Whispering Death

Whispering Death (1931) is the third adventure in the Dr. Night trilogy by Aidan De Brune, (1874-1946). This third story is gaudy crime yarns, which steadily veers into fantasy by the end and features a very unlikely Asian villain who is as different from Fu Manchu as you can imagine: a small, colorless man of uncertain central Asian origin whose principal obsession is raising money by any means possible to recreate a long-dead central Asian kingdom of which his distant ancestors were kings. Most of the stories in the Dr. Night trilogy take place in and around Sydney, although the earliest known is set in Perth Western Australia and one of the novelettes in north Queenslan. Aidan de Brune was a big name in Australian literature but is forgotten today. He was a prolific author who wrote in a variety of genres.