John Rayburn
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A seventeenth-century writer named Charles Perrault was sometimes called Mother Goose, an imaginary author of fairy tales. His early material was inspired and derived from earlier folk tales that he greatly embellished and improved. The Mother Goose creation was actually based on European popular tradition. She was never identified as an actual person but instead was merely a way of calling attention to popular and rural storytelling. The tales most...
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Dick Martin is leaving Scotland Yard. His final job, investigating a stolen book, takes him from a conversation with librarian Sybil Lansdown to a meeting with a Doctor Stalletti, who will become a key figure. Along the way, Martin becomes involved with a small-time crook-an expert at picking locks-who tells him about a recent lock-picking job that has made him quite nervous. But before he can pass along details, the lock-picker is murdered.
Next,...
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British journalist Louis Tracy wrote more than twenty-five novels that emphasized adventure, mystery, and romance, and this story has them all … a tale blending intrigue and murder in a rainy London. Two detectives … Winter and Furneaux, who constantly badger one another, are both quarrelsome and perceptive with Furneaux once remarking, "I can assure you it's a plot and a half."
When writer Frank Theydon emerges from a London theater, he notices...
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Tonto the Indian was breaking a trail across Thunder Mountain where it was said no horse could travel. In a cavern in Bryant's Gap, a Texas Ranger tossed in the torture of fever and infection. In the Basin, Penelope Cavendish ran to a house whose door had been chalked by Death. Tonto nodded slowly, soberly. He held out his brown hand again. In the palm there was a metal badge. The Texas Ranger's badge. The white man took it, looked at it, then closed...
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William Sydney Porter had an unusual personal history. He got a job as a teller and bookkeeper at a Texas bank when he was twenty-nine. He did what could be called some careless bookkeeping, and it appeared he may have embezzled some funds. No charges were made until about four years later when an audit found the previous shortages, and he was arrested. Bail was posted by his father-in-law, and Porter headed out to unknown places, living in Honduras...
46) The Brass Bottle
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The Brass Bottle is the story of an architect who bought an antique brass bottle to give to a professor dealing in Mideast antiquities. After the purchase, the architect's curiosity was aroused, and he removed the stopper in the bottle. And when he did, a big cloud of smoke was released, producing a major surprise when a genie emerged. His name was Fakrash el-Aamash, and he turned out to be a fairy tale–type character who wound up trying to repay...
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You will soon discover that Captain Arthur Hastings is on hand to relate confirming details of case after case. Hastings was an ongoing friend and adventure companion of the often exuberant Belgian investigator who once proudly proclaimed, "I am the greatest detective in the world."
In the tales related by Hastings, we soon discover the supremely confident little man lived up to his apparent braggadocio. His statement was rarely, if ever, challenged....
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"His career has been a long one," Arthur Conan Doyle notes of his immortal creation, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle made his observation in the 1920s, when the detective had already been thrilling readers for 40 years, and he modestly attributed his hero's success to "the patience and loyalty of the British public." Nearly a century later, the fictional sleuth continues to captivate imaginations around the world and to inspire modern-day reinterpretations....
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The Little Lame Prince by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
The Little Lame Prince is a story for children written by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik and first published in 1875. In the story, the young Prince Dolor, whose legs are paralyzed due to a childhood trauma, is exiled to a tower in a wasteland. As he grows older, a fairy godmother provides a magical traveling cloak so he can see, but not touch, the world. He uses this cloak to go on various adventures,...
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Philadelphia socialite Sara Lee leaves behind her fiancé and her comfortable life to open a kitchen in England for soldiers fighting the Great War. When she meets the mysterious Belgian spy Henri, she finds her loyalties torn-as well as her heart. Rinehart's 1918 novel draws on her experiences as a war correspondent.
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This is a whodunit that neatly fits into the history of detective fiction. It features artist Philip Trent as he unexpectedly becomes an amateur detective. Some of his carefully collected information often proved erroneous. It begins when a wealthy American plutocrat, Bigsbee Manderson, uses his finances in an attempt to establish rules controlling society. When Manderson is found murdered on the grounds of his country house in England, Trent is hired...
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Just who was Edgar Allan Poe? Of course he was an author, but there were parts of his life that were shrouded in mystery, like many of his stories. The differences between fact and fiction were intermingled and became even more so after his death.
Readers around the world had their imaginations stimulated by his tales of mystery and sometimes horror. He was able to arouse emotions by making implausible subjects and events into believable happenings....
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There were times when Bertie Wooster, the fictional narrator of these stories, was thought of as being at least a trifle feather brained. However, he had a valet who seemed to know everything about everything. These are among more than three hundred short stories written by a man who began a short-lived career in banking after his college days.
However, it didn't take long for P. G. Wodehouse to decide he didn't like that kind of job, and he began...
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Our Introduction is actually several comments by author P. G. Wodehouse. He wrote:
This book marks an epoch in my literary career. It is written in blood. It is the outpouring of a soul as deeply seared by Fate's unkindness as the fairway on the dog-leg hole of the second nine was ever seared by my iron. It is the work of a very nearly desperate man, an eighteen-handicap man who has got to look extremely slippy if he doesn't want to find himself...
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In the summer of 1850 a topsail schooner slipped into the cove under the rocky promontory of Trinidad Head in California and dropped anchor at the edge of the kelp (algae)-fields. Fifteen minutes later her small-boat deposited on the beach a man armed with long squirrel-rifle and an axe, and carrying food and clothing in a brown canvas pack. From the beach he saw the schooner raise anchor and stand out to sea before the northwest trade winds. When...
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Altogether, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories about Sherlock Holmes. Throughout, Dr. Watson (or just Watson) was included as a catalyst for Holmes's massive ego and mental processes. Eventually, Doyle felt the stories were distracting him from more serious literary work, but he did finally wind it up with the seven stories you're about to hear. In the words of Watson (Dr. John H. Watson, MD), we have the pleasure of...
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In H. Rider Haggard's 1885 debut novel, King Solomon's Mines adventurer Allan Quatermain is approached by aristocrat Sir Henry Curtis and his friend Captain Good to join them on an expedition into the heart of Africa. In search of Sir Henry's brother who disappeared looking for King Solomon's lost mines, the trio overcome tremendous odds to stumble upon a lost civilization that holds the key to unimaginable treasure. Considered to be the first of...
58) The Lost World
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Originally published serially in 1912, "The Lost World" is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tale of discovery and adventure. The story begins with the narrator, the curious and intrepid reporter Edward Malone, meeting Professor Challenger, a strange and brilliant paleontologist who insists that he has found dinosaurs still alive deep in the Amazon. Malone agrees to accompany Challenger, as well as Challenger's unconvinced colleague Professor Summerlee,...
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H.G. Wells' original masterpiece now includes a newly established text, a full biographical essay on the author, a list of further reading, and detailed notes. Famous for the mistaken panic that ensued from Orson Welles' 1938 radio dramatization, "The War of the Worlds" remains one of the most influential of all science fiction works.