H Douglas Thomson - The Mystery Book - Odhams - 1934


H Douglas (ed) - The Mystery Book - Odhams - 1934


H Douglas Thomson was an editor employed by Odhams in the 1930s to compile a number of  anthologies of short stories. He was also the author of Masters of Mystery, a book about writers of crime fiction. 

The Mystery Book is a particularly fine collection of 50 stories, divided into three sections; Stories of Mystery and Adventure, Stories of Crime and Detection and Stories of the Supernatural.

The 50 authors include J S Fletcher, A J Alan, J Storer Clouston, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Michael Kent. 

H G Wells' The Invisible Man and Henry James ' The Turn of the Screw are included in their entirety.

E Bulwer Lyttons'  The Haunted and the Haunter (aka The House and the Brain) and Perceval Landons' Thurnley Abbey are also presented here in full and not in the abridged versions included in some anthologies. I have read and enjoyed the Lytton story in both forms but in my personal view, Thurnley Abbey needs to be read in full to be appreciated.

Some of the stories here are regularly included in collections of this sort - Bram Stokers' The Judge's House springs to mind - but a number were new to me and I am an avid consumer of this type of thing

Inevitably, some stories were more to my taste than others, but that's pretty much built-in to an anthology of this sort. Charles Lambs' The Witch Aunt, included in the Stories of the Supernatural section, is the only tale that I thought didn't merit inclusion, simply because it is not in fact a story concerned with the supernatural (or with crime and detection or mystery and adventure for that matter). 

Lastly, I should mention the 17 illustrations by Ernest Wallcousins, which add to the mood of the thing. 










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