An American reporter in London goes looking for a man who has vanished, and finds a house in a respectable square where somebody is being held — and cannot get anyone official to believe it. Davis was the most famous reporter of his age, covered six wars, and was the model for the Gibson Man; the novella moves like a filmed chase, which is what it became. Sixty plates of docks, gaslit streets and wartime skies by painters including John Atkinson Grimshaw and Walter Sickert run through the book like the fog and menace of the vanished man's trail.
