The Talleyrand Maxim
J. S. Fletcher
Nov 2026 · Independently Published · Narrated by AI Voice Kokoro TTS
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8 hr 15 min
Unabridged
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This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
The Talleyrand Maxim is a twenty-eight-chapter mystery by J. S. Fletcher, published in 1920, set in the Yorkshire manufacturing town of Barford and in the valley country around Normandale Grange. Its engine is a single piece of paper. Linford Pratt, senior clerk to the solicitors Eldrick & Pascoe, is a young man who has taken Prince Talleyrand's maxim for his own creed — "With time and patience the mulberry leaf is turned into satin" — and who is waiting, patiently, for the tide to come in. On a foggy winter evening old Antony Bartle, the antiquarian bookseller of Quagg Alley, climbs the office stairs to tell him what he has just found in the pocket of a book bought from the late John Mallathorpe's collection: the will Mallathorpe made on the very morning he was killed by the fall of his own mill chimney, two years before, witnessed by the manager and the cashier who died beside him — a will that no one knew existed, and that therefore never came into evidence when the estate was divided. Before Eldrick can be fetched, the old man dies quietly in the partner's easy chair; and Pratt, alone with the body, unbuttons the rusty coat and puts the folded paper in his own pocket.
From that moment the book's question is not who wrote the will but who will be allowed to hold it. Mrs. Richard Mallathorpe and her two children, Harper John and Nesta, have been living at Normandale Grange on a fortune that was never lawfully theirs; Bartle's grandson, Bartle Collingwood, a solicitor with a conscience and a growing interest in Nesta, begins to pull at the thread his grandfather left; a man named Parrawhite, who learns part of the secret, tries to turn it into money and is found dead; and Harper Mallathorpe goes into the water at the foot-bridge. Against Pratt's patience are set the London private detective Gerald Byner of Halstead & Byner, Barford's Detective-Sergeant Prydale, and a Yorkshire gallery of dialect voices — Pickard of the Green Man inn at Whitcliffe...
The Talleyrand Maxim is a twenty-eight-chapter mystery by J. S. Fletcher, published in 1920, set in the Yorkshire manufacturing town of Barford and in the valley country around Normandale Grange. Its engine is a single piece of paper. Linford Pratt, senior clerk to the solicitors Eldrick & Pascoe, is a young man who has taken Prince Talleyrand's maxim for his own creed — "With time and patience the mulberry leaf is turned into satin" — and who is waiting, patiently, for the tide to come in. On a foggy winter evening old Antony Bartle, the antiquarian bookseller of Quagg Alley, climbs the office stairs to tell him what he has just found in the pocket of a book bought from the late John Mallathorpe's collection: the will Mallathorpe made on the very morning he was killed by the fall of his own mill chimney, two years before, witnessed by the manager and the cashier who died beside him — a will that no one knew existed, and that therefore never came into evidence when the estate was divided. Before Eldrick can be fetched, the old man dies quietly in the partner's easy chair; and Pratt, alone with the body, unbuttons the rusty coat and puts the folded paper in his own pocket.
From that moment the book's question is not who wrote the will but who will be allowed to hold it. Mrs. Richard Mallathorpe and her two children, Harper John and Nesta, have been living at Normandale Grange on a fortune that was never lawfully theirs; Bartle's grandson, Bartle Collingwood, a solicitor with a conscience and a growing interest in Nesta, begins to pull at the thread his grandfather left; a man named Parrawhite, who learns part of the secret, tries to turn it into money and is found dead; and Harper Mallathorpe goes into the water at the foot-bridge. Against Pratt's patience are set the London private detective Gerald Byner of Halstead & Byner, Barford's Detective-Sergeant Prydale, and a Yorkshire gallery of dialect voices — Pickard of the Green Man inn at Whitcliffe...
This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
The Talleyrand Maxim is a twenty-eight-chapter mystery by J. S. Fletcher, published in 1920, set in the Yorkshire manufacturing town of Barford and in the valley country around Normandale Grange. Its engine is a single piece of paper. Linford Pratt, seni...
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