The Herr Graft was a familiar sight to the residents of the Rhineland village of Grauhugel. After all, he’d been walking the halls of the local castle at night and occasionally nodding to the servants ever since he drowned some 86 years ago. No one was the least bit alarmed by the Graf’s spectral walks. Indeed, the castle’s major domo found it all quite comforting, as the young Graf had been quite popular while he was alive. When the actor hired to play the dead Graf in a movie is felled by an accident, the film’s director is overjoyed to come across a talented replacement who seems to have been born to play the part, little realizing that the Graf and his faithful servant—who perished in the same accident—had only recently decided to materialize in public.

The Graf isn’t stagestruck. He’s back among the living to correct an old wrong. Along the way, he adds a bit of realism to a cinematic duel, befuddles a black marketer, breaks out of jail, and exposes a charlatan spiritualist. At the same time, his amorous servant Franz is in the grip of an awkward dilemma. What is he’s pursuing the granddaughters of village maidens he dallied with eight decades in the past?

The writing team that crated those witty Tommy Hambledon spy novels is at the top of their form in this whimsical ghost story told in the best tradition of Topper.

Order This Book