The Spiked Boy
By John Russell Fearn
Dick Palmer and Will Snell are great friends, both former highwaymen who were subsequently exonerated. However, they become fugitives from the law again when members of a mysterious gang of murderers and kidnappers use their names to frame them. Then when the gang kidnap Palmer’s wife the two friends are plunged into a deadly struggle to rescue her. But they are up against an evil and secret organization – and the sadistic Simon Pendexter, who swings a ‘spiked boy’ . . .
John Russell Fearn was an extremely prolific and popular British writer, who began in the American pulps, then almost single-handedly drove the post-World War II boom in British publishing with a flood of science fiction, detective stories, westerns, and adventure fiction. He was so popular that one of his pseudonyms became the editor of Vargo Statten’s Science Fiction Magazine in the 1950’s. His work is noted for its vigor and wild imagination. He has always had a substantial cult following and has been popular in translation around the world. He passed away in 1960 at the age of 52.