Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery & Horror: 2

[dem]

Dorothy L Sayers (ed.) - Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror: 2nd Series (Gollancz, July, 1931)

Dorothy L. Sayers – Introduction

1. Detection & Mystery

F. Britten Austin - Diamond Cut Diamond
H.C. Bailey - The Little House
Robert Barr - Lord Chizelrigg's Missing Fortune
E.C. Bentley - The Inoffensive Captain
Anthony Berkeley - The Avenging Chance
Ernest Bramah - Who killed Charlie Winpole?
G.K. Chesterton - The Queer Feet
Agatha Christie -The Adventure of the Clapham Cook
G.D.H. and M. Cole - In A Telephone Cabinet
William Wilkie Collins - The Biter Bit
Freeman Wills Crofts - The Mystery of the Sleeping-car Express
J.S. Fletcher - Blind Gap Moor
Milward Kennedy - Mr. Truefitt Detects ; Death in the Kitchen
Ronald A. Knox - Solved by Inspection
Mrs. Belloc Lowndes -- An Unrecorded Instance
Baroness Orczy -The Regent's Park Murder
John Rhode - The Elusive Bullet
Dorothy L. Sayers - The Cave of Ali Baba
M.P. Shiel - The Race of Orven
J.C. Squire - The Alibi
Sir Basil Thomson - The Vanishing of Mrs. Fraser
Henry Wade - Duello
Victor L. Whitechurch - How The Captain Tracked a German Spy
Percival Wilde - The Pillar of Fire

2. Mystery and Horror:

A.J. Alan – My Adventure in Norfolk
Stacy Aumonier – Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty
R. H. Barham – The Leech of Folkestone
Max Beerbohm – A.V. Laider
E.F. Benson – The Room in the Tower
J.D. Beresford – Cut-Throat Farm
Ambrose Bierce – The Damned Thing
Algernon Blackwood – Secret Worship
Mrs. E. Bland (Edith Nesbit) – No. 17
Douglas G. Browne – The Queer Door
A.M. Burrage – The Waxwork
Wilkie Collins – Mad Monkton
Alan Cunningham – The Haunted Ships
Clemence Dane – The King Waits
Walter de la Mare – The Tree
S.L. Dennis – The Second Awakening of a Magician
Charles Dickens – No.1 Branch Line: The Signalman
Ford Madox Ford – Reisenberg
Violet Hunt – The Prayer
W.F. Harvey – The Beast With Five Fingers
Holloway Horn – The Old Man
W.W. Jacobs – The Well
Edgar Jepson – The Resurgent Mysteries
J.S. Le Fanu – Mr. Justice Harbottle
E. Bulwer-Lytton – The Haunted and the Haunters
Arthur Machen – The Great Return
Frederick Marryat – The Story of the Greek Slave
John Masefield – Anty Blight
John Metcalfe – The Double Admiral
Mrs. Oliphant – The Library Window
Barry Pain – Rose, Rose
Eden Phillpotts – The Iron Pineapple
Edgar Allan Poe – Berenice
Sir A. Quiller-Couch – The Roll-Call of the Reef
Naomi Royde-Smith – Mangaroo
Saki – Sredni Vashtar
Mary Shelley – The Mortal Immortal
M. P. Shiel – The Primate of the Rose
Henry Spicer – Called to the Rescue
Hugh Walpole – The Enemy
H. G. Wells – The Inexperienced Ghost
Edward Lucas White – Lukundoo

At 1150 pages, the equivalent of two-and-a-bit Robinson Mammoth's in one book. the great thing about this board having achieved some minor longeviity is that the bulk of those stories commented upon eight years ago inevitably fade from the memory, so to pay them a revit does no harm.

M. P. Shiel - The Primate of the Rose: E. P. Crooks, slimy editor of the Westminster Gazette is intrigued to learn that club acquaintance Crichton Smyth belongs to several secret societies, and right here in London! Smyth, "the chilliest thing that the Heavens ever invented," patiently explains that one cannot simply join these covert organisations by paying a membership fee: "The Friends of the Rose", for example, act as judge, jury and executioners to those transgressors who have escaped criminal justice. But Crooks is not to be deterred. An unashamed philanderer, he's been carrying on with Smyth's sister. When Minna falls pregnant, Crooks remembers he has pressing business overseas. She dies shortly after giving birth. Smyth adopts her daughter.

On his return to the Capital, Crooks seeks out his old "friend," offering condolences and token protestations of love for the late Minna. Gradually he wins back Smythe's confidence - or so he believes. it certainly looks that way when the occultist finally agrees to admit him to the secret chamber of "The Friends of the Rose."

Max Beerbohm - A.V. Laider: A. V. Laider has taken a pasting on here before now, but have to admit, i'm quite fond of it. Beerbohm first meets Laider when the pair are convalescing by the coast after a bout of influenza. Being correct and proper Englishmen, the pair tacitly ignore each other until Max's last night when an alarming breach of etiquette on Laider's part - he reads Beerbohm's temporarily abandoned newspaper - demands an "I'm terribly sorry, old man!" from the one and a "That's quite all right, my dear chap!" from the other. Conversation has been initiated. Apros to nothing, Beerbohm mentions his interest in palmistry, a lucky shot as Laider is eloquent on the subject, as well he might be. Had it not brought about his downfall? Was it not his failure to act on what he read in the palms of three railway passengers cost them - and countless others - their lives? He is no better than a murderer!

And so Laider relates his tale of woe. Of how, one night, travelling by train to a fog-bound London, he was imposed upon by a trio of excitable women to analyse their bumps ....

A year on, same place, and Beerbohm again encounters a sheepish Laider. And now comes the revelation that tends to piss off the modern reader, but even so, it's hardly on the same scale of wretchedness as the dreaded "It had all been a dream!"

S.L. Dennis - The Second Awakening of a Magician: Stage conjurer Joe Skender, "Modern Miracle Man of the London Halls," is slumming it in a second rate roadshow, his career gone to pot, his wife, Nina, the trapeze artist, having it off with swarthy strongman Georgio Guzelli. Tonight, they've even drugged his coffee, as if that were necessary. Something has to give. Skender pays a visit to the curious little shop off Oxford Street where, in better days, he purchased his props, and trades his soul in turn for the strength to tear Guzelli in half. Tonight's audience are in for a treat!

J. D. Beresford - Cut-Throat Farm: The narrator takes a room with the grim old couple at Valley Farm, Mawdsley, better known to the hostile locals by its macabre nickname. The pair, down on their luck, must slaughter their scrawny livestock to feed him. What will happen when the meagre supply is exhausted?

Holloway Horn - The Old Man: Martin 'Knocker' Thompson, turf bandit, meets an old timer in the Charing Cross Road who presses a newspaper upon him. The paper is dated July 29 1926 ... and today is the 28th. Knocker turns to the racing results, gets his money on the winners - including a tasty 100-8 shot - and cleans up. On his way home from Garwick, he reads the rest of the newspaper. One headline is of particular significance ...

[Jojo Lapin X]

"Please note what this is!" They should put that on every book. On all objects, in fact.

[dem]

Feb 11, 2014 14:48:29 GMT Jojo Lapin X said:

"Please note what this is!" They should put that on every book. On all objects, in fact.

Alternatively, you could print the entire text on the dust jacket, leaving the pages blank for the readers' personal use.

Douglas G. Browne - The Queer Door: (Cornhill Magazine, 1930).

"I was on nodding terms by now with a newsagent in Watchet, and it was in his shop I fell in with the local antiquarian. this gentleman followed me out and introduced himself, remarking that he had heard the shopman address me by name. He was obviously bursting to impart information. I had met local antiquaries before and knew how they would lie in wait in shops and places for helpless victims."

Jim and Clover, the most wonderful wife ever, rent renovated pub, The Queer Door, for their summer holiday on the kind advice of neighbour Alice Stacey. Jim finds it very odd that Mrs. Stacey should do them a good turn, as she despises him on account of his receiving a promotion above her husband, but the property is to die for and the rent a steal. The Queer Door is, of course, haunted. Fifty years ago, the landlord's boy went out looking for his mum and disappeared presumed blown over the cliff edge. The child continues the search in death, all the doors opening and shutting behind him as he runs from room to room. So far, so good, especially as there's cause to believe something terrible awaits Jim & Clover's four-year-old, but we do not wade through a whole fifteen pages for the sake of the most insipid 'happy' ending ever.

This one's a bit more like it. Never trust a man with a false beard.

Eden Philpotts -The Iron Pineapple: (Peacock House, 1927). Bude, Cornwall. John Noy, mild-mannered grocer, is a martyr to his compulsive-obsessive disorder. Eventually his ever-changing fixations drive wife Mabel as crazy as he is: all the terrible things going on in the world - e.g., the Germans - and he's got his head buried in a book on grasshoppers! What is he going to do about his poor, destitute sister, another victim of Bolsover Barbelllan, the supposedly sainted local philanthropist who has run away with everyone's savings?

Noy's mania takes a dangerous turn when he develops twin obsessions. His loathing of an eccentric artist who spends his days painting badly at a remote spot on the beach is as irrational and intense as his worship of the railing ornament he christens 'the iron pineapple,' but all his instincts scream that he will only be rid of the curse should he bring both together. So he does.

Blah blah blah, and so on etc. Anyway, should anyone read this, do me a favour. Remind me i've got to see a girl about a blouse (grey) at 11.45. Thanks in advance.

[dem]

warning: spoiler special

Stacy Aumonier – Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty: (Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty & Other Stories, 1923). Meet Miss Millicent Bracegirdle, 46, an ever so sweet, snobbish, xenophobic spinster, who one day deigns to cross the channel and spend some time among those foul and peculiar Frenchies. It is almost her undoing. Through a hilarious mix up that would not be out of place in No Sex Please, We're British, Millicent finds herself hiding beneath the bed of a Frenchman - a very dead Frenchman at that. This could prove acutely embarrassing. The uncivilised nations know nothing of justice, and she may even be sentenced to the guillotine! Imagine the wagging tongues of her fellow woman's institute mafioso back home at Easingstoke were that to happen. Her poor brother would have to resign the Deanery.

And then the funny little maid arrives with joyful tidings. The dead man was he who chopped up a local girl and threw the pieces in the river.

Utterly detested everything about Miss Bracegirdle ... on first reading, even accused it of sneaking into the 'Mystery & Horror' section under false pretences, which shows you what I know. Several years on, and I quite enjoyed it after my own perverse fashion, though would not have shed any tears if the frightfully proper old baggage had been dragged screaming to the blade.

Mrs. E. Bland (E. Nesbit) – No. 17: (The Strand, 1910). As told by a commercial traveller to chaps of his own profession. A hotel room where the last three men to spend the night have inexplicably cut their throats. A nice gory premise, but Mrs. Sayer was certainly fond of a shaggy ghost story.

[dem]

Two nautical but nice entries. Warning: may be considered literature (the stories, not this thread).

John Metcalfe - The Double-Admiral. Retired seaman Dock is tormented by the vague outline of an island he see from his Hampshire home, which nobody else seems to notice. Eventually the Admiral, Bishop John Charles and psychologist Beverley set out in a boat to explore. As they approach the island, a craft identical to their own draws near enough for each man to see his doppelgänger. Dock drops dead but, just as suddenly, revives. Inexplicably, their boat has performed a 180 degree turn and is now headed back to shore. It seems the trio have suffered no ill-effects for their strange experience which Metcalfe leaves unresolved. No surprise that Robert Aickman was among Metcalfe's admirers.

John Masefield - Anty Bligh: A seadawg's ripping yawn. Anty Bligh, Bristol's baddest pirate, is finally captured and hung in Brazil. Rival operator Fernando Noranha drunkenly accepts a wager to tie a rope around the legs of the dangling corpse and string it up like a hammock. Anty Bligh revives and has the wretched Noranha ferry him home to England so his ma can give him a proper burial in the churchyard.

[dem]

Another plundered during Tuesday creepy crawl of Peckham.

Dorothy L. Sayers [ed] Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, Third Series (Gollancz 1949: originally 1934)

DETECTION & MYSTERY

Stacy Aumonier - The Perfect Murder
Alex Barber - Slain!
J. J. Bell - The Bullet
Leslie Charteris - The Mystery of the Child's Toy
Carl Clausen - Poker-face
Freeman Wills Crofts - The Level Crossing
St. John Ervine - The Brown Sandwich
J. S. Fletcher - The Judge Corroborates
R. Austin Freeman - The Echo of a Mutiny
Ormond Greville - The Perfect Crime
Laurence Kirk - No Man's Hour
Ethelreda Lewis - Blind Justice
G. R. Malloch - Saxophone Solo
H. A. Manhood - Wilful Murder
John Millard - Member of the Jury
Basil Mitchell - The Blue Trout
Anthony Parsons - A Sleeping Draught
Robert E. Pinkerton - Wet Paint
Melville Davisson Post - The Wrong Hand
Garnett Radcliffe - On the Irish Mail
Margery Sharp - Risk
Frederick Skerry - Leading Light
Harold Steevens - The Leak
Henry Wade - The Missing Undergraduate
E. M. Winch - Buttons
Loel Yeo - Inquest
Francis Brett Young - A Busman's Holiday

MYSTERY & HORROR

A. J. Alan - The 19 Club
Martin Armstrong - Sombrero
John Betjamen - Lord Mount Prospect
Algernon Blackwood - The Wendigo
Ann Bridge - The Song in the House
D. K. Broster - Couching at the Door
Thomas Burke - The Dumb Wife
A. M. Burrage - The Bargain
A. E. Coppard - Arabesque: The Mouse
Oswald Couldrey - The Mistaken Fury
E. M. Delafield - Sophy Mason Comes Back
Lord Dunsany - Our Distant Cousins
James Frances Dwyer - A Jungle Graduate
Leonora Gregory - The Scoop
Alan Griff - The House of Desolation
L. P. Hartley - The Island
William Fryer Harvey - Double Demon
Margaret Irwin - The Book
W. W. Jacobs - The Interruption
M. R. James - The Diary of Mr. Poynter
Cyril Landon - "You'll Come to the Tree in the End"
John Metcalfe - Time-Fuse
J. C. Moore - Decay
Claire D. Pollexfen - Stowaway
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - A Pair of Hands
R. Ellis Roberts - The Hill
Naomi Royde-Smith - The Pattern
Herbert Shaw - What Can a Dead Man Do?
Vincent Sheean - The Virtuoso
Lady Eleanor Smith - No Ships Pass
Sir Frederick Treves - The Idol with Hands of Clay
H. Russell Wakefield - The Frontier Guards
H. G. Wells - The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham
Ben Ames Williams - Witch-Trot Pond
Clarence Winchester - Anniversary

[dem]

A. M. Burrage - The Bargain : (Original to collection). A haunted stamp album. Narrator lands it as part of a job lot at auction. The volume of Commonwealth rarities comes complete with ghastly, mumbling, bald spectre. Our death-dealing phantom philatelist seems to have a thing about a particular item from Ceylon.

Leonora Gregory - The Scoop : (The Passing Show, 1933). Three years on from his dismissal, Carver returns to the premises of the Daily Examiner with a big news exclusive. In return for temporary reinstatement on the paper, he provides the night editor with a detailed account of a murder, assuring him the victim's body was disposed of down a coal hole not two hours ago. How can he know all this?

A. J. Alan - The 19 Club: (A.J. Alan's Second Book, 1932). The raconteur and friends are deeply put out by the inconvenient death of Heacham, nosey journalist, who secured an invite to tonight's private dinner party under false pretences. Height of bad manners.

Clarence Winchester - Anniversary (The Story Teller, March 1932). Got as far as the mention of a girl running a lap of the aerodrome stark naked for a bet, realised I'd but recently read it in Peter 'William Pattrick' Haining's Mysterious Air Stories.

Ben Ames Williams - Witch-Trot Pond : (The Story Teller, Sept. 1931; via Saturday Evening Post, 6 June 1931). Pentridge wants rid of lucky Will Giplin so he can get his hands on the fellow's wife. A fishing excursion in a canoe on Witch-Trot Pond affords him the best opportunity - Giplin can't swim.

[dem]

Martin Armstrong - Sombrero: The Fiery Dive and Other Stories, 1929). Court Martial of Captain Lake, who press-ganged Robert Jeffrey aboard The Ritual in Sept. 1807, only to maroon him on a bare Atlantic rock with neither food or fresh water when he proved entirely unsuited to a life on the ocean waves. According to author, it's based on a factual report which appeared in an 1810 issue of The Sporting Magazine

Claire D. Pollexfen - Stowaway: (The Story-teller, March 1931). A very different "horror of the links" as Bradlow, thief and murderer, conceals himself in the chain room behind a towering mass of cable before the ship sets out on turbulent seas ....

Oswald Couldrey - The Mistaken Fury: (The Mistaken Fury & Other Lapses, 1914). A Junior Dean is persecuted by the last of the three Erinyes who wrongly believes him to have murdered his father. Any protestations of innocence are in vain. The Millennia-old Stygian is adamant that "The scent of the Bloodhounds of Night does not deceive" - even when it does.

Alan Griff (Donald Suddaby) - The House of Desolation: (The Cornhill Magazine, Jan. 1934: Argosy, Jan. 1939). Neath invites several friends of late wife Barbara to an anniversary party in her honour. It is well known to each that he lost interest in Mrs. Neath as soon as it was confirmed that she could not have children: henceforth he devoted his time and vast fortune to researching the occult. When the host fails to put in an appearance, Jason the butler eventually admits the master died seven months ago. It was Jason posted the invitations as per the instructions in the master's will. After much snuffing out of candles and similar horseplay, Neath's ghost appears before Lady Merle's little daughter, Margaret. Denied a child in life, he does not intend to remain so in death.

[humgoo]

Aug 22, 2019 10:49:14 GMT dem said:

A. M. Burrage - The Bargain : (Original to collection). A haunted stamp album. Narrator lands it as part of a job lot at auction. The volume of Commonwealth rarities comes complete with ghastly, mumbling, bald spectre. Our death-dealing phantom philatelist seems to have a thing about a particular item from Ceylon.

Wow, I didn't know Burrage has a stamp story! (I don't think I've ever read a haunted stamp tale, come to think of it.) Any good? (I don't think Burrage was able to write a bad story, but some are certainly better than the others.)

[dem]

Aug 23, 2019 15:58:37 GMT humgoo said:

Wow, I didn't know Burrage has a stamp story! (I don't think I've ever read a haunted stamp tale, come to think of it.) Any good? (I don't think Burrage was able to write a bad story, but some are certainly better than the others.)

I'm no judge of these things so will just say that The Bargain worked for me, even if it is unlikely to feature in many Burrage top 10's. Of the stories from Vol 3 synopsised above, it's my joint pick of the ghost stories along with the magnificently melodramatic The House of Desolation

This pair from Detection, Mystery & Horror 2

Hugh Walpole - The Enemy: (The Silver Thorn, 1928). Jack Harding, Charing X Road bookseller, has a deep loathing of his overbearing neighbour, Mr. Tonks, who collars him every damn morning on the long commute to work. The worst of it is, Mr. Tonks genuinely likes Mr. Harding, thinks of him as his best pal, so learning otherwise is heartbreaking. Then Tonks is knocked down in the road outside his house ...

Henry Spicer – Called to the Rescue: (Stranger Things Among Us, 1863). A phantom voice in the night demands Cambridge Undergraduate D____ "Go down to the ferry! The boatman awaits!" In complying D____ is able to save an innocent man from the gallows.

The Enemy is a good, strange one.

[weirdmonger]

Feb 11, 2014 12:32:25 GMT dem said:

Walter de la Mare – The Tree

How can I go on?
WDLM story after story, whether read before or not, staggering in their dark beauty. THE TREE is possibly the most powerful story so far in my current reading and re-reading spate of WDLM, and that is saying increasingly half and half and half more than I can express in this real-time review. Each sentence of the story is priceless, and temptingly quotable, but so utterly quotable it somehow seems to become unquotable. So I have restricted myself to just one quote below, possibly one of the least quotable in the whole story, the one concerning ‘semi-fraternal’ truths…

“To submit to being half-starved simply because nobody with money to waste would so much as look at your bits of drawings; to sit there dreamily grinning at a tree in your back-garden, twenty times more useless because there wasn’t its like for miles around, even if there wasn’t; to be content to hang like a bloodsucker on the generosity of a relative half-blood and half-water – well, he had given P.P. a bit of his mind.”

POSSIBLE SPOILERS TO OR BY THE BARK AND BRANCHES OF THIS REVIEW’S TREE, AND THE DARKLY STRANGE AND TANTALISINGLY BEAUTIFUL BIRDLIFE (AND BEAUTIFUL, PERHAPS POISONOUS, FLOWERS, FRUIT OR WHATEVER) THAT IT HARBOURS:

This is is the story of the rich Fruit Merchant returning by dreary and surprisingly downtrodden first-class train carriage and by horse carriage manned by a sort of animal human, through hoar-frost and country wilds to see his half-brother whom he somehow makes us refer to as P.P., also remembering when they first met 12 years before. They have since had disputes over money, as well as their ongoing natural mutual antipathy, and when you read the descriptions, you understand why, at least from the Fruit Merchant’s point of view — but in some sort of button-focussed OCD way, the Fruit Merchant needs to harvest a principle as well as a principal, to reclaim a monetary debt that P.P. owes him, even though the Fruit Merchant does not need the money.
We gradually learn of the giant tree whence P.P. makes valuable woodcuts and drawings, or as our Fruit Merchant deems them, ‘miserable scribblings and scragglings.’ And the tree is the one that grew huge as if from nothing, like magic, in the two half-brothers’ inherited land, though I may be wrong about that last bit, as, after putting down this story, one feels one needs to destroy any memory of it just as P.P. must have tried to do with the tree itself by a lethally cut tree-ring in it, and also as the Fruit Merchant later destroys, in turn, each of P.P.’s priceless auctioned woodcuts and drawings that, as a rich Fruit Merchant, he can easily afford to buy, thus to destroy them. But I can write no more about it in real-time, and I somehow do not wish to refresh anything by browsing the story again.

PS: Memory of the tree in The Tree has so far remained indelible.

PPS: Ditto