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Read With Me
"A personal anthology of memorable reading, selected and introduced by Thomas B. Costain"
- GenresShort Stories
623 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
Thomas B. Costain
128 books189 followersCostain was born in Brantford, Ontario to John Herbert Costain and Mary Schultz. He attended high school there at the Brantford Collegiate Institute. Before graduating from high school he had written four novels, one of which was a 70,000 word romance about Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange. These early novels were rejected by publishers.
His first writing success came in 1902 when the Brantford Courier accepted a mystery story from him, and he became a reporter there (for five dollars a week). He was an editor at the Guelph Daily Mercury between 1908 and 1910. He married Ida Randolph Spragge (1888–1975) in York, Ontario on January 12, 1910. The couple had two children, Molly (Mrs. Howard Haycraft) and Dora (Mrs. Henry Darlington Steinmetz). Also in 1910, Costain joined the Maclean Publishing Group where he edited three trade journals. Beginning in 1914, he was a staff writer for and, from 1917, editor of Toronto-based Maclean's magazine. His success there brought him to the attention of The Saturday Evening Post in New York City where he was fiction editor for fourteen years.
In 1920 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He also worked for Doubleday Books as an editor 1939-1946. He was the head of 20th Century Fox’s bureau of literary development (story department) from 1934 to 1942.
In 1940, he wrote four short novels but was “enough of an editor not to send them out”. He next planned to write six books in a series he called “The Stepchildren of History”. He would write about six interesting but unknown historical figures. For his first, he wrote about the seventeenth-century pirate John Ward aka Jack Ward. In 1942, he realized his longtime dream when this first novel For My Great Folly was published, and it became a bestseller with over 132,000 copies sold. The New York Times reviewer stated at the end of the review "there will be no romantic-adventure lover left unsatisfied." In January 1946 he "retired" to spend the rest of his life writing, at a rate of about 3,000 words a day.
Raised as a Baptist, he was reported in the 1953 Current Biography to be an attendant of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He was described as a handsome, tall, broad-shouldered man with a pink and white complexion, clear blue eyes, and a slight Canadian accent. He was white-haired by the time he began to write novels. He loved animals and could not even kill a bug (but he also loved bridge, and he did not extend the same policy to his partners). He also loved movies and the theatre (he met his future wife when she was performing Ruth in the The Pirates of Penzance).
Costain's work is a mixture of commercial history (such as The White and The Gold, a history of New France to around 1720) and fiction that relies heavily on historic events (one review stated it was hard to tell where history leaves off and apocrypha begins). His most popular novel was The Black Rose (1945), centred in the time and actions of Bayan of the Baarin also known as Bayan of the Hundred Eyes. Costain noted in his foreword that he initially intended the book to be about Bayan and Edward I, but became caught up in the legend of Thomas a Becket's parents: an English knight married to an Eastern girl. The book was a selection of the Literary Guild with a first printing of 650,000 copies and sold over two million copies in its first year.
His research led him to believe that Richard III was a great monarch tarred by conspiracies, after his death, with the murder of the princes in the tower. Costain supported his theories with documentation, suggesting that the real murderer was Henry VII.
Costain died in 1965 at his New York City home of a heart attack at the age of 80. He is buried in the Farringdon Independent Church Cemetery in Brantford.
His first writing success came in 1902 when the Brantford Courier accepted a mystery story from him, and he became a reporter there (for five dollars a week). He was an editor at the Guelph Daily Mercury between 1908 and 1910. He married Ida Randolph Spragge (1888–1975) in York, Ontario on January 12, 1910. The couple had two children, Molly (Mrs. Howard Haycraft) and Dora (Mrs. Henry Darlington Steinmetz). Also in 1910, Costain joined the Maclean Publishing Group where he edited three trade journals. Beginning in 1914, he was a staff writer for and, from 1917, editor of Toronto-based Maclean's magazine. His success there brought him to the attention of The Saturday Evening Post in New York City where he was fiction editor for fourteen years.
In 1920 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He also worked for Doubleday Books as an editor 1939-1946. He was the head of 20th Century Fox’s bureau of literary development (story department) from 1934 to 1942.
In 1940, he wrote four short novels but was “enough of an editor not to send them out”. He next planned to write six books in a series he called “The Stepchildren of History”. He would write about six interesting but unknown historical figures. For his first, he wrote about the seventeenth-century pirate John Ward aka Jack Ward. In 1942, he realized his longtime dream when this first novel For My Great Folly was published, and it became a bestseller with over 132,000 copies sold. The New York Times reviewer stated at the end of the review "there will be no romantic-adventure lover left unsatisfied." In January 1946 he "retired" to spend the rest of his life writing, at a rate of about 3,000 words a day.
Raised as a Baptist, he was reported in the 1953 Current Biography to be an attendant of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He was described as a handsome, tall, broad-shouldered man with a pink and white complexion, clear blue eyes, and a slight Canadian accent. He was white-haired by the time he began to write novels. He loved animals and could not even kill a bug (but he also loved bridge, and he did not extend the same policy to his partners). He also loved movies and the theatre (he met his future wife when she was performing Ruth in the The Pirates of Penzance).
Costain's work is a mixture of commercial history (such as The White and The Gold, a history of New France to around 1720) and fiction that relies heavily on historic events (one review stated it was hard to tell where history leaves off and apocrypha begins). His most popular novel was The Black Rose (1945), centred in the time and actions of Bayan of the Baarin also known as Bayan of the Hundred Eyes. Costain noted in his foreword that he initially intended the book to be about Bayan and Edward I, but became caught up in the legend of Thomas a Becket's parents: an English knight married to an Eastern girl. The book was a selection of the Literary Guild with a first printing of 650,000 copies and sold over two million copies in its first year.
His research led him to believe that Richard III was a great monarch tarred by conspiracies, after his death, with the murder of the princes in the tower. Costain supported his theories with documentation, suggesting that the real murderer was Henry VII.
Costain died in 1965 at his New York City home of a heart attack at the age of 80. He is buried in the Farringdon Independent Church Cemetery in Brantford.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 10, 2020
As with any such collection, there are bound to be winners and losers, so assigning a rating is a Muggs game. By focusing on fairly well know writers of the early 20th century, Costain produced a quite narrow slice of material, never venturing far afield. It's almost like riffling through a stack of magazines from that era. Despite that severe limitation, he managed to put together a reasonably enjoyable selection of 32 pieces, including a few real gems, most notably:
Dawn a truly gripping tale of life as a terrorist, by Elie Wiesel
The Snow Goose a richly human study of devotion by Paul Gallico
The Worker in Sandalwood a magical vignette by Marjorie Pickthall
The Queer Feet one of G K Chesterton's most engaging Father Brown stories.
And probably the most widely known entry here is The Lilies of the Field by W E Barrett.
For the sake of variety, Costain has included pieces by Rumer Godden, Damon Runyon and a fragment by Virginia Woolf, so I didn't feel short-changed by needing to skip over Brendan Behan, John O'Hara and F S Fitzgerald (Isn't it odd that writers of Irish heritage seem to annoy me?)
All in all, a worthwhile diversion during our inability to access a library.
Dawn a truly gripping tale of life as a terrorist, by Elie Wiesel
The Snow Goose a richly human study of devotion by Paul Gallico
The Worker in Sandalwood a magical vignette by Marjorie Pickthall
The Queer Feet one of G K Chesterton's most engaging Father Brown stories.
And probably the most widely known entry here is The Lilies of the Field by W E Barrett.
For the sake of variety, Costain has included pieces by Rumer Godden, Damon Runyon and a fragment by Virginia Woolf, so I didn't feel short-changed by needing to skip over Brendan Behan, John O'Hara and F S Fitzgerald (Isn't it odd that writers of Irish heritage seem to annoy me?)
All in all, a worthwhile diversion during our inability to access a library.
May 27, 2024
For about a decade or so, this book undeservedly languished in a sack of books deemed unworthy of shelf space, until serendipity brought it back to me. It's a collection of short stories and a poem, all delicately, sentimentally curated by novelist/editor Thomas B. Costain. This book was first published in 1965, so some stories felt dated, which only fuelled my nostalgia--these are stories from a different time, in a world far removed from life as we've come to know it these past fifty years. The lineup of contributors is impressive, but what endeared me most about the stories were its seeming familiarity. The narratives, the characters, the storytelling--these all felt familiar to me, somehow, though I had only actually read one of them before. And the only reason I could think of was because they reminded me of the kind of stories I used to read in our old and monthly subscriptions of Reader's Digest. From the late seventies, when I learned to read at the late age of seven, to the mid-nineties, when I first felt the quality of their articles had ebbed, Reader's Digest magazines dominated my reading; the older the issue, the better I liked it. Their stories effected a gamut of emotions in me--some made me supremely happy in an all's-well-with-the-world kind of way, while others left me temporarily, profoundly broken, with a vise grip in my chest that lasted for days. The articles on illness and loss turned me into a very young hypochondriac, while any story on animals--especially James Herriott's, made me swoon with joy or a quantifiable sadness that cleansed the soul. I'm extremely fortunate to have discovered the power of stories at a young, impressionable age. And thus lies the beauty of a book such as this: most of the stories are reminiscent of the ones I read in my favorite issues of Reader's Digest.
Mr Costain is a man of few words, and glaringly absent from the foreword is the kilometric introduction explaining plot (often with spoilers), theory, and other effluvia so irrelevant to a reader like me. An editor's editor, his "A Word of Explanation" barely fills up a page. An equally succinct half-page explanation, which I appreciated and think essential, precedes each story, but it doesn't indicate whether it is fact or fiction. The contributors are a mix of famous and unknown writers--unknown at least to me. Interestingly, despite works by Chesterton, Christie, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Kipling, I found myself drawn to the stories by writers I was reading for the first time. Below are my three to five-starred stories:
1 The Lilies of the Field by William E. Barrett - This is a film I had tangentially come across in articles featuring Sidney Poitier, books on film, and in snippets of old Oscars shows. Thankfully, I never delved deeper and so remained ignorant of the narrative, a Shane meets Loren Eiseley story so deceptively simple, unsentimental, and sublime. Five stars.
2 Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer by Stephen Vincent Benet - This Mr Smith Goes to Washington/The Seventh Seal hybrid appealed to generations of readers before me. But it's too decent, too sanitized to fly with most of today's readers, myself included. But somehow, I liked it.
3 A Portrait Reversed by George Bradshaw - A story after my own heart. Which palpitates and pines for the short stories of Somerset Maugham. The intimate, fly-on-the wall first person narrative, the locale, the eccentric subject artiste--this one absolutely bore the stamp of storytelling a'la Maugham. Five stars.
4 The King of Paris Dies by Guy Endore - A short, fictional bio on Alexander Dumas, pere. The man who gave us The Count of Monte Cristo. And sage aphorisms like this: "Oblivion is the shroud in which the dead are buried for the second time." Not so for you, Monsieur Dumas. Three stars.
5 The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico - Set against the backdrop that was Dunkirk is this footnote of a story about a hermetic artist, a little girl, and a migratory goose. Broken in body and spirit, their need for healing is palpable. As Mr Constain accurately counsels readers in his intro, "it is a sad tale but one which, once read, remains always in the memory." Five stars.
6 Mooltiki by Rumer Godden - I've only read one of Rumer Godden's books, Black Narcissus, about English nuns stationed at a nunnery in the Himalayas; it was made into a movie which starred the always ethereal Deborah Kerr. Reading my old review of the book now, I see I gave it three stars plus an impertinent potshot, and one I'm likely to disagree with now: Rumer Godden is certainly no Pearl S. Buck. Mooltiki is written in the first person, which always gives me the impression the account is factual. Godden writes about a foray into the Assamese jungle on the borders of Bhutan and India, where she becomes fascinated with a young, headstrong elephant named Mooltiki. Much ink is used in describing the cavalier killing of two tigers, memorable to me for the great white hunter's absence of guilt or reflection. Three stars.
7 Miracle of the Fifteen Murders by Ben Hecht - An intriguing tale with a very interesting premise involving a doctors' conference with an unlikely agenda. Four stars for that tidy conclusion I failed to foresee.
8 Lobo by MacKinlay Kantor - Dog stories like Lobo should really come with warning labels: Proceed only if you're amenable to dejection. And yet, it's the sad tales that stay with us. And Lobo is the best of the lot. Five stars.
9 Ask Me No Questions by Mary McCarthy - Sister to the actor Kevin McCarthy, Mary McCarthy writes about life in retrospect with the maternal grandmother who raised her--a complicated character more ideal for fiction. McCarthy writes with clarity and grit. By the end of her story, we realize the grandmother is just as human as the rest of us. Three stars.
10 The Sun-Dodgers by John O'Hara - A short, engaging story about journalists, chorus girls, and upper and lower echelon gangsters in their watering holes. By the writer of BUtterfield 8.
11 Clothe the Naked by Dorothy Parker - The only story which I have read before, and one of the most heart-wrenching in the batch. But I still don't get what really happened there? Three stars.
12 They Trample on Your Heart by Katherine Anne Porter - The mechanics of a friendship between a slave owner-turned-employer and her lave-turned-employee. Four stars.
13 The Other Place by J. B. Priestley - This story of a doorway into another dimension smacks of H.G. Wells. And Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand. Three stars.
14 Johnny One-Eye by Damon Runyon - A tale of a hardened gangster with a heart for helpless kittens, children, and single mothers who shack up with hardened gangsters. Three stars.
15 The Proud Old Name by C. E. Scoggins - A western tale about pardnerships--in business and amor. This would have made for an interesting western movie with Monty Clift, Burgess Meredith and a young Debbie Reynolds for the main leads. Three stars.
16 Dawn by Eli Wiesel - A gripping, tense few hours in the life of a Jewish terrorist on his (first) mission to execute an English subject. Three stars.
17 The Clicking of Cuthbert by P. G. Wodehouse - Wodehouse's take on the benefits of golf clubs over literary clubs. Three stars.
18 The Legacy by Virginia Woolf - Neat short storytelling. But I realized the "reveal" early into the story. The downside to having read so many books. Three stars.
Mr Costain is a man of few words, and glaringly absent from the foreword is the kilometric introduction explaining plot (often with spoilers), theory, and other effluvia so irrelevant to a reader like me. An editor's editor, his "A Word of Explanation" barely fills up a page. An equally succinct half-page explanation, which I appreciated and think essential, precedes each story, but it doesn't indicate whether it is fact or fiction. The contributors are a mix of famous and unknown writers--unknown at least to me. Interestingly, despite works by Chesterton, Christie, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Kipling, I found myself drawn to the stories by writers I was reading for the first time. Below are my three to five-starred stories:
1 The Lilies of the Field by William E. Barrett - This is a film I had tangentially come across in articles featuring Sidney Poitier, books on film, and in snippets of old Oscars shows. Thankfully, I never delved deeper and so remained ignorant of the narrative, a Shane meets Loren Eiseley story so deceptively simple, unsentimental, and sublime. Five stars.
2 Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer by Stephen Vincent Benet - This Mr Smith Goes to Washington/The Seventh Seal hybrid appealed to generations of readers before me. But it's too decent, too sanitized to fly with most of today's readers, myself included. But somehow, I liked it.
3 A Portrait Reversed by George Bradshaw - A story after my own heart. Which palpitates and pines for the short stories of Somerset Maugham. The intimate, fly-on-the wall first person narrative, the locale, the eccentric subject artiste--this one absolutely bore the stamp of storytelling a'la Maugham. Five stars.
4 The King of Paris Dies by Guy Endore - A short, fictional bio on Alexander Dumas, pere. The man who gave us The Count of Monte Cristo. And sage aphorisms like this: "Oblivion is the shroud in which the dead are buried for the second time." Not so for you, Monsieur Dumas. Three stars.
5 The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico - Set against the backdrop that was Dunkirk is this footnote of a story about a hermetic artist, a little girl, and a migratory goose. Broken in body and spirit, their need for healing is palpable. As Mr Constain accurately counsels readers in his intro, "it is a sad tale but one which, once read, remains always in the memory." Five stars.
6 Mooltiki by Rumer Godden - I've only read one of Rumer Godden's books, Black Narcissus, about English nuns stationed at a nunnery in the Himalayas; it was made into a movie which starred the always ethereal Deborah Kerr. Reading my old review of the book now, I see I gave it three stars plus an impertinent potshot, and one I'm likely to disagree with now: Rumer Godden is certainly no Pearl S. Buck. Mooltiki is written in the first person, which always gives me the impression the account is factual. Godden writes about a foray into the Assamese jungle on the borders of Bhutan and India, where she becomes fascinated with a young, headstrong elephant named Mooltiki. Much ink is used in describing the cavalier killing of two tigers, memorable to me for the great white hunter's absence of guilt or reflection. Three stars.
7 Miracle of the Fifteen Murders by Ben Hecht - An intriguing tale with a very interesting premise involving a doctors' conference with an unlikely agenda. Four stars for that tidy conclusion I failed to foresee.
8 Lobo by MacKinlay Kantor - Dog stories like Lobo should really come with warning labels: Proceed only if you're amenable to dejection. And yet, it's the sad tales that stay with us. And Lobo is the best of the lot. Five stars.
9 Ask Me No Questions by Mary McCarthy - Sister to the actor Kevin McCarthy, Mary McCarthy writes about life in retrospect with the maternal grandmother who raised her--a complicated character more ideal for fiction. McCarthy writes with clarity and grit. By the end of her story, we realize the grandmother is just as human as the rest of us. Three stars.
10 The Sun-Dodgers by John O'Hara - A short, engaging story about journalists, chorus girls, and upper and lower echelon gangsters in their watering holes. By the writer of BUtterfield 8.
11 Clothe the Naked by Dorothy Parker - The only story which I have read before, and one of the most heart-wrenching in the batch. But I still don't get what really happened there? Three stars.
12 They Trample on Your Heart by Katherine Anne Porter - The mechanics of a friendship between a slave owner-turned-employer and her lave-turned-employee. Four stars.
13 The Other Place by J. B. Priestley - This story of a doorway into another dimension smacks of H.G. Wells. And Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand. Three stars.
14 Johnny One-Eye by Damon Runyon - A tale of a hardened gangster with a heart for helpless kittens, children, and single mothers who shack up with hardened gangsters. Three stars.
15 The Proud Old Name by C. E. Scoggins - A western tale about pardnerships--in business and amor. This would have made for an interesting western movie with Monty Clift, Burgess Meredith and a young Debbie Reynolds for the main leads. Three stars.
16 Dawn by Eli Wiesel - A gripping, tense few hours in the life of a Jewish terrorist on his (first) mission to execute an English subject. Three stars.
17 The Clicking of Cuthbert by P. G. Wodehouse - Wodehouse's take on the benefits of golf clubs over literary clubs. Three stars.
18 The Legacy by Virginia Woolf - Neat short storytelling. But I realized the "reveal" early into the story. The downside to having read so many books. Three stars.
October 25, 2013
an interesting selection, though like any, a prisoner of it's times. some writers here that have slipped into obscurity, but that's part of the charm, of course; the opportunity to expose oneself to someone obscure. curious quirk of the book - costain "introduces" each story. very strange and usually barely relevant.
January 3, 2010
An out-of-print collection of good short stories.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews