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Another full-length mystery story featuring Hamilton Cleek, whom we met first in /cleek-the-man-of-the-forty-faces-by-thomas-w-hanshew/ Cleek: The Man of the Forty Faces . This time, Cleek investigates the sinister disappearance of people and the mysterious appearance of flames at night in the desolate Fens, and his friend Superintendent Narkom of Scotland Yard tries to solve some tricky cases of bank robberies in London. While not quite up to the standard we have come to expect from previous Cleek adventures, it is still quite a jolly romp, and Cleek's cockney sidekick Dollops is always good fun. (Introduction by Ruth Golding)...

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Mystery, Fiction

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Humorous, ironic, and sometimes cynical observations of life in 1915 from Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock. (Summary by TriciaG)

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Fiction, Humor, Satire

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I’ll write the summary later. Warning: This book contains some anti-Semitic dialog that many/all will find offensive. (Summary by Adrian Praetzellis)

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Adventure, Spy stories, Mystery

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The Shrieking Pit is one of Arthur Rees's earlier works, and is a good old fashioned murder mystery story. Grant Colwyn, a private detective, is holidaying in East Anglia when he notices a young man at a nearby table behaving peculiarly. The young man later leaves the hotel without paying his bill, and turns up in a nearby hamlet in the Norfolk marshes where he takes lodgings at the village inn. The next day, another guest at the inn is found dead, and the young man is missing. Can Colwyn sort out the mystery and prove the young man's innocence one way or the the other? (Summary by Kevin Green)...

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Fiction, Mystery

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Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is the first sonnet sequence written by an Englishwoman. Published in 1621, the poems invert the usual format of sonnet sequences by making the speaker a woman (Pamphilia, whose name means all-loving) and the beloved a man (Amphilanthus, whose name means lover of two.). It is possible that Wroth based the story on her own fraught relationship with her cousin, William Herbert. (Summary by Elizabeth Klett.)...

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Literature

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This is the Arthurian legend of Tristan and Iseult. It is a tale of love, honour, intrigue, betrayal and jealousy, ending ultimately in tragedy. This story predates that of Lancelot and Guinevere, and is one of the most influential romances of the medieval period, inspiring many artists, from story-tellers to painters to composers. (Summary by Joy Chan)...

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Romance

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In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled him to verify his theories of glacial action. Again and again he returned to this continental laboratory of landscapes. The greatest of the tide-water glaciers appropriately commemorates his name. Upon this book of Alaska travels, all but finished before his unforeseen departure, John Muir expended the last months of his life. (Summary by William Frederic Bade)...

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Adventure, Memoirs, Nature, Travel

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This is a true account by American woman journalist who, in 1889, set out to see whether she could beat the fictional journey in Jules Verne’s 1873 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days. Wearing one dress and carrying one handbag, Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman (pen name “Nellie Bly”), reported her travels back to avid readers in America. (Summary by Mary Reagan)...

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Biography

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The story centers on the relationship between Mrs Kitty Warren, a rich woman, described by the author as on the whole, a genial and fairly presentable old blackguard of a woman and her daughter, Vivie. Mrs Warren is a middle-aged woman whose Cambridge-educated daughter, Vivie, is horrified to discover the sinister way her mother acquired her fortune. (Summary by Wikipedia and Arielle Lipshaw)...

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Play

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A wickedly funny book of advice on women's dress. However old, fat or plain you are, Dorothy Quigley will tell you what not to wear. (Summary by Ruth Golding)...

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Advice, Humor

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Porcelain and Pink is a comic one-act play from the 1922 short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. The plot involves a young woman in a bathtub and a case of mistaken identity. (Summary by Laurie Anne Walden)...

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Comedy

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This is a collection of 12 short stories of mystery and humor, which are, as the title says, for amusement only. (Summary by Carolin)

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Humor, Mystery

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Albert Bigelow Paine was Samuel Langhorne Clemens' (Mark Twain's) biographer. He lived with Twain, collecting ideas and material for a biography, for a few years before Twain's death in 1910. Six years later Paine published this story of a man who made the world laugh and love him. For those who have read or listened to Mark Twain's works, Paine's work is an invaluable resource to better understand Twain, the stories behind his stories and his life with those he loved and with whom he worked. (Summary by John Greenman)...

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Biography, Humor

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Anne is off to Redmond College! She will spend the next four years

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Fiction, Romance, Teen/Young adult

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A shot rings out in the middle of the night in a quiet Chicago neighborhood. Patrolman Murphy is directed to an apartment where a man says the shot came from. The apartment is locked and apparently empty. Was there a murder here? And if so, where is the victim? (summary by J. M. Smallheer)...

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Mystery

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Kate Orme, shocked by the discovery of her fiance's complicity in a tragedy, and by society's willingness to overlook such transgressions, nevertheless marries him. Years later, her son faces a moral crisis similar to the one that showed her his father's moral weakness. (Introduction by Christine Dufour)...

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Fiction

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A woman is apparently murdered in a New York auditorium under very suspicious circumstances one evening during a performance. Helen Hardwick happened to be in attendance that evening, as she had written the play that was being performed, and she was the only person to have caught a glimpse of something peculiar just before the murder. She also heard an ominous laughter which would haunt her for a long time. Was the Gray Phantom involved, or could he assist with the investigation that Helen was to become involved with? (Introduction by Roger Melin)...

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Fiction, Horror/Ghost stories, Mystery

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Lord Ernest Borrow and Captain Anthony Fenton think they know a secret - a secret that could make them both rich. En route, they are sidetracked by Sir Marcus Antonius Lark, a woman who thinks she's Cleopatra reincarnate, a Gilded Rose of an American Heiress, and Mrs. Jones, a mysterious Irish woman with a past. Will they find the secret? Or will the trip up the Nile on the Enchantress Isis net them another discovery altogether? (summary by Sibella Denton)...

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Mystery

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The novel picks up where Tarzan of the Apes left off. The ape man, feeling rootless in the wake of his noble sacrifice of his prospects of wedding Jane Porter, leaves America for Europe to visit his friend Paul d'Arnot. On the ship he becomes embroiled in the affairs of Countess Olga de Coude, her husband, Count Raoul de Coude, and two shady characters attempting to prey on them, Nikolas Rokoff and his henchman Alexis Paulvitch. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

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Adventure, Teen/Young adult

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’s Short Story Collection 008: a collection of 20 short essays and fiction in the public domain read by a variety of members.

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Short stories, Essay/Short nonfiction