1st Edition 1875. A scarce triple decker of this classic crime/adventure novel bound in the original publishers cloth. Thomas Wilkinson Speight, better known as T.W. Speight, was born in Liverpool in 1830. Speight worked for the Midland Railway Company from 1847 to 1887 but wrote in his free time. From 1867 to 1912, he published more than four dozen short stories, serials, and novels. These were mostly thrillers, mysteries, crime historical romances, and sensation novels. Speight died in 1915. The literary establishment had this to say at the publication of the book in 1875 - Speight is more than generous, be is positively lavish and wasteful. There is sufficient material in A Secret of the Sea for three ordinary novels of the nearly-exploded sensational type. Only a little of it is of a novel kind ; murder, robbery, impersonation, revenge, carried out under surprisingly advantageous circumstances, police disguises, escaped criminal lunatics, about whom no inquiries are made, and who resume their places in the social system, have been heard of rather frequently; but we do not remember to have met with a specimen of the genus poisoner on Mr. Speight's pattern before. A young woman who resorts to the slow poisoning of a gentleman who is indifferent to her affection, and reduces him to the brink of the grave, in order to induce him to propose to her out of gratitude for her nursing of him, is a decided novelty in fiction. We incline to believe that Mr. Speight will not find it necessary to defend his monopoly of it. Books are very good and bright. Slight rubbing to spine tips. Spine darkened on one volume. Light marking to cloth. Contents good. Ownership stamp to endpapers in each volume.