Fiction Books

FLASHPOINT 1The moon has a larderand a kitchen,wears a nightcapas Father in the Night Before Christmas. The moon hoards pistachios,marzipancommands the shadowsis mustachioedsleeps in a sloop(at least when I look)like the boatowl and pussycattook to sea. 3And on country nightsin high summerfishing nets seem drawnabout his face,reveal ribbons of light,eerie panhandlers grubbing quarters;a sinister sailor... more...

CHAPTER I THE CIRCASSIAN GRAND Miss Lucile Wollaston was set to exude sympathy, like an aphid waiting for an overworked ant to come down to breakfast. But there was no sympathizing with the man who came in from a doctor's all-night vigil like a boy from a ball-game, gave her a hard brisk kiss on the cheek-bone, and then, before taking his place at the table, unfolded the morning paper for a glance... more...

CHAPTER I THE STRANGE CASE OF SIR GRENVILLE RUSHOLM Sir Grenville Rusholm, Baronet, was dead. The blinds were down at the Lodge, Queen's Square. For the last few days lengthy obituary notices had appeared in all the papers, innumerable wreaths and crosses had arrived at the house, and letters of sympathy and condolence had poured in upon Lady Rusholm. The dead man had filled a considerable space... more...

1. The Dread Paralysis A weird and uncanny tale about a strange criminal who called himself Doctor Satan, and the terrible doom with which he struck down his enemiesOn one of the most beautiful bays of the Maine coast rested the town that fourteen months before had existed only on an architect's drawing-board. Around the almost landlocked harbor were beautiful homes, bathing-beaches, parks. On the... more...

Two incidents, widely different in character yet bound together by results, marked the night of January the twenty-third. On that night the blackest fog within a four years' memory fell upon certain portions of London, and also on that night came the first announcement of the border risings against the Persian government in the province of Khorasan the announcement that, speculated upon, even... more...

A SOLILOQUY On a Monday evening in January, 1883, I had returned comparatively late from work in the District Attorney's office in New York, and was in my rooms at the Crescent Club on Madison Square, corner of Twenty-sixth Street, making a leisurely toilet for dinner, when a note was brought me from Arthur White. In it he asked me to join a few mutual friends at his rooms on West Nineteenth... more...

Along one of the most precipitous of the many Rocky Mountain trails a man and a woman climbed slowly one spring morning. The air was cold, and farther up the mountains little patches of snow lay here and there in the hollows. Two or three miles below them nestled one of the most famous pleasure resorts of the entire region. Three or four times as distant lay the nearest town of any importance. Over the... more...

CHAPTER I Near the end of my fourteenth year I was apprenticed to Valentine, King & Co., cotton importers, Liverpool, as a "pair of legs." My father had died suddenly, leaving me and his property in the possession of my stepmother and my guardian. It was in deference to their urgent advice that I left my home in London (with little reluctance, since my life there had never been happy) to... more...

CHAPTER IIN WHICH I WHET MY FATHER'S SWORD The summer day was all but spent when Richard Jennifer, riding express, brought me Captain Falconnet's challenge. 'Twas a dayfall to be marked with a white stone, even in our Carolina calendar. The sun, reaching down to the mountain-girt horizon in the west, filled all the upper air with the glory of its departing, and the higher leaf plumes of... more...

CHAPTER I Peter Brent sat nervously smoking in the library of his great house, Brent Rock. He was a man of about forty-five or -six—a typical, shrewd business man. Something, however, was evidently on his mind, for, though he tried to conceal it, he lacked the self-assurance that was habitually his before the world. A scowl clouded his face as the door of the library was flung open and he heard... more...