# The Secret House — Character guide

> Key figures in The Secret House by Edgar Wallace.

- [Count Poltavo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/count_poltavo.md): Poltavo moves through London society on charm and a threadbare purse, living alone, answering his own door, husbanding every shilling until fortune turns. A letter from the vanished Gregory Farrington told Doris Gray to 
- [T. B. Smith](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/t_b_smith.md): T. B. Smith takes charge of the Farrington case and works it with patient, unhurried precision, prying open pick-locks and piecing together a conspiracy that reaches from a foggy London office to the underground cells be
- [Mr. Gregory Farrington](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/mr_gregory_farrington.md): Farrington is the wealthy guardian whose supposed suicide — a letter in his own hand, a body in the river, a fortune mysteriously lost — sets every engine of the plot running. But he was a man who never told the truth ab
- [Frank Doughton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/frank_doughton.md): Frank Doughton is the young man who once held a commission from Farrington to find old Tollington's missing heir — a trail that leads, inconveniently, to Great Bradley and to Poltavo. He loves Doris Gray with an honest, 
- [Lady Constance Dex](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/lady_constance_dex.md): Lady Constance Dex is the woman whose youthful indiscretion — a dead lover, a brother who knows, a blackmailer named Montague who threatens murder if she goes to the police — has kept her entangled with Farrington and th
- [Doris Gray](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/doris_gray.md): Doris Gray is the ward whose fortune and future sit at the center of the Farrington affair, courted by the wholesome Frank Doughton and increasingly under the influence of the magnetic Poltavo. When a typewritten letter 
- [Dr. Fall](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/dr_fall.md): Dr. Fall occupies a position of unnerving trust at the Secret House, serving simultaneously as physician and secretary to the reclusive Mr. Moole. His agreeable bedside manner sits uneasily beside the electrified gates, 
- [Mr. Ela](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/mr_ela.md): Ela works the case beside T. B. Smith, trading dry asides in a fog-choked London while bodies and false leads pile up. His defining moment comes at the power house, where he bullies a terrified Italian foreman into throw
- [Lady Dinsmore](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/lady_dinsmore.md): A society lady with a role in the background of the mystery.
- [Montague Fallock](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/montague_fallock.md): Montague Fallock haunts the investigation as an absence—a missing man whose threats against his own sister and the millionaire Farrington have already turned fatal. The bodies of his agents, an architect and a courier, s
- [Mr. Brown](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/mr_brown.md): A minor character encountered during the investigation.
- [Mr. Moole](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/mr_moole.md): A sickly man who provides a clue.
- [George Tollington](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/george_tollington.md): An elderly man with a past connection to the case.
- [Dr. Goldworthy](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters/dr_goldworthy.md): A respected doctor consulted in the investigation.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_secret_house_se/characters