This is your audiobook for September 2022.

This story, "A Schoolmaster Abroad", comes from a collection titled The Crime Doctor by Ernest William Hornung, first published in 1914. Hornung was best known for his character A.J. Raffles, a gentleman thief, who first appeared in 1890, but these stories introduce a new character who is rather neglected these days. Dr John Dollar is a medical expert in criminology, a kind of proto criminal psychologist of the kind that is today such a staple of police procedurals. Dollar is a former soldier with a head injury and a somewhat startling manner, who nonetheless consults successfully on a wide variety of cases, often as a result of a recommendation by the Home Secretary. Hornung, by the way, was brother in law to Arthur Conan Doyle, having married his younger sister Constance. This collection sadly comes near the end of his extensive writing career — his son Oscar was killed at Ypres in 1915 and he didn’t publish any more crime fiction after that.

This story features another character, George Edenborough, who is introduced in the story that immediately preceeds this one in the collection. All you need to know is that he is a political secretary, recently married, and that Dollar helped him out of a sticky situation that involved strychnine.