Bull-dog Drummond: The Adventures of a Demobilised Officer Who Found Peace Dull

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.4
Word count
458K words
Chapters
46

Tags

English Originals Mystery and Suspense Counter-EspionageSuspense ThrillerSpy AdventureAction and SuspenseVengeance and GratitudeJianghu FeudHeroismDemobilized Officer

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Bull-dog Drummond: The Adventures of a Demobilised Officer Who Found Peace DullAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Sep 10, 2015

Editor's review

Bull-dog Drummond is a popular adventure novel published under a pen name by the English writer Herman Cyril McNeile, with its electronic text provided by Project Gutenberg. The protagonist is a demobilised officer who finds peacetime dull and throws himself into adventures against conspiracy. The book moves at a brisk pace with witty dialogue and carries the easy yet hard-edged tone characteristic of post-war British popular fiction, making it a useful sample of the early twentieth-century adventure novel. Its pleasure comes mainly from character and plot rather than deep social analysis; some attitudes and expressions bear clear marks of their time, and today's readers would do well to approach it as genre fiction. For English learners, the dense dialogue and rich colloquial expression make it an optional text for practising rapid reading and language feel. Read it for leisure, without seeking systematic literary-historical study.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read it as genre fiction in continuous stretches, following the plot without looking up every word.
  2. Note colloquial expressions in the characters' dialogue to build English language feel and everyday usage.
  3. After finishing, compare it with common patterns in similar adventure novels and map out character setup and plot structure.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46

FAQ

What kind of novel is this book? It is an early twentieth-century British popular adventure novel, with a demobilised officer as protagonist and a plot built around the conspiracies and actions he becomes involved in. It emphasises pace and character charm over social analysis, making it leisure reading in the genre rather than a text for serious literary study.
Is the original English hard to read? Overall difficulty is moderate: the narrative is clear, dialogue makes up a large share, and colloquial expression is abundant, so it moves along more easily than literary fiction of the same period. But there is old-fashioned slang and period phrasing, and a few passages need checking. Intermediate English readers can try reading continuously without weighing every word.
Does the book contain period limitations? As early twentieth-century popular fiction, it bears clear period marks in its views on gender, its ethnic references and its depiction of violence, and some content may discomfort today's readers. Understand its genre features from a literary-historical perspective while reading critically, and do not equate its value with that of modern works.

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About the author

Project Gutenberg Author

Project Gutenberg is not a single author but a nonprofit digital library founded by Michael Hart in 1971 and one of the world's earliest free ebook platforms. It relies on volunteers to digitize, proofread, and freely distribute public-domain works and is now operated by the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Its collection contains 2,692 works, mainly religious texts, epics, and story collections, including the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims volumes, the epic Mahabharata, a literal translation of the Arabian Nights, and Danish editions of the Old and New Testaments. Public information is limited, and its nature is closer to a public-interest compiling and dissemination body; these texts are open to the public, easy to consult and circulate, and have had a profound influence on the spread of ebooks and the preservation of public-domain resources.