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Contact: And Other Stories
Short stories of sophistication and psychological suspense, including an O. Henry Award winner.
In the wake of the First World War, a young woman watches the sky for a pilot who didn’t come home. A wealthy bachelor becomes increasingly obsessed with a beautiful stranger at a Manhattan restaurant. A nervous wife awaits a fateful phone call on a stormy November night.
These stories and five more showcase the literary skill of Frances Noyes Hart, author of The Crooked Lane and The Bellamy Trial, and one of the great literary talents of the early twentieth century.
In the wake of the First World War, a young woman watches the sky for a pilot who didn’t come home. A wealthy bachelor becomes increasingly obsessed with a beautiful stranger at a Manhattan restaurant. A nervous wife awaits a fateful phone call on a stormy November night.
These stories and five more showcase the literary skill of Frances Noyes Hart, author of The Crooked Lane and The Bellamy Trial, and one of the great literary talents of the early twentieth century.
- GenresShort Stories
176 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1923
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19 people want to read
About the author
Frances Noyes Hart
9 books6 followersFrances Newbold Noyes Hart (August 1890 – October 25, 1943) was an American writer whose short stories were published in Scribner's magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies' Home Journal.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 16, 2025
Need something REALLY depressing to read?
If Keat was “half in love with easeful death", Frances Noyes Hart was positively enamoured with it. And death didn’t even have to be easeful, either. She’d take it any way she could get it.
I’d never heard of the lady, but a book of her short stories was selling for a dollar. They sounded like mysteries and they were published in the 1920’s. The book blurb said the title story (“Contact”) won an O.Henry award for excellence. I figured it was a safe bet.
If exploration into paranormal events and tragic miscommunications constitutes “mystery” then they’re mystery stories. I don’t think it does, although I’m not sure what genre I’d put it in. I just wouldn’t have read it.
It looks like nine stories, but two of the stories are continuations of the previous story. In several of them, dead people are communicating with survivors who loved them. In several, there is doubt as to who is dead or alive. Was that interesting man I talked to alive or a spook revisiting his old home?
I suppose you could call them “romance stories” although they have no resemblance to modern romance stories (which friends tell me are mostly soft-core porn or S/M stories.) No one lives happily ever after, which I suppose is realistic. The ones that don’t die are separated and wish they were dead.
The women are hauntingly beautiful and men can’t resist them. This results in strange love triangles and squares and maybe pentagons. Again, I can’t say for sure because I was lost a lot of the time.
I read the story “Contact” and can’t see why it would be awarded anything. Maybe it’s great literature and that’s why it went over my head. I’m the ultimate low-brow. If not proud of it, I’m not ashamed of it, either.
What made this woman so glum? It sounds like she had a privileged life. Her father was a wealthy editor and founder of Associated Press. At a time when few girls went to college, she was educated at Columbia and the Sorbonne. She came of age during WWI and went to France to serve in a soldiers’ canteen and must have seen some horrors.
WWI was the first of the “bad wars.” A war in which there were no rules and nothing was too awful to do to win. It’s hard to say who was the more unfortunate - those who died or those who lived through the nerve gas attacks and suffered the effects for the rest of their lives.
Afterwards, she married, had children, and her stories were published in popular magazines. She died in her early fifties, which seems very young to me. Still, people did die younger in the 1940’s. Medical care was primitive and most doctors were overseas, treating the military.
I read all the stories, understood some of them, and didn’t enjoy them much. I was particularly puzzled by the author’s waffling take on the subject of women’s independence. Sometimes she seems to be backing women who compete with men. Sometimes she seems to be saying that romantic love is all there is for a woman. Since she led both an adventuresome life (for a woman in that era) and also followed the traditional female paths of wife and mother, maybe she never figured it out herself.
It’s an odd book, but if you like old romance stories, you might enjoy it. Unload the guns and hide the razor blades before you start reading. It’s not cheerful.
If Keat was “half in love with easeful death", Frances Noyes Hart was positively enamoured with it. And death didn’t even have to be easeful, either. She’d take it any way she could get it.
I’d never heard of the lady, but a book of her short stories was selling for a dollar. They sounded like mysteries and they were published in the 1920’s. The book blurb said the title story (“Contact”) won an O.Henry award for excellence. I figured it was a safe bet.
If exploration into paranormal events and tragic miscommunications constitutes “mystery” then they’re mystery stories. I don’t think it does, although I’m not sure what genre I’d put it in. I just wouldn’t have read it.
It looks like nine stories, but two of the stories are continuations of the previous story. In several of them, dead people are communicating with survivors who loved them. In several, there is doubt as to who is dead or alive. Was that interesting man I talked to alive or a spook revisiting his old home?
I suppose you could call them “romance stories” although they have no resemblance to modern romance stories (which friends tell me are mostly soft-core porn or S/M stories.) No one lives happily ever after, which I suppose is realistic. The ones that don’t die are separated and wish they were dead.
The women are hauntingly beautiful and men can’t resist them. This results in strange love triangles and squares and maybe pentagons. Again, I can’t say for sure because I was lost a lot of the time.
I read the story “Contact” and can’t see why it would be awarded anything. Maybe it’s great literature and that’s why it went over my head. I’m the ultimate low-brow. If not proud of it, I’m not ashamed of it, either.
What made this woman so glum? It sounds like she had a privileged life. Her father was a wealthy editor and founder of Associated Press. At a time when few girls went to college, she was educated at Columbia and the Sorbonne. She came of age during WWI and went to France to serve in a soldiers’ canteen and must have seen some horrors.
WWI was the first of the “bad wars.” A war in which there were no rules and nothing was too awful to do to win. It’s hard to say who was the more unfortunate - those who died or those who lived through the nerve gas attacks and suffered the effects for the rest of their lives.
Afterwards, she married, had children, and her stories were published in popular magazines. She died in her early fifties, which seems very young to me. Still, people did die younger in the 1940’s. Medical care was primitive and most doctors were overseas, treating the military.
I read all the stories, understood some of them, and didn’t enjoy them much. I was particularly puzzled by the author’s waffling take on the subject of women’s independence. Sometimes she seems to be backing women who compete with men. Sometimes she seems to be saying that romantic love is all there is for a woman. Since she led both an adventuresome life (for a woman in that era) and also followed the traditional female paths of wife and mother, maybe she never figured it out herself.
It’s an odd book, but if you like old romance stories, you might enjoy it. Unload the guns and hide the razor blades before you start reading. It’s not cheerful.
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