Around Dark Corners: A Collection of Mystery Stories

An Uncle George Mystery #3

by Hugh Pentecost

Contents:

Hunting day
A black eye for Miss Millington
My dear Uncle Sherlock
In the middle of nowhere
Murder throws a curve
The man inside
Hector is willin'
The monster of Lakeview
Our turn to kill.

182 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Hugh Pentecost was a penname of mystery author Judson Philips. Born in Massachusetts, Philips came of age during the golden age of pulp magazines, and spent the 1930s writing suspense fiction and sports stories for a number of famous pulps. His first book was Hold 'Em Girls! The Intelligent Women's Guide to Men and Football (1936). In 1939, his crime story Cancelled in Red won the Red Badge prize, launching his career as a novelist. Philips went on to write nearly one hundred books over the next five decades.

His best-known characters were Pierre Chambrun, a sleuthing hotel manager who first appeared in The Cannibal Who Overate (1962), and the one-legged investigative reporter Peter Styles, introduced in Laughter Trap (1964). Although he spent his last years with failing vision and poor health, Philips continued writing daily. His final novel was the posthumously published Pattern for Terror (1989).

Reviews

[Blackpipe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hugh Pentecost, the name is no stranger to me. I remember first starting reading his John Jericho stories in EQMM many years back. Also in EQMM I was first introduced to my first Uncle George tale, My Dear Uncle Sherlock, by Mr. Pentecost, which I thoroughly enjoyed. And that‘s the only story I have read so far about this elderly sleuth after all these years. And only early this week, I was fortunate enough to find a copy of this book, his only Uncle George short story collection, on the Internet Archive website. In a nutshell, the book is a real page-turner for me, and it easily becomes my fastest read of the year. All nine tales are uniformly good. Mr. Pentecost seems to save the best for last. I would give you the final tale, Our Turn to Kill, the highest ratings of them all. It reads as if I were witnessing first-hand all the events in the story. The author’s narrative and descriptive power is simply amazing.
Highly recommended!

[Jeff Hobbs]

Read so far:

Hunting day--2
A black eye for Miss Millington (aka The sooty man)
*My dear Uncle Sherlock
*In the middle of nowhere
Murder throws a curve (aka Murder by a southpaw)
The man inside
Hector is willin'
*The monster of Lakeview
Our turn to kill
***
The day the children vanished --4
The contradictory case --3
Challenge to the reader --2
Room number 23 --3
The fourth degree --3
Blood red in the morning --3
They'll kill the lady--3
*Murder in Manhattan
Murder plays through --2
*A kind of murder
*The dead man's tale
*Hover through the fog
*The man with half a face
*An end to fear
*The man in seat 12