Strange Stories - The Last Seven ed by J L. Hardie

[allthingshorror]

Art and Educational Publishers (circa 1940's)



CONTENTS

The Sire De Maletroits door - Robert Louis Stevenson

Keeping His Promise - Algernon Blackwood

The Girl On The Bridge - Davis Tindall

The Diamond Lens - Fitz-James O'Brien

The Squires Story - Mrs Gaskell

The Masque Of The Red death - Edgar Allan Poe

The Middle Toe Of The Right Foot - Ambrose Bierce

A horror booklet, no less and enough of a nice selection to make it quite the curious oddity. Would love to know a little bit about John L Hardie...

[dem bones]

All I know is, he had another antho published as the war was drawing to a close. It kind of signalled the way things would go until the close of the 'fifties as far as Brit anthologies would go. Repackaging of old classics as the more literary Ghost & Horror stories came back in vogue. It was like Not At Night and Creeps had never happened.

John L. Hardie - 22 Strange Stories (Art & Educational, n.d. circa 1945)

Preface: John L. Hardie

Arthur Machen - The Cosy Room
Nathaniel Hawthorne - Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment
Algernon Blackwood - Running Wolf
E. A. Poe - The Facts In The Case of M. Valdemar
W. W. Jacobs - The Monkey’s Paw
Lord Lytton - The Haunters And The Haunted
Richard Hughes - A Night At A Cottage
Washington Irvine - The Spectre Bridegroom
J. S. Le Fanu - Shalken The Painter
R. L. Stevenson - Markheim
Mrs. Gaskell - The Squire’s Story
Thomas Hardy - The Three Strangers
R. H. Barham - A Singular Passage In The Life Of The Late Henry Harris, D. D.
W. M. Thackeray - The Story Of Mary Ancel
Oliver Onions - The Accident
Wilkie Collins - A Terribly Strange Bed
Sir Walter Scott - The Mirror
F. Marion Crawford - The Upper Berth
Frederick Marryat - The Werewolf
Joseph Conrad - Because Of The Dollars
Fitz-James O’Brien - The Diamond Lens
Ambrose Bierce - A Watcher By The Dead

* email to CP has been sent, so fingers crossed *

[Johnlprobert]

And there's Lord Lytton again! Hooray! In fact this weekend I found a book entitled 'It was a dark and stormy night and other terrible story openers' and treated it with the disdain I now realise it deserved.

[dem bones]

W. M. Thackeray - The Story Of Mary Ancel; (New Monthly Magazine, Oct 1838). Van Thal swiped this one - along with roughly half of Hardie's book - for Great Ghost Stories, despite there being nothing remotely 'supernatural' about it (Rex Collins likewise includes it in Classic Victorian & Edwardian Ghost Stories). Thackery volunteers this factually accurate historical romance was suggested by Charles Nodier's account of an abuse of power during the Reign of Terror. Mary Ancel, daughter of a notoriously wealthy old skinflint, is the most beautiful girl in Steinbach village, worshipped by cousin Pierre (our narrator), lusted after by the conniving, lecherous M. Schneider, a former clergyman, who, thanks to his friendship with Robespierre, is now something important on the Commission of Public Safety. Schneider offers Mary a stark choice. Either she marry him immediately or her father goes direct to guillotine as an enemy of the one and indivisible Republic. We can only hope, in the feisty Mary, the odious creep has picked on the wrong heroine.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment: (Knickerbocker Magazine, Jan. 1837. As The Fountain of Youth). The kindly and wise Heidegger invites four ghastly oldies of his acquaintance to drink from the wondrous waters of the fountain of youth. Medbourne is a ruined merchant. Colonel Killigrew, a dried up libertine. Gascoigne, disgraced politician. The widow Wycherly, a good time gal gone to seed. The object of the experiment is to see if, with an opportunity to put right past mistakes, they choose to pursue the same ruinous course as before. Predictable outcome, but I adore this story for the guided tour of the Professor's haunted study.