, gone to Church on Sunday, and bought up, with considerable financial stress, a large family. But Brown Magic took Dick Selby and made him a soldier, and when sudden invasion came, circumstances combined to raise him-up,up he went, to a position seemingly quite unattainable. As a prophecy of modern warfare, this book, written before the Great War, is distinctly remarkable, as well as having the genuine Edgar Wallace sense of thrilling narrative.