Mary Danby (Ed) - Realms of Darkness - Octopus - 1985

 

Mary Danby (ed) - Realms of Darkness ; Nightmarish Tales of the Supernatural and Macabre - Octopus - 1985

Published for St Michael/Marks and Spencer, presumably to be sold in their stores, in 1985, the same year as the first edition was published (by Heinemann, I think).

With introduction by Christopher Lee

73 short stories by 73 authors, including Martin Amis, Dennis Wheatley, Agatha Christie, F Marion Crawford, J B Priestley, and Bill Pronzini.

Mary Danby was an author in her own right as well as being noted as editor of numerous anthologies of supernatural fiction. She also acted as compiler of various humorous anthologies - books of jokes, cartoons, limericks etc, though these need not detain us here.

This impressive collection brings together the modern and the classic, the obscure and the well-known. It`s true that other anthologists - Richard Dalby springs to mind - have done very much the same thing, but let`s not worry too much about that. 

With such a range of authors,  almost anyone who likes this sort of thing is going to find some stories they love and some they will probably read once and never again. I can think of three straight away that I didn`t care for, but given the number of stories contained in this volume, I`m not too worried about that. 

More to the point, there were only a moderate number of stories here that I already had in other collections and a great number that were new to me, despite the many comparable volumes I`ve read over the years. 

I`ve read that Mary Danby`s ghost/horror anthologies often duplicate each other (though I don`t know that from my own knowledge), so I would be cautious of buying too many of them.

Given the scope of this selection, it would be perfect for someone who just wants one anthology of this sort, but wants the one that they have to be a good one.

  

Sound Dimension - Style and Fashion

Bill S Ballinger - The Longest Second - The Mystery Book Guild - 1958

 

 Bill S Ballinger - The Longest Second - Mystery Book Guild - 1958

An absorbing read, with a touch of the Ed McBains about it. 

The principal story told in this novel is of a man who wakes up in a hospital ward suffering from amnesia. He has a severe cut to his throat and it is unclear if this was due to an assault or a suicide attempt. He is told by a detective that his name is Vic Pacific, an identity they have established by checking his fingerprints against army records as he served in North Africa during World War Two.

The second story concerns two detectives investigating the case of a man found dead with very similar injuries to the throat. They too check his fingerprints man`s against army records and they too find their man is Vic Pacific !

The larger part of the story is given over to the first man`s search for his own identity and the things he learns about himself along the way. 

For him, people seem to fall into two categories, those who are useful to him and those who are not. He sees others as "phantoms" that he never really connects with and whose feelings, as often as not, are just an annoyance to him. 

Few will warm to his central character, but Ballinger , a prolific and experienced writer,  keeps the readers` interest throughout. 

Howard Perry - Let Me Be Yours Until Tomorrow

Jonathan Goodman(Ed) - Medical Murders - BCA - 1992

 

Jonathan Goodman (ed) - Medical Murders - BCA  - 1992

(Book originally published by Piatkus the previous year)

Contributors ; Jonathan Goodman, Edward H Smith, Harold Eaton, Joan Lock, Rev Evelyn Burnaby and 8 others

This was a book I found on a charity stall at my local supermarket. Having proffered what I hope was a suitable donation I trotted happily home, ready to immerse myself in the world of murderous medics, dangerous doctors and poisonous practitioners. 

The book was enjoyable, but a bit patchy. Most of the pieces were originally published  in other true crime collections, a couple seem to have been written specifically for inclusion in this volume and two were originally  newspaper articles.

Some contributors have done their homework - Albert Borowitz has clearly made a particular study of the murder of Dr George Parkman at Harvard Medical College in Boston (1849) - but while I may be treating them unfairly,  others may not have drawn on such a wide range of sources.

All are readable and informative, however, though I did feel that Richard Whittington-Egan in his piece on the crimes of Arthur Warren Waite rather overdid the humour and at times his comments were ill-judged. 

Overall, I am happy to have read this book, and I would be tempted to seek out other works by some of the contributors, but I would be not be in a hurry to try any of Jonathan Goodmans` other crime collections -  unless another unexpected bargain comes my way, of course.