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  The Striped Chest - From their...

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 22nd May 1859.  His childhood was blighted by his father’s heavy drinking which for some years broke up the family. Fortunately, wealthy uncles were willing to support them by paying for education and clothing.  
  He was accepted at the University of Edinburgh to study medicine and also began to write short stories the first, ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe’, was published in Blackwood’s Magazine.  Despite several other stories and some articles in the British Medical Journal his medical studies took priority. 
  When these finished he was appointed as Doctor on the Greenland whaler ‘Hope of Peterhead’ in 1880 and then, after graduation, as ship’s surgeon on the SS Mayumba on its voyage to West Africa. 
  1882 saw a move to Plymouth and his own independent practice. With few patients he resumed writing and completed his first novel, ‘The Mystery of Cloomber’, although most of his output was short stories based on his experiences at sea.  
  He married Louisa Hawkins in 1885. However, two years later he met and fell in love with Jean Elizabeth Leckie, though they remained platonic out of respect for, and loyalty to, his wife. 
  His literary career suddenly burst into life in November 1886 with ‘A Study In Scarlet’, the first of the fabulously successful Sherlock Holmes stories.  
  With two children to support he now revisited his haphazard commercial arrangements and curtailed everything save for commissions from the Strand Magazine.  
  As a sportsman he was remarkably proficient. He was goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club and played ten first-class cricket matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club as well as captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in East Sussex.  
  In 1891 tired of writing Holmes stories, he began a series of historical novels and even went so far as to apparently kill off Holmes in a lethal brawl with his arch-nemesis Moriarty. 
  Despite heavy and sustained criticism he continued to write in support of the Boer War, a fact he thought contributed to his knighthood in 1902.  The following year to great relief and acclaim he brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead in his first outing for a decade. 
  Sadly, his wife Louisa died from TB in 1906 and, a year later, he at last married Jean.  
  During the War and for several years after family deaths had left him depressed. In a search for solace and answers he alighted upon spiritualism and, such was his interest, that he wrote several books on the subject. 
  On 7th July 1930 Conan Doyle was discovered in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in East Sussex, clutching his chest dying of a heart attack.  He was 71.

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  The Prodigal Parents

  Sinclair Lewis

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  “The Prodigal Parents” is a novel by Sinclair Lewis, an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. The story revolves around a typical middle-class family of four and is about the revolt of the parents against the revolt of youth. The daughter, inclined towards communism, and the hard-drinking brother want their mother and father to continue to support them.

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  Anna Karenina - A sweeping...

  Yvonne Schaefer

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  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." 
  Step into the opulent, suffocating world of 19th-century Imperial Russia, where polite society masks devastating betrayals and desires that possess the power to ruin lives. Anna Karenina plunges us immediately into the domestic catastrophe of the Oblonsky household, shattered by infidelity, before shifting the lens to the earnest, agrarian Konstantin Levin, whose desperate, unrequited love for the radiant Princess Kitty exposes the vulnerable, bruising reality of the human heart. 
  As these iconic characters navigate the treacherous waters of marriage, societal expectation, and intoxicating, forbidden love, their destinies intertwine in a sweeping tapestry of passion and despair. Narrated by Yvonne Schaefer, this brilliant exploration of morality, duty, and human fragility captures the dizzying heights of romantic ecstasy and the crushing depths of societal ruin. Prepare to lose yourself in one of the most masterful portraits of human longing ever crafted.

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  The Under Dog and Other Stories...

  Agatha Christie

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  A dead heiress on a train, a murdered recluse, a wealthy playboy slain at a costume ball are but a few of the unfortunate victims of confounding crimes committed in the pages of Agatha Christie’s The Under Dog and Other Stories, a superior collection of short mystery fiction all featuring Hercule Poirot as the investigator.  
  A beautiful heiress has been found dead on a train. A playboy has been stabbed through the heart during a costume ball. An elderly woman suspects that she is being slowly poisoned to death. A prince fears for his reputation when his fiancée is embroiled in another man's murder. A forgotten recluse makes headlines after he is shot in the head. 
  Who but Agatha Christie could concoct such canny crimes? Who but Belgian detective Hercule Poirot could possibly solve them? It's a challenge to be met—in a triumph of detection.

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  The Four Million - Short Stories

  O Henry

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  'There are stories in everything. I've got some of my best yarns from park benches, lampposts, and newspaper stands.'
  
  The second collection of short stories by O. Henry, The Four Million is a moving, witty response to a contemporary newspaper editorial which claimed there are only four hundred people in New York worth knowing. O. Henry fervently disagreed.
  
  First published in 1906, The Four Million consists of twenty-five moving short stories based in New York. Each tale showcases the lives of seemingly ordinary people – clerks, waiters, con artists and more – with irony, humour and warmth. From a charming exploration of love with 'The Gift of the Magi' to a tragic tale of friendship in 'After Twenty Years', The Four Million compellingly conveys the unique breadth of the human experience. A brilliant collection of character sketches, O. Henry reminds us how everyone has a story worth telling.
  O. Henry (1862 – 1920), otherwise known as William Sydney Porter, was an American writer. Best known for his short stories, Henry also dabbled in poetry and non-fiction, and is famed for his naturalist style, wit and unexpected endings.

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  Count Magnus - From their pens...

  M R James

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  Montague Rhodes James is cited as perhaps the greatest English writer of ghost stories, an opinion few would disagree with. 
  James was born on 1st August 1862 at Goodnestone Parsonage in Kent, where his father was Curate but at age 3 the family went to live at Livermere, near Bury St Edmunds in East Anglia.  
  From early childhood he had a passion for mediaeval books and antiques. He was educated initially as a boarder at Temple Grove School in East Sheen, west London, before gaining a scholarship to Eton and thence Cambridge where he gained a double first, becoming a distinguished linguist and mediaevalist.  
  Before the Great War vacations were usually spent touring Europe absorbing cultures and references for his later writing. 
  A man of enormous knowledge it was said he timed his breakfast egg whilst he completed the Times crossword.  
  Many of his elegant yet terrifying tales were created by discarding the prevailing gothic cliches and placing his characters and narrative in a realistic setting.  Thereby the stories gained atmosphere and menace on a grand scale and he was famed as the originator of the antiquarian ghost story. 
  Although story-telling and writing these 30 or so tales was a hobby, when published their effect transformed the genre and still chill the bones in our more modern times. 
  James was also a medievalist scholar and translator whose work remains highly respected. He was also Provost of Eton College between 1918 and 1936. 
  M R James died on 12th June 1936 at Eton in Buckinghamshire.  He was 73.

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