Status Updates From Shadow Voices: 300 years of...

Well, I feel good that I've gone back to this book, after months of letting it sit neglected simply because its size discourages me from carrying it around for between-novels short-stuff sampling. Today had to be the day to give it more love! I just finished a fine whodunit shortie, and though it was written by an Irishman, between that and Freeman Wills Crofts, I'm starving for something actually SET IN Ireland...

Well it was kinda fun to finally go back to this book, just when I’m making a point of reading novels with the word ‘Fear’ in them, and discover that the next story for me in here was ‘The Man Who Never Knew Fear’ by Douglas Hyde. I might even include Night of Fear by Moray Dalton in my focus on ‘Fear’, even though it’s a Mystery set at Christmas. I’m okay with that, but we’ll see.

I loved ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime: A Study of Duty’ by Oscar Wilde. It strikes me as being a distant ancestor to two of my favourite novels: The Count of Eleven by Ramsey Campbell, and Counting Down by Gerard Stembridge. The Oscar Wilde tale is followed in this book by a story by his mom, Jane, Lady Wilde (“Speranza”), and as it was so short, I read that one too. Some notes on her as well - wow, she was 6’ tall!

It’s such a big book, that I decline to take it with me anywhere, the way I take other more manageable short story books with me when out and about. If I’m about to finish, or start, a longer work, I like to read a short story between novels…so this book gets attention mainly on weekends. Nevertheless, it has been terrific, so far - and is it so terrible if I’m spotlighting it for an unusually long time…?

Her entry in this book - plus the biographical notes enunciating just how important her early efforts are to the history of Crime fiction - of course make me want to read more by Mary Helena Fortune. The story reminded me of the stuff of Freeman Wills Crofts.

Just finished ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’ (original version) by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Everything by this author that I’ve read has made him a favourite of mine: this story, Uncle Silas, and everything in Through a Glass Darkly, especially ‘Carmilla’. It was also fun to have this story come up in my reading cycle when I’m about to start a novel about paintings, Golden Ashes. Theme, ahoy!