Tag: Short Stories

Mr Mulliner stories – P G Wodehouse

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Everyone has heard of the Jeeves and Wooster stories by PG Wodehouse and many know his tales set at Blandings Castle, less well known are the ones relating to Mr Mulliner’s numerous relatives as recounted by Mr Mulliner himself in the bar-parlour of The Anglers Rest. Altogether there are three books of short stories and whilst I was originally planning on just dealing with the first one ‘Meet Mr Mulliner’ once started I ended up reading all three one after another so it only feels right to deal with them all in one blog. Each story starts in the bar with various customers present all of whom, apart from Mr Mulliner, are unnamed and are simply referred to by what they are drinking, as for example this passage immediately before Mr Mulliner first interrupts the conversation from ‘The Reverent Wooing of Archibald’ which is the first story in ‘Mr Mulliner Speaking’

“I can remember the days,” said the Gin-and-Ginger-Ale, “when every other girl you met stood about six feet two in her dancing-shoes, and had as many curves as a Scenic Railway. Now they are all five foot nothing and you can’t see them sideways. Why is this?”
The Draught Stout shook his head.
“Nobody can say. It’s the same with dogs. One moment the world is full of pugs as far as the eye can reach; the next, not a pug in sight, only Pekes and Alsatians. Odd!”
The Small Bass and the Double-Whisky-and-Splash admitted that these things were very mysterious, and supposed we should never know the reason for them. Probably we were not meant to know.

This story is one of my favourites of the twenty seven featuring Mr Mulliner spread over the three volumes, Archibald is one of his nephews and he is in awe of a young woman called Aurelia Cammarleigh whom he is terrified to ask out, he is also far from bright in fact he is described in typical Wodebouseian dead pan prose as follows:

Even at the Drones Club, where the average intellect is not high, it was often said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers.

This inclusion of The Drones Club, which also includes Bertie Wooster as one of its members, beautifully ties this group of books to others from PG Wodehouse and adds some familiarity for the reader. The Wooster books started with ‘The Inimitable Jeeves’ in 1923 although there were some short stories before then, whilst Mr Mulliner first appeared in 1927 with the other two volumes being 1929 and 1933 respectively. Like most of Wodehouse’s books they are set in an indefinable period, one that had certainly vanished by the 1930’s, if indeed it had ever truly existed, with large houses hosting guests for weekends or even weeks at a time and young women whose main preoccupation appears to be the finding of a suitable, i.e. rich, husband, with the males trying for the most part to avoid them. Stories of that type certainly do appear in the Mulliner books, such as Archibald, but for the most part Mr Mulliner’s relatives do actually do some sort of work although they often have sufficient funds to exist without it.

Another great story concerns a property called Honeysuckle Cottage which is inherited, on the death of his aunt, by a distant cousin of Mr Mulliner, James. Now James is a writer of hard boiled detective stories and his aunt wrote what is described as ‘Squashily Sentimental’ tales so they never really got on. However he gained the house in her will and when he arrived he found that it was imbued with the spirit of the stories she wrote, so that things happened as if he was living in an unbearable romantic stor. It even threatened to disturb his books, with him introducing a girlfriend for his normally disinterested detective. The slow takeover of James by the aura of the house is hysterical as he is aware it is happening but powerless to resist until finally… Well that would be telling, Honeysuckle Cottage is the last story in ‘Meet Mr Mulliner’.

These three books are from the excellent Everyman’s Library series which collects for the first time all of Wodehouse’s novels and short stories in one uniform edition comprising of ninety nine beautifully presented volumes.I shall probably eventually get almost all of them, with the exception of the twenty one titles which I already have that were published by the Folio Society.

If you are intrigued as to what it is Mr Mulliner is drinking as he isn’t referred to by his drink of choice but by name. His favourite tipple is a hot scotch and lemon, a drink which I for one would go a long way to avoid unless as a cure for a cold, and that only on the basis that it may not cure the cold but it will help towards you forgetting about it. It’s been great fun exploring another set of stories by Wodehouse only one of which I had read before. It occurs to me that the setting of all the stories in the form of tales in a bar by the noted raconteur and regular Mr Mulliner possibly inspired Arthur C Clarke to write his ‘Tales from The White Hart’ in 1957 which I have touched on before in a blog from eight years ago ‘Fables From The Fountain‘.

Murder by the Book – Martin Edwards (ed)

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Part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series, a collection of reprints of crime books originally published from the late Victorian era to the 1960’s but now long out of print. I love the way that this can introduce modern readers, who don’t have access to collections such as my Penguin library, to forgotten stories or even forgotten authors. The series editor is Martin Edwards and he usually provides a brief introduction to each book introducing the author and any unfamiliar context needed. This book is a great starting point, as it is one of the anthologies of short stories, in this case featuring sixteen authors, some still well known such as Ngaio Marsh, Nicholas Blake and even A A Milne but others probably only familiar to fellow bibliophiles (book collectors). I wrote about Milne’s only detective novel back in August 2018, and that blog also includes one of G D H and Margaret Cole’s crime novels, a husband and wife writing team who produced the first story in this collection, Milne’s own contribution here is interesting as it has a novelist talking with a police Chief Constable and saying that the jobs are similar in that they both have a series of items and need to create a story that includes them all:

I could contrive some sort of story out of any assortment of facts, a spot of candlegrease, a badly sharpened pencil, a canary that wouldn’t sing anymore and a man who went to bed one night in his wooden leg. Even as he said this Coleby began to wonder what the story would be. Better start with the canary…

Not all the stories are tales of murder, some like one of my favourites in this collection, the one by E C Bentley featuring his regular amateur detective Philip Trent is far more of a mystery but has an ingenious solution which is based around a mix of ornamental rock gardens and Lewis Carroll. Not a sentence I ever expected to type. One detective I was sort of expecting to find here but didn’t is Lord Peter Wimsey, but thinking about it he is famously a bibliophile but a book is rarely so significant to the plot as to make it into this collection, also Dorothy L Sayers is still a very well known author so is unlikely to feature in a series of books which by their nature are reprinting the more neglected writers. A A Milne of course isn’t neglected for his children’s works but sadly his excellent plays and brief forays into detective fiction are nowadays a lot more obscure. Another great read was ‘Malice Domestic’ by Philip MacDonald, I’ve got a few of his books but oddly haven’t featured him before in this blog, this short story is one of the few I can think of where the resolution doesn’t occur until almost the last sentence and it’s a brilliant twist. But on that subject I really have to mention ‘A Man and His Mother in Law’ where it really is the last line where the whole story turns.

This selection of sixteen stories are well worth reading, there were a couple which I didn’t think were as strong as others but that will be true with any group of stories. The British Library Crime Collection is a superb way to explore the less well known byways of crime fiction and I’m a subscriber so I get a new book every month along with a matching bookmark and a piece of ephemera related to the book especially created for subscribers. If you like murder mysteries then I heartily recommend this service.

9th & 13th – Jonathan Coe

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I needed something short this week, the last eight books have averaged 335 pages each, which is a lot to read and write about every week. This slim volume is the complete collection of short stories by British novelist Jonathan Coe and even then it is so short he still had to add a piece of journalism to get the book to much more than a pamphlet. There are three short stories and as Coe explains in the introduction this is mainly due to how difficult he finds writing “over a short distance” and finds that even if he starts out to write a short story he gets involved in the various possibilities and ends up with a novel instead. I’m glad he included the extra article especially as it is the first time it had appeared in English, it was written for the French film periodical ‘Cahiers du Cinéma‘ (Notebooks on cinema), as I really enjoyed it. Knowing that there wasn’t much material to work with Coe originally considered making the entire volume a collection of pieces of journalism from the seven or eight years he worked in that field before the novels took over, but rejected that idea:

it provided a perfect moment to rescue some lost journalistic gems from undeserved obscurity. Having trawled through my hard disk, however, I’ve reached the conclusion that obscurity is exactly what most of that writing does deserve.

Ivy and Her Nonsense

The first story is a fictionalised version of Coe’s memories of a childhood Christmas spent at his grandparents home in Shropshire when he was seven years old, he grew up in the south west corner of Birmingham so Shropshire was only just over the border. It is clearly a happy time and the book is dedicated to his grandfather in tribute even though he did advise Coe to give up writing and get a job in teaching, but that was before he started to become successful and sadly his grandfather didn’t live to see him published. The story is told from the young boy’s perspective, so not really understanding what is going on around him, his grandmother had been on the jury of a murder trial just a week or so earlier and the adults were trying not to discuss the case in front of Jonathan and his sister whilst the children were fascinated by anything they could glean.

9th & 13th

With story two we leap across the Atlantic to New York with a piano player telling the story of how he met a young woman, new into town and what might have happened if things had gone as he wishes they had. Wonderfully this story is available in a recording where the explanation of the chord described is played, which helped me a lot as I can’t play so was struggling with the imagery. You can hear the story here.

V.O.

The title stands for Voice-over and it only becomes clear why near the end of this quite poignant love story set at a horror and fantasy film festival which William is attending as part of the panel of judges, in his case specifically with regard to the soundtrack as he has made a career as a composer. The films however are rather mediocre and not to his taste, being rather more gore spattered than his normal viewing. Coe clearly had fun coming up with unpromising film ideas, my favourite being the “hilarious necrophiliac comedy called One Corpse at a Time, Please!”, although like William I’m quite sure I don’t want to see it. We start with William being interviewed by Pascale although the interview is soon forgotten and morphs into something more serious without either of them apparently realising where it is going, the denouement is beautifully written and perfectly ends the tale.

Diary of an Obsession

Finally we reach the piece of journalism and it explores a fascination that Coe developed from childhood with an obscure film by Billy Wilder called ‘The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’. It follows his rising interest from first seeing a novelisation of the film for sale in a Cornish bookshop in 1972 whilst aged eleven during a family holiday, and frankly the cover design with Sherlock Holmes framing a half naked woman horrified him as he loved the Holmes stories and this clearly wasn’t an appropriate interpretation. Three years later the film was broadcast on the television and he watched it, somewhat confused by the story line which seemed to jump around rather a lot but drawn in by the music soundtrack by a composer he had never heard of. Eventually over the years Coe would grow up and marry but still was drawn back to the film much to the bemusement of his wife especially after he bought a copy of the book and whilst reading it discovered that a lot was missing from the film. It turned out that studio executives had made Wilder heavily chop the film he had made to the point that it barely made any sense to the viewer and Coe then became obsessed by finding out if any of the edited out parts still exist. He wrote the article that this part of the book features in 1998, but there is a postscript as in 2004 he sent the article to Wilder himself, now aged ninety four, and asked if he could do a follow up interview. Wilder was delighted that somebody was still interested in this largely bowdlerised work but declined the interview. The article is really well written as you follow Coe finding out more and more about the film and its music over the years so I would very much like to see more of his journalism rescued from obscurity.

Camelot – Edited by Jane Yolen

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This collection of new short stories was published in 1995 by Philomel Books which is now a children’s imprint of Penguin Books but at the time was a division of the Putnam and Grosset Group, Philomel does seem to have had a varied history of owners over the years since it was formed by Ann Beneduce in 1980 taking the poetic name for a nightingale and has always specialised in children’s titles which I hadn’t realised when I picked it off the shelves to read. Frankly the only reason I own the book is that it contains the first printing of the Terry Pratchett story ‘Once and Future’, I used to buy various anthologies just to track down Pratchett short stories but since 2012 when ‘A Blink of the Screen’ was published which gathered presumably all his fiction short stories together in one volume I’ve stopped the hunt. Pratchett’s story tells the tale of the pulling of a sword from the stone only in his version it’s controlled by a time traveller who has built an electromagnet into the rock so that he could control who succeeded, needless to say his plan doesn’t work out a expected. Interestingly in ‘A Blink of The Screen’ Pratchett states:

There’s a lot more of this deep on a hard drive somewhere. It may yet become a novel, but it started as a short story in Camelot, edited by Jane Yolen, in 1995. I’d wanted to write it for nearly ten years, I really ought to dig out those old discs again…

Sadly he didn’t live to have another go at it.

Of the nine other stories, and one song by Jane Yolen, the only other author I have heard of is Anne McCaffrey, famous for her Dragon Riders of Pern series of novels, and her offering ‘Black Horses for a King’ is probably the best of the collection, closely followed by Pratchett. Frankly the McCaffrey story is strong partly because she largely ignored the brief and simply wrote a good short story with nothing to make it Camelot apart from the leader of the warriors being called Lord Artos, which is probably close enough to Arthur to be included. The story is actually the first part of the novel ‘Black Horses for a King’ by McCaffrey which came out in 1996 so either she was inspired to continue the tale, and develop it into the story of the early days of British cavalry, in a way that Pratchett considered doing with his contribution or she was already working on the novel and simply extracted part of it when asked to supply something for this collection.

The real joy in the book are the lovely illustrations by Winslow Pels who has just the right amount of mystical whimsy for the book. The one above is for ‘Excalibur’ by Anne E Crompton who was sixty five when she wrote this story and a well established writer of children’s stories although this is the only example of her work I own, I quite enjoyed it but not enough to seek out any of her other works.

The other stories included along with Amesbury Song by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple are:

  • The Changing of the Shrew by Kathleen Kudlinski
  • Wild Man by Diana L Paxton
  • Gwenbwyfar by Lynne Pledger
  • Holly and Ivy by Jaes D Macdonald and Debra Doyle
  • The Raven by Nancy Springer
  • All the Iron of Heaven by Mark W Tiedemann
  • Our Hour of Need by Greg Costikyan

I cannot find any examples of this book being reprinted after coming out in 1995, so I’m guessing it wasn’t a great seller and as the best parts are available elsewhere it has probably had its day.

The Fall of The House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe

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Another beautiful volume from the Vintage Collectors Classic series by Penguin Books and easily the most comprehensive collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories that I have read so far. Below you can see the contents list of this book, which includes thirty one tales including all the most famous ones such as the one that lends its title to this collection ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ along with ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and one of the very earliest detective stories ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. all of which I’ve read before but it was a delight to encounter them again after a gap of several decades.

Poe was an outstanding writer and very much out on his own stylistically in the early 1800’s, he was born in 1809 and died, appropriately in mysterious circumstances, in 1849 after he was found delirious and wearing clothes that didn’t belong to him, but was never sufficiently coherent afterwards to explain what had happened to him before he died. But back to 1831 and after his court martial from West Point military college, which he deliberately engineered as a means of getting out of the army, he turned to journalism to earn a living. He had been writing poetry since 1824 but his first short story was Metzengerstein from 1832 and that story opens this collection and is an indication of the horror/mystery style that would mark most of his subsequent works. I was surprised however by ‘The Man That Was Used Up’, which definitely falls into the category of comedy although with a satirical twist that only Poe would have thought of. I mentioned ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ as an early detective story and in this collection I found the two follow up tales of Poe’s detective Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin of Paris, these are, the largely unsuccessful, and overly long, story ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ and the much better ‘The Purloined Letter’. Dupin is so obviously a basis for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes including in Rue Morgue a passage where he interrupts his unnamed companion and narrators thoughts just as Holmes does in ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’ written in 1893, fifty two years after Poe’s tale, indeed Doyle references Poe in the story. ‘The Purloined Letter’ also has shadows of Sherlock Holmes but the less said about ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ the better, although it does have the distinction of being the first ever fictional detective story based on a real crime.

Still onto the contents list of this collection and a very well collated selection it is too:

I’m not going to go though all of these stories, I heartily recommend you have a go yourself, some are not as good as others, as you would expect from any book like this but almost all are well worth reading. I particularly enjoyed ‘The Gold-Bug’ which explains simply cryptology on its way to the discovery of pirate treasure and the humour in ‘The Sphinx’ which I cannot explain without giving away the whole story. ‘Mesmeric Revelation’ and ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’ both deal with the concept of placing a dying man in a hypnotic state just as he was about to expire although the effects of such a trance is markedly different in the two stories. There are murders aplenty and vengeful spirits abound if you like your reading dark and unexpected then there is much in Poe to explore.

Below is the contents list for the collection I already had of Poe’s writings entitled ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ and published in 1938. As can be seen the best known works are all here along with ‘Hop-frog’ which is the only tale in this volume that is missing from my latest purchase, so I have quickly read again that short story and enjoyed the tale of the revenge of two captive dwarfs who were being abused and made to entertain a medieval king and his courtiers. Yet again Poe surprises with his imagination and this story more than holds its own with the ones in the new book.

Jorrocks’ Jaunts & Jollities – RS Surtees

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In 1949 The Folio Society decided to have a go at resurrecting the works of Robert Smith Surtees who had sadly dropped out of fashion since his heyday in the Victorian period with an edition of his first book, indeed his books used to be so well known that Virginia Woolf referred to this very title in the 1925 novel ‘Mrs Dalloway’ as her eponymous character was searching for a book suitable to take to a nursing home.

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing. Think, for example, of the woman she admired most, Lady Bexborough, opening the bazaar.

There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria, all spread open. Ever so many books there were; but none that seemed exactly right to take to Evelyn Whitbread in her nursing home.

Frankly if I was in a nursing home then Surtees may well be just the right author for my convalescence as the books are well written, with excellent observations on country life and Jorrocks is one of the great comic characters of the early Victorian age. This book was printed in only the third year of The Folio Society’s existence and was intended as a one off from this author in companion with a similarly designed edition of The Compleat Angler by Izaac Walton. However it was so popular that they subsequently published the remaining seven books by Surtees at the rate of one a year, making Surtees the first author to have their complete works published by the society.

John Jorrocks is described as a grocer in the book but as he operates out of his own warehouse rather than a shop he is probably a fairly wealthy wholesaler based in London. He is a keen fox hunter, riding with the Surrey hounds based at the small country town of Croydon about ten miles from central London. Anyone who knows Croydon nowadays, it has a population of around two hundred thousand and has been largely subsumed by Greater London, will find the rural descriptions of the place in the 1830’s difficult to imagine but this really was the case back then. Jorrocks’ regular companion is Mr Stubbs who is normally simply referred to as The Yorkshireman and one of the funniest passages in this book describes a ride from the middle of London by both of these gentlemen to join the hunt on a particularly foggy day in the city with the chaos they cause or get involved in. As Surtees is not well known nowadays I’m going to include a couple of examples of his style. The Yorkshireman never seems to have any money but is quite happy to live off Jorrocks as in this plan for a weekend trip.

“Now to business—Mrs. J—— is away at Tooting, as you perhaps knows, and I’m all alone in Great Coram Street, with the key of the cellar, larder, and all that sort of thing, and I’ve a werry great mind to be off on a jaunt—what say you?” “Not the slightest objection,” replied the Yorkshireman, “on the old principle of you finding cash, and me finding company.” “Why, now I’ll tell you, werry honestly, that I should greatly prefer your paying your own shot; but, however, if you’ve a mind to do as I do, I’ll let you stand in the half of a five-pound note and whatever silver I have in my pocket,” pulling out a great handful as he spoke, and counting up thirty-two and sixpence. “Very good,” replied the Yorkshireman when he had finished, “I’m your man;—and not to be behindhand in point of liberality, I’ve got threepence that I received in change at the cigar divan just now, which I will add to the common stock, so that we shall have six pounds twelve and ninepence between us.” “Between us!” exclaimed Mr. Jorrocks, “now that’s so like a Yorkshireman. I declare you Northerns seem to think all the world are asleep except yourselves;

Jorrocks also loves his food and drink and there are long descriptions of meals and consuming numerous bottles of wine and port in one sitting. I particularly enjoyed the contrast between the eating manners of the English and French when Jorrocks takes The Yorkshireman with him on a trip to Paris and the slow appearance of course after course in France confuses him rather than the everything on the table to start with which was then the preference in England and he assumes he is going to starve due to the lack of visible food. Early on in the book he invites The Yorkshireman round for breakfast before heading out to the hunt.

About a yard and a half from the fire was placed the breakfast table; in the centre stood a magnificent uncut ham, with a great quartern loaf on one side and a huge Bologna sausage on the other; besides these there were nine eggs, two pyramids of muffins, a great deal of toast, a dozen ship-biscuits, and half a pork-pie, while a dozen kidneys were spluttering on a spit before the fire, and Betsy held a gridiron covered with mutton-chops on the top; altogether there was as much as would have served ten people. “Now, sit down,” said Jorrocks, “and let us be doing, for I am as hungry as a hunter. Hope you are peckish too; what shall I give you? tea or coffee?—but take both—coffee first and tea after a bit. If I can’t give you them good, don’t know who can. You must pay your devours, as we say in France, to the ‘am, for it is an especial fine one, and do take a few eggs with it; there, I’ve not given you above a pound of ‘am, but you can come again, you know—waste not want not. Now take some muffins, do, pray. Batsey, bring some more cream, and set the kidneys on the table, the Yorkshireman is getting nothing to eat. Have a chop with your kidney, werry luxterous—I could eat an elephant stuffed with grenadiers, and wash them down with a ocean of tea; but pray lay in to the breakfast, or I shall think you don’t like it. There, now take some tea and toast or one of those biscuits, or whatever you like; would a little more ‘am be agreeable? Batsey, run into the larder and see if your Missis left any of that cold chine of pork last night—and hear, bring the cold goose, and any cold flesh you can lay hands on, there are really no wittles on the table.

A note should be made regarding the fifteen colour plates included in the book as they were done by a technique that had largely disappeared by 1949. The plates, which are those by Henry Alken originally included in the book back in 1838, were in fact printed in monochrome and individually hand coloured by Maud Johnson who went on the do the same for the further seven volumes Folio printed of Surtees’ works. The Folio Society doesn’t include printing numbers for their books in the various bibliographies they have published but it can be imagined what a huge amount of work this involved for one person, but the effort was worth it as these illustrations really stand out. The pages for the prints are noticeably thicker and stiffer than the pages of text presumably to allow for Johnson’s use of watercolours to do the colouring without distorting the paper. Other than special very limited editions these eight volumes are the last books with hand coloured plates printed in England that I am aware of although I’d love to know of any others. The Folio Society continued to use the original plates throughout the series of reprints which was finally complete in 1956 with this being the only one illustrated by Alken, most of the others are done by John Leech.

The Mirror of Ink – Jorge Luis Borges

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2005 was Penguin Books seventieth anniversary and to mark the occasion they published seventy books at £1.50 each which were largely extracts from other works in their vast back catalogue as is this one although this is collated from several collections of short stories. With Borges though, as he is mainly a writer of short stories, you ended up with seven complete works in the book and as an introduction to his literary output this book is excellent. The art of writing a short story is extremely difficult as in a short space you must not only have a beginning, a middle, and an end but also express an idea or indeed several which will leave the reader satisfied and in all seven of these Borges has proved himself well able to meet those aims. Knowing that he was Argentinian I was expecting South American themes but instead the first two ‘The Mirror of Ink’ and ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ are set in the Middle East, the third ‘The Library of Babel’ could frankly be anywhere and everywhere. The fourth ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ is in Ireland, ‘The Witness’ is probably medieval England, ‘Ragnarok’ could also be anywhere, whilst the final story ‘Blue Tigers’ is based in rural India. A linking theme, if there is one, is the somewhat mystical and fantastic ideas behind all of these stories, that and the definite quality of the prose. I hadn’t read any of Jorge Luis Borges before this slim volume and indeed this is the only book of his work that I possess but I definitely need to read more.

Sadly Borges suffered from fading eyesight for many years and became blind at the end of the 1950’s however he continued to write, dictating stories initially to his mother who took on the role of his secretary until her death. The last two stories in this book were written after his blindness and there is certainly no diminution of the power of his writing. I just want to pick out a couple of the stories that I particularly enjoyed:

‘The Library of Babel’ is an exploration of the concepts of infinity in that the library described contains all possible books that are exactly 410 pages long with a fixed format of forty lines per page and eighty characters per line where a character is one of twenty two letters of the alphabet, a full stop, a comma or a space and all combinations of these appear at least once in one of the infinite series of books stored in the apparently infinite number of replicating hexagonal galleries that make up the library. The concept of a library that because it has all combinations of the twenty five characters and therefore contains books of apparently complete nonsense but must also due to randomness have every book that could possibly exist expressing every theme and also arguing both for and against every idea is beguiling. The impossibility of ever finding a specific work is also clearly spelled out along with some of the oddities of infinite series in that a revolution in the past had destroyed countless volumes but that this didn’t matter because books survived elsewhere in the library which differed from the vandalised editions by as little as a punctuation mark somewhere within them.

‘Blue Tigers’ also drew me in with a weird mathematical theme, the tigers are not flesh and blood but a collection of odd blue disks that the narrator finds on top of the plateau of a sacred hill. These discs are uncountable, initially he thought he had around ten of them but when examining them found far more. Sometimes there would be as little as three but holding these few and then letting them fall could reveal hundreds. The narrator spends nights trying to find a pattern to the ever increasing, and decreasing, quantities without any success and eventually, to save his sanity, he gives them to a blind beggar who seems to understand in someway that he is the fitting custodian.

Naturally the four mathematical operations – adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing – were impossible. The stones resisted arithmetic as they did the calculation of probability. Forty disks, divided, might become nine, those nine in turn divided might yield three hundred. I do not know how much they weighed, I did not has recourse to a scale, but I’m sure their weight was constant, and light. Their colour was always the same blue.

As 2005 was the seventieth anniversary it is clear that this year (2025) is the ninetieth and again Penguin have marked their birthday with a set of books, this time ninety of them at £5.99 each, some of which will be featured in this blog as the year goes on. The actual anniversary is the end of July so I am dedicating my August theme this year to the first four Penguin titles, which I will be reading in their first Penguin editions something I don’t do often due to the fragility of these ninety year old paperbacks.

Holy Terrors – Arthur Machen

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it’s a riff on Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan,” which is one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language. Mine isn’t anywhere near that good, but I loved the chance to put neurotic behavior—obsessive/compulsive disorder—together with the idea of a monster-filled macroverse. That was a good combination. As for Machen vs. Lovecraft: sure, Lovecraft was ultimately better, because he did more with those concepts, but “The Great God Pan” is more reader-friendly. And Machen was there first. He wrote “Pan” in 1895, when HPL was five years old.

The above quote is by Stephen King and if anyone can judge a horror story then he is probably the man, it can be found on his website here as part of one of his ‘self interviews’. Sadly I don’t have a copy of ‘The Great God Pan’ as this is the only book I have by Arthur Machen, which is actually the pen name of Welsh fantasy and horror writer Arthur Llewellyn Jones. Even Lovecraft regarded Machen as a great in the horror story genre naming him amongst the four modern masters of the style and he was highly influential in the development of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories. This book consists of fourteen short stories which whilst none of them are of the horror genre give a glimpse of the abilities of this popular writer many of whose works are still in print almost eighty years after his death. Indeed several bear the mark of another writer who came later that of Roald Dahl and his ‘Tales of the Unexpected’.

As is often the case with collections of short stories the better examples are the longer ones, especially in this set, the final tale of which, that I will also come to last, is excellent. The stories range from a story about a clergyman who vanishes without trace from his home for six weeks only to re-appear exactly as he was last seen by his housekeeper working at his desk and with no feeling that he had stepped away for more than a few minutes. One story I particularly enjoyed is ‘The Tree of Life’ which tells of a seriously unwell man running the lands of his estate from his sick bed by communicating his wishes via his land agent. The ending of the tale completely upends the story so far but in a completely believable manner. ‘The Bright Boy’ and ‘The Happy Children’ are the closest we get to horror in this collection with the first story of a man with the appearance of a boy and the odd occurrences that happen in the vicinity of the house where he lives with his supposed parents. The happy children tells however of a journalist unexpectedly coming across the spirits of dead children in the streets of a Yorkshire town before they process up to the abbey ruins. There is also the story an unspecified ceremony being performed at a strange stone in the woods that I wish was longer as the atmosphere is so well created and then it stops leaving me wanting more and ‘The Soldiers Rest’ where it gradually becomes clear what sort of rest he is having. All of these are wonderfully written but it is the final story of this collection along with one that is sadly missing that cement Machen in his position as a truly great writer of short stories never mind his horror novels.

The one that is missing is ‘The Bowmen’ which was first published on 14th September 1914 and tells the story of a horde of phantom bowmen from the Battle of Agincourt, five centuries earlier, which came to the aid of British troops at the Battle of Mons. This story, as it was published in The Evening News newspaper which Machen worked for at the time became believed as true and is the foundation of The Angel of Mons and evidence of divine intervention on behalf of the British soldiers. No matter how often Machen tried to say that he made it up he was rarely believed and the tale was spread around the world as fact. The story that completes this set is however ‘The Great Return’ and this is the first published story telling of the existence of the Holy Grail in modern times and the miracles that occur along with its reappearance. The story which along with Machen’s novel taking the same theme ‘The Secret Glory’, which he had already written by then but which wasn’t published until 1922, would clearly influence writers such as Dan Brown in his Da Vinci Code and George Lucas with Indiana Jones amongst others.

You can find out more about Machen via ‘The Friends of Arthur Machen‘ an international literary society dedicated to the works of this remarkable author.

Short Stories – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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I’ve been meaning to read Fyodor Dostoyevsky for a long time but in common with a lot of other Russian novelists his books are somewhat daunting for a blog which appears every week, just checking my shelves I find:

  • ‘Crime and Punishment’ – 559 pages
  • ‘The Devils’ – 669 pages
  • ‘The Idiot’ – 661 pages
  • ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ – 2 volumes totalling 913 pages
  • and a volume containing two short stories and a novella ‘The Cossacks’ – 334 pages

It was then I spotted that I had two volumes from the Penguin Little Black Classics series which would give me an entry point to Dostoyevsky to see if I like him as an author. The first one is number 44 from this series ‘The Meek One’ which only has this one short story in it. The title is more usually translated as ‘A Gentle Creature’, and it is just 57 pages, still quite long for a short story, but a lot more approachable. Warning there are spoilers in this review if you want to read the stories first I cannot find ‘The Meek One’ but ‘White Nights’ is on Project Gutenberg here and ‘Bobok’ can be found here.

‘The Meek One’ begins with the un-named narrator contemplating the body of his equally un-named young wife laid out on a table in their home waiting for the undertaker to arrive the next day and we then go back over the story of how the two met and the short and largely unhappy marriage that they had. They had originally come into contact with one another as she would often come and pawn items in his pawnbrokers to raise money to advertise her services as a governess or more latterly almost any job to enable her to leave her two aunts. At the time of their marriage he was forty one and she just sixteen, however he regarded himself as her saviour from a planned marriage arranged by these aunts to a shopkeeper in his fifties who had killed his two previous wives whilst drunk and was looking for a third. The relationship between the couple seems to have deteriorated very quickly after the wedding and it is a sad story he tells of long silences and barely communicating through the winter including a time when she places a loaded gun to his head whilst thinking he was asleep but doesn’t pull the trigger. In the spring he makes an unexpected move to rescue the marriage suggesting a journey to France but it is whilst out getting the passports that she commits suicide.

Russian writing has an often undeserved reputation for gloominess and this short story doesn’t go any way to repudiate that impression, maybe the next book will have something more uplifting.

The second and third of Dostoyevsky’s short stories in volume 118 of the Penguin Little Black Classics series has ‘White Nights’ paired with ‘Bobok’. ‘White Nights’ is 86 pages long, ‘Bobok’ is the shortest at just 27 pages.

‘White Nights’ tells the story of a twenty something recluse in St Petersburg and yet again we don’t have his name, this lack of a name seems to increase the isolation of Dostoyevsky’s characters and this time he is pretty well the only un-named person in the story. He spends his days wandering around the city imagining having conversations with the people and even the houses he sees but in fact the only person he communicates with is his maid Matrona who is supposed to look after his apartment but hasn’t even removed the cobweb on the ceiling, mind you neither has he. One day whilst out on one of his aimless walks he sees a pretty young girl crying on a bridge and this time builds up the courage to approach her, however she evades him only to be threatened by an older passerby and our narrator steps in the save her. So begins the four days of happiness that he is to enjoy as they get to know one another, he explains that he is a lonely dreamer whilst she tells of a unhappy time living with her blind grandmother who pins their clothes together so that she can be sure Nastenka is not wandering off. She also tells of a lodger they had a year ago whom she fell in love with but who had to return to Moscow but promised to return and marry her when he left. The narrator rapidly also falls in love with her but agrees to carry a letter to a family who know the ex-lodger to see if he has returned and is still planning on restarting their relationship whilst secretly hoping that he has found somebody else in Moscow. The story is well written with the narrator regarding himself as the hero almost of a book of his life, indeed Nastenka rebukes him for telling his story almost as if he was reading it out. Sadly the ex-lodger does return and the narrator returns to his apartment downcast looking to another fifteen years of loneliness but Matrona does at least remove the cobweb.

‘Bobok’ is easily the strangest of the three stories and to my mind the best due to its originality, although it starts out normally enough with our narrator, this time with a name, Ivan Ivanych, going to the funeral of a distant relative and avoiding the lunch afterwards, takes to lying down on one of the long stones in the graveyard for a rest. All of a sudden he hears voices, muffled but intelligible, and wonders where they may be coming from. Gradually he realises that they are coming from the graves around him and it appears that the dead have a second short life in the grave where they can communicate with each other for two or three months, possibly up to six before they decompose too far. I loved this story as I hadn’t read anything like it before, The various conversations start off reflecting the status of the characters as they were before they died but gradually they decide to throw off their previous lives and simply talk to one another until they suddenly fall silent when they become aware he is listening. Another possible reason for our narrator hearing them is given in the opening lines of the story:

The day before yesterday Semyon Ardalyonovich suddenly comes out with: ‘And would you kindly tell me Ivan Ivanych will the day come when you’ll be sober?’

All three tales are taken from the Penguin Classics volume ‘The Gambler and Other Stories’ translated by Ronald Meyer which also includes the short stories ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, ‘A Christmas Party and a Wedding’ and ‘A Nasty Story’ along with its title novella ‘The Gambler’ which was actually written by Dostoyevsky in order to pay off his debts from losses at roulette.

Short Stories – H G Wells

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At 474 pages this is an excellent selection of the short stories and three of the short novels from the pen of H G Wells, a man most people think of as a Victorian science fiction writer but who was much more than that not only in output but also his timeline as he survived until after WWII, dying in 1946 at the age of seventy nine. So why is Wells so popularly thought of as being earlier than he truly was, well his best known works were certainly written during the Victorian era, such as ‘The Time Machine’ (1895), ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ (1896), ‘The Invisible Man’ (1897), and ‘The War of the Worlds’ (1898) however at the turn of the century he largely moved away from science fiction towards more contemporary novels such as ‘Kipps’ and ‘Tono-Bungay’ and later almost abandoned fiction altogether and produced his ‘A Short History of the World’ which attempted to summarise all of history into a single volume, I also have the earlier ‘The Outline of History’ in two illustrated volumes and the odd ‘Crux Ansata’ from 1943 which is basically a polemic against the Catholic Church.

This book was published by Flame Tree Publishing in 2017 and was the first of their Gothic and Fantasy series of books to be dedicated to just one author, closely followed by H P Lovecraft. Along with what would normally be regarded as short stories the collection includes three short novels, or novellas, ‘The Invisible Man’, ‘The Time Machine’ and ‘The Story of the Days to Come’. I have previously reviewed The Invisible Man as part of the August 2018 review of the first set of ten Penguin crime novels, and it was the inclusion of The Time Machine that prompted me to pick up this collection after last weeks ‘The H-Bomb Girl’ including as that does a time travelling character called Miss Wells which is clearly a reference to H G Wells. Along with these three novellas are thirty three short stories which vary from a simple crime caper ‘The Hammerpond Park Burglary’ through murder ‘The Cone’ amongst others and but the majority fall into the loose category of intriguing fantasy but I wouldn’t describe many of them as Gothic in the way that Lovecraft is definitely Gothic Fantasy, the one significant exception is ‘The Red Room’ which reads like a ghost story with a great twist at the end. I also have The Folio Society collection published in 1990 and which is based on the selection published by J.M. Dent and Sons in 1927 although that only has twenty two stories But even that shorter collection has seven stories not included in the Flame Tree edition and that still leaves over fifty short stories that I don’t have. as Wikipedia lists 94 short stories and the same number of novels or novellas.

That Wells was a prolific author is not in doubt and the quality of his writing can also not be underestimated, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times although never won it, frankly I suspect the judges regarded him as insufficiently high brow to be properly considered. But he was undoubtedly a popular writer from his earliest works and still sells well. I’ve really enjoyed reading some of the stories that I didn’t know and revisiting the ones I read many years ago. If you haven’t read Wells’ short stories then I heartily recommend them, no matter which collection, and there are many, that you manage to pick up.