Double Treasure

BURIED PIRATE TREASURE, WISECRACKING KELLAND HEROINE LEAD TO ROMANCE, ADVENTURE & MURDER IN THIS EXCITING KELLAND NOVEL SET ON PROHIBITION-ERA LONG ISLAND!

"A refreshing, entertaining story written by a master storytellers, and one of Kelland's best novels," Allentown Call-Leader

"Combines love and mystery in a fast and exciting adventure." Bakersfield Californian

Wisecracking Jane Teach had pirate blood, a take charge attitude and a penchant for sticking her nose in the wrong places. Sober-minded Bill Popple was from one of Long Island's first families, a conservative minded young man who walked the straight and narrow. When they met it was loathing at first sight. Definitely not a match made in heaven. But with six people trying to kill them over a dead bootlegger's lost fortune and a pirate's treasure secretly buried three hundred years ago, they both needed each other.

Among the malefactors, threatening to remove them as impediments::

* Gillan and Quelch Cullover, twins named after famous pirates, who finish each other's sentences in a comical way, but whose ruthless eyes and deeds are anything but humorous.

* Count Van Breslau, a caveman with culture, a body like a Greek god, a musical voice, and a face that would frighten hobgoblins. People are fascinated by him, says Jane Teach, until they wake up with their throats slit.

* Henry Hartman, disagreeable bootlegger with an unsavory reputation, who has just bought a major piece of property on the Long Island sound, surrounded by armed guards who threaten to shoot anyone found on the grounds..

* Ken, the Cullover twins' chef, who serves exquisite cuisine with a murder chaser, and whose skill with a knife is something to watch in and out of the kitchen.

* Alissandro Mehagian, a small, plump stranger from Manhattan with no inhibitions against crime, he had the strongest motive for murder of them all – so why was he the one almost killed as soon as he arrived?

First Bill Popple, the muscular serious-minded research student, unearths information which makes the odds high in favor of pirate gold being hidden long ago on what is now Hartman's property. Then Jane Teach, the streamlined girl of ready wit, who seems to know more than Bill does about almost everything, suggests that there may be not one treasure but two, the first one part of her Ancestor's lost loot, the second a bootlegger's ill-gotten gains. Next Jane and Bills discover a corpse lying on a beach near Oxbow Bay with gold pieces sunk into its eye sockets.

Soon the pair find themselves up to their necks in mystery and dark doings involving the heterogeneous group of strangers who have appeared suddenly in town to wait and watch for …what? From then on Jane and Bill never experience a dull moment.

How they extricate themselves, and at the same time solve two deep mysteries, adds up to an absorbing novel of skullduggery and sudden death in which excitement and romance mount to an increasingly high pitch and culminate in a wholly satisfying climax,

"Clarence Budington Kelland, master of surprises, has devised an intricate plot full of unusual twists for "Double Treasure," a tale in the best Kelland tradition of adventure and romance." Indianapolis Star

"Thrilling!" Wisconsin Daily Tribune

Clarence Budington Kelland was author of nearly 100 novels of mystery and romantic suspense, had enough careers for several men: attorney, reporter, manufacturer of clothespins, director of a major newspaper group, and more. Kelland became best known as a fiction writer, penning some 100 novels, and selling them as serials to the biggest and highest paying magazines of the time—like the Saturday Evening Post, The American Magazine, Colliers, and Cosmopolitan. Many were immortalized on film, of which the romantic suspense comedy and Oscar-winner, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, is undoubtedly the most famous. Kelland appeared alongside Agatha Christie, Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner in the same magazines, but was the most popular of the four. The New York Times described Kelland’s novels as “lively stories, designed to prick the jaded palate, that keep readers pleasantly entertained” and noted that “Kelland demonstrates the emotions of his lovers with a psychological penetration.” Kirkus Reviews called his novels “Bright and breezy, with plus appeal for murder-mystery addicts.” His magazine publishers kept besieging him for more novels because every time they serialized one of them (typically in 6-8 installments), circulation shot upward. Kelland obliged, and produced far more each year than his publisher (Harper and Row) could keep up with, leaving more than three dozen unpublished in book form when he died. His inimitable characters, trademark dialogue and deftly plotted stories, according to Harper, “made him an American tradition and won him more loyal, devoted readers than almost any other living author.” Kelland, as ever self-depreciating, simply described himself as “the best second-rate writer in the world.” His legions of fans, old and new, would likely disagree. There was nothing second-rate about his work.