One dark and stormy night, a stranger arrives in West Sussex at a village inn. He is heavily clad in an overcoat and his face is wrapped in bandages. He takes a room at the inn, but refuses to socialize with anyone. He stays cooped up in his room all day and night, working with strange chemicals and apparatus. Suddenly, strange events begin to happen in the village. Mysterious burglaries and fires break out, culminating in a destructive rampage across the peaceful countryside. The stranger is the keeper of a terrible secret...
The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (to give the book its full title) by HG Wells was published in 1897. Written in novella form, this bizarr...
Two poets in a London park at sunset, debating on the attributes of poetry and whether it's really a metaphor for anarchy. A group that meets in secret, planning to overthrow the world order. Disguises and deceptions, ideals and ideology. A medley of themes and genres makes this a great read for anyone who's a fan of Chesterton and his iconic Father Brown.
The Man Who Was Thursday includes Chesterton's favorite theme of Christianity with touches of delightful humor to enliven the twists and turns that abound throughout the book.
Set in the early part of the twentieth century, the novel's main protagonist, Gabriel Syme is a Scotland Yard detective who's assi...
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thought he had finished forever with his immortal sleuth Sherlock Holmes and his chronicler, Dr Watson. Exhausted and bored with the Holmes saga, he wanted to turn to more serious writing. In the short story The Final Problem, published in 1893 as part of the collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, the author had sent Holmes plunging to his doom into the Reichenbach Falls. However, by 1901, Doyle found himself in severe financial difficulties. It was then that he resurrected his popular detective. The Hound of the Baskervilles is set in time before the Reichenbach and as the publishers had predicted, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once again struck gold!
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The story follows a beautiful Countess who escapes from Paris as a committee there was making arrangements to send her to the guillotine. She is smuggled out by the Scarlet Pimpernel and brought to England. There she encou...
A young gambler is found shot dead in a closed room. Dr. Watson, who still mourns the disappearance of his famous friend is intrigued enough to step out of his house and take a look at the crime scene. A crowd has gathered there, curiously gazing up at the room where the crime is supposed to have taken place. Watson inadvertently jostles against an elderly, deformed man and knocks a stack of books from the fellow's hand. The man curses Watson vilely and disappears into the throng. It suddenly occurs to Watson that one of the books that he had helped the stranger pick up had seemed familiar... Thus begins the first thrilling story, The Adventure of the Empty House, in The Retu...
The typical action hero with a stiff upper lip whose actions speak louder than his words, a mysterious American who lives in dread of being killed, an anarchist plot to destabilize Greece, a deadly German spy network, a notebook entirely written in code, and all this set in the weeks preceding the outbreak of World War I. The Thirty-nine Steps, by John Buchan is a spy classic entirely worthy of its genre and will delight modern day readers with its complicated plot. It is also notable for being the literary progenitor of the spook novel that typically features the secret operative on the run, determined to unravel a world domination plot.
John Buchan, the author, was ...
In the ship, David makes friends with a Scottish rebel and together they successfully defeat the ship’s crew. The rebel, Alan, cherishes a dream to overthrow the British rulers of Scotland. Soon after...
A journalist who undertakes a life threatening mission to impress the woman he loves, a mysterious plateau in South America that none of the locals dare to enter and an adventurous English aristocrat are all charectors you will encounter in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. With Dinosaurs, ape-men, diamonds and secret tunnels the book is filled with enough action, excitement, drama and adventure to go around.
For Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, Conan Doyle's hero in this book Professor Challenger is almost the antithesis of the cerebral sleuth. The squat, feisty, quarrelsome, boastful Challenger with the “face and beard of an Assyrian Bull” and a “stunted Hercules...
Sherlock Holmes fans who haven't yet read A Study in Scarlet would be delighted to discover this book in which the iconic detective makes his grand entrance into the world! From hence on, the deer stalker hat, his Stradivarius violin, the occasional descent into cocaine induced hell, the Persian slipper in which he stores his tobacco and of course, his meeting with the eternally loyal Dr. Watson and so many other details become common for generations of enthralled devotees.
Strangely enough, Sherlock Holmes' first outing went almost unnoticed in the 1887 Christmas Annual edition of Beeton's Magazine. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was just 27 years old when he wrote the story...