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E. Phillips Oppenheim
In this novel we have Oppenheims as it best, with the story of a man hunt set in an English village, and involving a well-known banker and the Lord of the Manor. The story is a thriller built on several interlaced mysteries which are suddenly thrust on the sleepy village of Sandywayes: three men committing shockingly unexpected suicides, three strangers with questionable backstories but no obvious connections simultaneously appearing in town, and large amounts of money quietly disappearing from the bank. This 1935 novel focuses on the conduct of bankers, their clients, and wealthy merchants in the English suburbs surrounding London in the interwar period. The comfortable society of tennis and golf, private cars in trains, and unspoken secrets of money and privilege are the keys to unlocking the mystery.
Stanley G. Weinbaum
The Manderpootz Series includes the three stories of Stanley G. Weinbaums early science fiction trilogy. He is best known for his short story A Martian Odyssey which has been influencing Science Fiction since it was first published in 1934. Weinbaum is considered the first writer to contrive an alien who thought as well as a human, but not like a human. In a series of comedies featuring the eccentric scientist Professor Manderpootz including the Alternate-History story The Worlds of If, The Ideal and The Point of View he flippantly devised absurdly miraculous Machines. The humorous stories follow the doings of Dixon Wells, a perpetually late playboy who runs afoul of the inventions of his friend and former instructor in Newer Physics, Professor Haskel van Manderpootz, a supremely immodest genius who rates Einstein as his intellectual equal.
M.P. Shiel
In The Man-Stealers we have the French plot to kidnap the Duke of Wellington to avenge Napoleons imprisonment. Matthew Phipps Shiel (18651947) was a prolific British writer of West Indian descent. His legal surname remained Shiell though he adopted the shorter version as a de facto pen name. He is remembered mostly for supernatural and scientific romances. His work was published as serials, novels, and as short stories. The Purple Cloud (1901; 1929) remains his most famous and often reprinted novel. If you havent discovered the joys of Shiel s mysteries there is a good place to start.
Arthur Conan Doyle
This is one of the works of fiction published during Doyles life. Published in 1929, only a year before the authors death, this short novel amply demonstrates that Doyle still retained all his great abilities as a spinner of riveting yarns, even in his twilight years. The book concerns Maracots exploration of the world beneath the sea. Maracot and his companions find themselves stranded on the ocean floor, and discover a very unexpected world, in fact a civilisation, deep beneath the waves. They are introduced to a remarkable and ancient society that expands their knowledge of human civilizations history and then even more so, their understanding of planes of existence.Their visions of the future of humanity possess an optimism and a romance that simply isnt possible to writers today.
The Marble Faun. Or, The Romance of Monte Beni
Nathaniel Hawthorne
At the center of the novel is a group of four characters. These are two young American artists, Hilda and Kenyon, who were brought to Rome by a thirst to comprehend the secrets of art, and their friends the artist Miriam and the young Donatello, who are introduced into this circle not by a passion for art, but by love for Miriam. Everyone is struck by the similarity of the count with the famous statue of Praxiteles, depicting a faun. Most importantly, this similarity is not limited to external similarity: traits dominate in the depiction of his image, beyond which the innocence of a creature unaware of the existence of evil is revealed.
Carolyn Wells
In this edge-of-your-seat thriller, renowned mystery writer Carolyn Wells strays from the enclaves of the well-to-do that usually serve as the settings for her novels and introduces elements of gritty street life. When the body of Rowland Trowbridge, a successful businessman, is found in a remote corner of Van Cortlandt Park, it initially appeared to be a robbery gone wrong. The dead mans last words were Cain killed me, which leads investigators to the victims nephew Kane Landon. But was Cain a Biblical reference? Or did it mean something else entirely? With circumstantial evidence against him, Landon turns to expert detective Fleming Stone and his assistant Fibsy McGuire, young man who hails from an Irish immigrant family, to unravel the meaning of... The Mark of Cain.
Edith Wharton
American writer Edith Wharton is known for her novels of manners set in old New York; yet much of her adult life was spent in France. She lived in Paris throughout World War I and was heavily involved in refugee work. She was a hugely successful writer and the first woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence. In this 1918 novella, we are introduced to the story of 15-year-old Troy Belknap who is from a wealthy family in New York but yearns to serve in the area of France along the Marne River where critical World War I battles took place, known as The Marne. Wharton takes the reader on a dizzying journey down the line between Troys rose-colored, heroic ambitions, the grim realities of the war, and the often hollow and ugly attitudes of Americans at home.
Honoré de Balzac
Just a plain old story told by a superb story teller. A Marriage Contract (French: Le Contrat de marriage) is an 1835 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac and included in the Scenes de la vie privée section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine. Set in Bordeaux, the marriage between an elegant but weak young Parisian gentleman, Paul de Manerville, and the beautiful but spoiled daughter of a Spanish heiress, Natalie Evangélista, is undermined from the beginning by a fight over the contract of marriage and the financial arrangements, which causes the mother-in-law to seek revenge against Paul. The story is told in a typical Balzac prose style, a forthright narrative sprinkled with witty adages and life lessons, a swift change in emotions running in his characters such that its difficult to decipher the true nature of each character but only to gratify ones curiosity by admitting that inherent fallacy of human character its multi-faced nature.