![]() However, if they have the good fortune to give pleasure to anyone, at anytime or place, their author will be very satisfied." I was of course too impatient to wait for winter nights, but summer evenings sufficed just as well if the author of these knew just how much pleasure these works have brought to me over the years, I suspect he'd be very satisfied indeed. This would be my ideal atmosphere for such stories, if an author might choose his time and place as an artist does the light and hanging of his picture. In the preface, Conan Doyle writes "In the present collection those have been brought together which are concerned with the grotesque and with the terrible - such tales as might well be read 'round the fire' upon a winter's night. These are some of his creepiest and most suspenseful works, at times surpassing even the Sherlock Holmes stories in quality (Holmes makes a few uncredited cameo appearances in these stories, but is otherwise absent). I struggled a bit with some of the vocabulary and resorted to keeping a sticky note inside the book to note words to Google later, so besides the actual story, this might be a good book. ![]() The story had an exciting and satisfying conclusion for me personally. Every bit as engaging as other Sherlock Holmes works I've loved, both old and new. I recently came across a copy of the 1991 Chronicle Books edition and bought it, knowing I'd enjoy a re-read of the stories. 5/5: This book was so much better than I had expected. I suspect the book I took out of the local public library most often during my middle school years was an edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Round the Fire Stories, first published in 1908 and reprinted several times since. Finally, Playing with Fire presaged the author's own later obsession with spiritualism. Finally, some were quite horrific and Poe-esque (especially The Leather Funnel, Pot of Caviare, The Sealed Room, perhaps also The Brazilian Cat and The Fiend of the Cooperage). ![]() Some others were a little more pedestrian or rather predictable in their resolution (The Club-Footed Grocer, The Usher of Lea House School, The Brown Hand, Jelland's Voyage). Implausibility was also a feature of one or two others, such as The Jew's Breastplate. Some of the stories are crying out to be Sherlock Holmes stories (Man with the Watches, The Black Doctor, B.24 and possibly The Japanned Box and The Beetle Hunter) while The Lost Special alluded to Holmes (as an unnamed amateur investigator who says that one must eliminate the impossible and then whatever remains is the truth, no matter how improbable), though I found the resolution of the mystery implausible in this case. A fairly interesting selection of mystery stories, a collection first published in 1908. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |