The forger by Edgar Wallace

 Or The counterfeiter, 1927

The book was inteerstng and engaging, but the ending was not satisfying at all.

Peter Clifton is rich, and after giving money to a man, John, he gets engaged to his daughter Jane. The get married early, and she says that she doesn’t love him. He was afraid that h ‘bought her’ and guessed as much. Bu when things take a turn for the worst, showing that there’s a mystery and Peter might be in serious danger, she cares for him and slowly realises she does love him, and keeps trying to help him as much as she can.

One night she saw him in a secret room with a printer for fake money, and thought he might be the famous Fox, the forger that nobody knew the identity of. Then her old friend Basil told her that Peter was crazy, that he had inherited the madness that his father had when he died in an asylum.

Peter was afraid of it, had confided everything to a doctor, Donald, and believed the worst. When Basil is found dead, Peter doesn’t remember anything. Jane found him in bed covered in blood, and changed his clothes and washed his hands. 

A cop, Rouper, met Donald because he found his name on a fake bandnote, but then he took money from Donald and believed his words that Peter was a crazy murderer, and followed his instructions, but Rouper’s boss at Scotland Yard is Bourke. Bourke is a friend of Peter’s, and strongly believes him innocent, so he helps Jane in protecting him. He gets rid of the dirty clothes, and later on keeps helping when they find Peter outside the house fo an old lawyer that has beeen shot dead.

Peter believed Donald’s words, and would have confessed to something that he didn’t remember doing, but Jane and Bourke stopped him. 

Her beloved father keeps telling her to believe Donald, and when she realises that if Peter was found crazy, she would have control of his money, she realises his diabolical plan.

There’s also a woman, Basil’s mother, who had married Peter’s father while he was still married to his mother. She’s crazy, she thinks her Basil is so precious, and also that he has rights to Peter’s money… she loses her mind when Basil dies.

She gets money from a usurer, Blonberg or something, that nobody knows who he is, but she thinks it’s Peter, I guess. She thinks everything is Peter’s fault.

At the end, Basil’s mom goes to Blonberg and shoots him dead. Bourke finds the body, it was Donald. Then Jane sees Peter in a taxi, with a man who owns his own taxi and only goes out at nights, sometimes. When he gets home, he tells Jane that her father went away, and confirms for her that he was the Fox.

They find some documents at Donald’s office, and Peter finally learns that he’s the son of the sane Alexander Welerson. There was a cousin with the same name who married his mother afterwards, and he was the crazy one who later on married Basil’s mom. 

I liked Jane’s character, a strong character who acts instead of screaming. It ends simply with her asking if her father got away, then she took an hour for herself to cry in peace and compose herself, and then she joins her husband again to talk of something else and put it all behind them.