The books of Dornford Yates are an acquired taste for some readers. His style has an elegance that resembles no other artisan in the English language; his content is rooted in the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Hope, Stanley Weyman, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. His works fall into three categories: light humor, light romance, and thrillers. Some of the characters in one category have a habit of showing up in books in the other two categories. Yates was a writer who merged his own life with that of his creations, and he created a world into which he and his readers could escape from mundane reality. It was a world with unending sunshine and the best vintage wine, when one war was behind and the next not even on the horizon.

Yates valued the light romance more highly than the thriller, but the latter made enough...