Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

Percival Christopher Wren (1875 - 1941) was an English writer of adventure fiction mostly dealing with colonial soldiering in Africa. He is remembered best for Beau Geste, a much filmed book of 1924, involving the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. 'Presentiments' is the story of a legionnaire who knows he will be killed the following day but does not want to die without telling somebody about a set of terrible events which occurred in his childhood and which have overshadowed his life.

"The Door in the Wall" is the strange supernatural tale of a young boy who finds a door in a wall which leads to a beautiful magical garden full of wonderful people, animals and flowers. The rest of his life is spent searching for the door and the magical world again...but the door reveals itself again only at the most inconvenient moments, when he cannot spare the time to go through it. Until one night, finally, he finds the door again and goes back through....

Herbert George Wells (1866 - 1946) was a prolific English writer best known for his outstanding science fiction stories and novels. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times. 'The Crystal Egg' is a science fiction short story about an antiquarian dealer, Mr. Cave, who discovers that a crystal egg in his shop has strange properties. In certain light conditions it functions as a window on the planet Mars and he is able to observe the Martians and their bizarre cities and machines.

Vincent O'Sullivan (1868-1940), born in New York to an Irish American family, moved as a child to London. As a young man, he soon became well recognised as the master of decadent and macabre fiction. 'Will' is the macabre tale of a man who is in the process of poisoning his wife using the most deadly, untraceable and secret poison ever discovered. His wife has realized what he is doing but is powerless to prevent her own death...but she vows to exact a ghastly and morbid revenge from beyond the grave.

Richard Austin Freeman (1862-1943) was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr. Thorndyke. Freeman used some of his early experiences as a colonial surgeon in West Africa in his novels. The Case of the White Footprints is a murder mystery set in Margate. A lady has been found dead in her room in a boarding house.

Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936) was an American writer of weird tales and horror fiction. Rattle of Bones is a tale featuring one of Howard's most popular heroes, the stalwart English puritan, Solomon Kane. In this tale Kane meets another traveller while journeying through the Black Forest, and the two arrive at a sinister, lonely inn, which bears the sign of a cleft skull. In the course of the night, the two uncover the terrible and macabre secret of the tavern....

Robert O'Hara Burke (1821-1861) was one of the great Victorian explorers. In 1860 he was appointed to lead the Victorian Exploring Expedition, which aimed to cross the Australian continent from south to north. The expedition left Melbourne on Monday, 20 August 1860 with a total of 19 men, 27 (rum fuelled) camels, and 23 horses. The expedition was dogged by disputes and poor leadership decisions from the start. Even at the first staging post the second in command and the medical officer resigned.

Conradin is a sickly and introverted child who hates his guardian, Mrs. De Ropp. When she takes away his pet hen and threatens to do the same with his pole-cat, whom he worships like a god, Conradin makes a special prayer and his sinister wish is answered. Hector Hugh Munro (aka Saki) at his most sinister and macabre. Superb!

Who Was She? is a romantic mystery. The narrator is on vacation and discovers what he takes to be a secluded glen unknown to anyone else. But one day, he finds a wilted bunch of flowers and a book on the flat rock where he always sits. The book contains sketches and musings, clearly by an unmarried woman. The narrator finds a way to return the book, with his own message and an unlikely and mysterious correspondence begins, from which it becomes clear that this is the start of a strange unknown quest.

When the elderly widow Cipriana is visited by a strange and scary fire spirit, he tells her that he will help her to make her fortune. The weird elf tells her that he is responsible for fires all over the world and he tells her of a major fire that will break out in the city of Murcia in two weeks time. He advises Cipriana to go to the authorities there and predict the fire. Of course, she will not be believed at first...but when her predictions come true, she will be in great demand and will be well rewarded. Things do not go quite according to plan.

'The Bowmen' is perhaps the most famous of Machen's tales. It is the iconic story of an incident from the First World War trenches. Faced with inevitable death and defeat, a battalion of English soldiers is saved by the mysterious and miraculous intervention of Saint George and a company of English bowmen who had last fought at Agincourt.

There are certain stories which stand out from the crowd owing to the unique creativity of the plot and the skill with which the author unfolds his tale. This selection contains 50 of the most ingenious short stories ever written. Includes: 'The Lighthouse on Shivering Sand' by J. S. Fletcher; 'The Umbrella' by Arnold Bennett; 'The Lovely Lady' by D. H. Lawrence; 'The Lake' by W. F. Harvey; 'A Tiger’s Skin' by W. W. Jacobs; and 'The Strange Case of Mr. Todmorden' by F. Britten Austin.

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) is arguably the greatest European novelist in terms of the range and power of his writing. Most of his short stories predate his long novels and are written in a different style. One of the earliest is An Episode of the Reign of Terror in which two nuns and a priest in hiding from the mob are visited by a stranger with a very peculiar request, and even odder motives behind it.

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a Scottish poet and novelist, best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. 'The Three Dogs' tells the story of a shepherd who trades his three sheep with a stranger for three dogs with magical powers. The dogs are able to help him slay a dragon and win a princess.

English novelist and journalist Wilfrid Ewart (1892-1922) survived the battlefields of the First World War only to die a few years later in Mexico City where near midnight, he stepped out onto his hotel balcony to observe the New Year's festivities and was killed by a stray bullet fired by a reveler below. This is Ewart's firsthand account of his first visit to the trenches in February 1915.

Harry Houdini's greatest escape ever. While visiting Cairo as a tourist, Houdini and his wife are shown around the pyramids by a mysterious and slightly sinister guide who has a strange hollow voice and looks like an old pharaoh. What starts as a strange traveller's adventure to witness a duel at midnight on the summit of one of the pyramids, turns into a nightmare as Houdini is seized, tied up and lowered on a rope far into the bowels of the earth to an unknown tomb where the oldest and most sinister of the Egyptian Pharaohs dwell....

Kipling’s classic tale taken from the Just So Stories. In the old days, the Rhinoceros's skin used to fit him quite tightly... but after getting cake crumbs inside it, Rhino was forced to scratch himself - and his skin got baggier and his temper grumpier.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English writer best known for his fictional priest-detective, Father Brown.This collection features five of Chesterton's most intriguing cases:The Shadow of the SharkThe Hammer of GodThe Invisible ManThe Queer FeetThe Blue Cross

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. A Dill Pickle is a wistful love story about a couple who meet again six years after their break-up, and for a moment the old passions, positive and negative, resurface in the course of a short intense conversation.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. 'The Black Cap' is a sketch about a woman leaving her husband and eloping with her lover. But then her lover turns up at the station wearing a piece of totally inexplicable and unacceptable headgear....