The Power-House

When a friend vanishes abroad under some unspoken compulsion, the London barrister and Member of Parliament Sir Edward Leithen is drawn, almost against his will, into the edges of a secret he was never meant to see. By degrees he uncovers the Power-House: a vast, hidden international organisation dedicated to dissolving the existing order, with its agents lodged invisibly throughout respectable society.

At its head is Andrew Lumley — wealthy, cultivated, charming, a man Leithen has dined with and rather liked. Over good wine Lumley explains, with perfect courtesy, his conviction that civilisation is a fragile fiction held up by habit alone: “the division is a thread, a sheet of glass.” And once Leithen knows the truth, the polished surface of his London life becomes, very suddenly, a place where he can be killed — among the indifferent crowds of a daylight street, with help nowhere because no one would believe him.

Written in 1913, a year before The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Power-House is the first Sir Edward Leithen novel and a master of compression — barely the length of a long short story, yet containing the whole nightmare of the modern conspiracy thriller. Its philosophical villain and its vision of order stretched thin over chaos anticipate a century of fiction to come, from the secret cabals of spy novels to the paranoid thrillers of the screen.

This edition pairs the complete text with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s origins and influence, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.