Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

A Vine on a House is a classic Gothic haunted house story. The old abandoned Harding house, which is now overgrown by an unusual vine, has a strange and sinister story behind it. Years before, the mother of the household disappeared suddenly. Two years later the family abandoned the house. More recent visitors have discovered the vine growing up the front of the house behaving very oddly. Finally the local authorities decide to dig up the vine....

When Theodoric Voler boards a train he finds he is not alone in the compartment. Not only is there a female companion asleep in one corner, there is a mouse which has hidden itself inside his clothes. Can the sensitive and prudish young man manage to undress and extricate the mouse without his female companion waking up? Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) at his most satirical. A superb and witty observation on the sensibilities and mores of British Edwardian society.

A quartet of short stories by Britain’s raconteur supreme, Hector Hugh Munro, better known under his pseudonym “Saki”. This collection brings together four of his most curious and amusing tales, all of which involve animals. Saki’s satirical take on the morals and eccentricities of Edwardian society, combined with a compelling narrative and an unexpected ending draw keep the reader hanging on until the very last word.

Max Carrados is called in to investigate a mysterious ghost which haunts an empty flat in Massingham Mansions in London. Every night gaslights are seen in the apartment, even though the gas has been disconnected. Also water runs in the bath every night, even though the water supply has been turned off. Carrados quickly realises that the detectives on the case are barking up the wrong tree....

Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916) is better known by the pen name Saki. He remains hugely popular as a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirised Edwardian society and culture. The Interlopers is the story of two sworn enemies who find themselves trapped and injured under a fallen tree in a forest at night.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. 'Wireless' is a multilayered story set in a chemist's shop, where the nephew of the business' owner occupies a back room where he is experimenting with Marconi's new radio technology. The chemist's assistant, lovesick and also sick with tuberculosis, is staying in the shop overnight. The narrator is visiting, officially to observe the radio experiments...but he discovers that another set of signals are being received in the chemist's shop.

W. W. Jacobs was best known for his humorous tales of sailors, often related by his most popular and enduring character: The night-watchman on the wharf in Wapping, recounting the preposterous adventures of his acquaintances Ginger Dick, Sam Small, and Peter Russet. These three characters, pockets full after a long voyage, would take lodgings together determined to enjoy a long spell ashore; but the crafty inhabitants of dockland London would soon relieve them of their funds, assisted by the sailors' own fecklessness and credulity.

A fascinating collection of intriguing and unusual classic murder stories by some of the masters of mystery and crime writing.

G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936) is best known for his fictional priest-detective, Father Brown. In "The Invisible Man", Father Brown is able to solve the mystery of the jilted lover who is able to track his beloved, threaten and attack his rival and yet is never seen by anybody, even those who are specifically on the look-out for him. Can it be that he really is invisible? And when he does manage to murder his rival, how does he make the body disappear too?

Kipling’s classic tale taken from the Just So Stories. Neolithic cave girl Taffy tries to send a pictorial letter home when her father breaks his fishing spear, but her message is hilariously misinterpreted, and a series of misunderstandings follows.

When the young bank clerk Charlie Mears comes up with an innovative idea for a new story, he has no notion just how amazing his tale is. Inspired by dreams which are memories of former lives, he takes us back to the vivid and brutal world of ancient Greece. But Charlie's own literary skill is not equal to the task of writing his novel. His friend must take on the challenge of extracting the finest tale in the world from the reluctant and ever-distracted brain of the young clerk.

A newly qualified doctor receives a call from his first patient - a mysterious woman who is deeply distressed and who is covered in a thick black veil. She tells him a confusing story about a dying man who she wishes the doctor to visit the following day, although she assures the doctor that the patient will certainly be dead by then. The young doctor agrees that he will make the visit at nine on the next morning...and finds himself on the strangest professional call of his entire life.

Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863-1935) was a British journalist and author. He wrote more than 230 books on a wide variety of subjects, both fiction and nonfiction. He was one of the leading writers of detective fiction in the Victorian golden age of the short story. This collection brings together some of the finest and most diverse examples of Fletcher's genius. 'The Ivory God' is the tale of a failing writer who acquires a strange ivory carving of an Indian god. He becomes convinced that the statue is communicating with him, taking possession of him, even writing through him.

'Escape - Three and Sixpence' is a haunting short story which opens with a Yorkshire housewife putting her head into the gas oven to commit suicide to escape her unbearable life of drudgery. We are swept along with the thoughts and emotions which go through her mind...and the roller coaster of emotions as events unfold.

Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934) was an English novelist and journalist who wrote his comic novels under the pseudonym F. Anstey. 'Mrs. Brassington-Claypott's Children's Party' is a humorous tale of a family trying to keep up with their social set in hosting a children's party. Ambitious and snobbish but somewhat restricted financially, Mrs. Brassington-Claypott agrees to her maid's recommendation of a conjurer with whom she is acquainted....

The narrator, Zaleukos, a native of Constantinople, studied medicine in Paris and, following his father's death, develops a successful business as a travelling merchant and healer. Arriving in Florence, he sets up shop as usual. But after he has been in town a few days, he finds a small handwritten note from an unknown stranger, asking to meet him at midnight on the Ponte Vecchio. Curious, he goes to the bridge in question, but ends up tussling with the stranger and comes away with the man's red cloak.

Nobel Prize winner (and Forsyte Saga author) John Galsworthy described Stacy Aumonier as ‘one of the best short-story writers of all time’ and predicted that, through the best of his stories, he would ‘outlive all the writers of his day’. A Source of Irritation is one such story. Sam Gates, an elderly and somewhat irritable agricultural labourer, is thinning a field of turnips in Norfolk one morning during the Great War. Suddenly he sees an ‘airyplane’ behaving oddly in the sky.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific English writer of science fiction stories and novels and is frequently credited as being the father of science fiction. 'The Lord of the Dynamos' is the story of an immigrant worker who becomes captivated by the huge electric dynamo in the shed where he works. He begins to see it as a great deity...a god who demands human sacrifices.

When Mary Hampton challenges Leonard Bilsiter to deploy his self-proclaimed Siberian magic powers to transform her into a she-wolf, nobody reckons with Clovis's cunning. Mrs. Hampton's disappearance in an Azalea bush and the coincidental appearance of a female wolf in exactly the same part of the conservatory during coffee causes considerable consternation among the house guests - with the usual hilarious results. Ingenious!

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (1884-1941) was a New Zealand born English novelist, famous for his skill at scene setting and vivid plots. He was a best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s and remains popular to this day. 'The Tiger' is the evocative tale of an Englishman who travels to New York and descends strangely into a terrible psychosis in which he seems to perceive wild animals roaming through the subway beneath the streets.