The Gentleman Adventurer

When the British government asks Harry Delamere to courier a secret document from Constantinople to Paris on the Orient Express, it seems such a simple way to cover a couple of months' rent and some outstanding bills. But somebody knows a lot more than he does, nobody trusts him, and pretty much everybody's trying to kill him. All the glamour of the Orient Express, melodrama, sinister foreign gentlemen, exotic foreign ladies, bandits, revolutionaries, assassins, surprises, disguises, explosions, breathtaking escapes from death, and an unfortunate incident in a Viennese lavatory.

Harry Delamere doesn’t know much about opera, but he’s fairly sure people aren’t supposed to get murdered for real at the climax. In this excerpt from his memoirs he finds himself kidnapped, blown up, suspected of murder, forced to listen to Winston Churchill, kidnapped again — oh, and again — enjoying a terrifying encounter with modern technology and making a most ungentlemanly display of his legs while tackling the threat of world revolution.