Alfred Edward Woodley Mason was a British author and politician. He is best remembered for his 1902 novel The Four Feathers. He was the author of more than 20 books, including At The Villa Rose (1910), a mystery novel in which he introduced his French detective, Hanaud, The House of the Arrow (1924), No Other Tiger (1927), The Prisoner in the Opal (1929) and Fire Over England (1937). The Broken Road begins, "It was the Road which caused the trouble. It usually is the road. That and a reigning prince who was declared by his uncle secretly to have sold his country to the British, and a half-crazed priest from out beyond the borders of Afghanistan, who sat on a slab of stone by the river-bank and preached a "djehad". But above all it was the road--Linforth's road. It came winding down from the passes, over slopes of shale; it was built with wooden galleries along the precipitous sides of cliffs; it snaked treacherously further and further across the rich valley of Chiltistan towards the Hindu Kush, until the people of that valley could endure it no longer."