A story about a mysterious oriental figure who pursues a British politician to London, where he wreaks havoc with his powers of hypnosis and shape-shifting, Marsh’s novel is of a piece with other sensational turn-of-the-century fictions such as Stoker’s Dracula, George du Maurier’s Trilby, and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels. Like Dracula and many of the sensation novels pioneered by Wilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, The Beetle is narrated from the perspectives of multiple characters, a technique used in many late nineteenth-century novels (those of Wilkie Collins and Stoker, for example) to create suspense

Richard Marsh was the pseudonym of the Br...

This is a collection of 12 short stories of mystery and humor, which are, as the title says, for amusement only.

Madge and Ella have lived at Clover Cottage for six weeks when a series of strange events begin to occur. A gentleman who arrives asking for a piano lesson from Madge, suddenly bolts out the back door and over the hedge when he sees a rough-looking character watching him from the street in front of the cottage. This man in turn, runs away when he sees a shabbily dressed woman come around the corner. The woman, marches into the cottage, declaring that the cottage is haunted, and she is the wife of the ghost! An attempted burglary, and a cryptic note left at the scene, just add to the mystery.