Adult Storytime

For our fourth Adult Storytime podcast, we're changing things up a little.  Our story is by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but it's not a Sherlock Holmes story nor even a mystery.  Instead it's a horror story—actually a science fiction horror story, since it's set about ten years into the future from when it was written, and involves more advanced airplanes than existed at the time.  Written in an effective documentary style, it describes the shocking discoveries and disappearance of an aviator probing the upper limits of the atmosphere.

"The Horror of the Heights" was first published in November 1913, just 10 years after the Wright Brothers' first flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.  Thus it trades on early-20th-century anxieties about this new, largely unexplored frontier, just as sci-fi horror today plays with the dangers of space exploration or the unintended consequences of technology.  This story is collected in Tales of Terror and Mystery, an Arthur Conan Doyle anthology available from Saint Paul Public Library in print, ebook, and e-audiobook format.

One of the more unconventional crimesolvers created during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is known only as the Old Man in the Corner.  Relying on newspaper coverage and courtroom proceedings, he theorizes solutions to unsolved mysteries, which he shares with a female journalist named Polly Burton while sitting in the corner of a tea shop.  Very unusually for the genre, the Old Man in the Corner never pursues justice.  His admiration instead goes to criminals who manage to outwit the police.

The Old Man in the Corner is the creation of the Baroness Emma Orczy, who was born into an aristocratic family in Hungary in 1865 and emigrated to Great Britain when she was 14.  She began writing in her 30s to help support her low-earning husband and soon had a major hit with The Scarlet Pimpernel, which introduced the trope of the hero with a secret identity into popular culture.

In "The York Mystery", a roguish gentleman is ensnared in the sensational murder of a horseracing bookie on his back doorstep during the annual Ebor Festival, and only the Old Man in the Corner has deduced the real culprit.

Saint Paul Public Library librarian János reads "The Coin of Dionysius" by Ernest Bramah from The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

As the Golden Age of Detective Fiction emerged in the wake of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, it behooved authors to distinguish their character both from Holmes and the other crimesolvers proliferating in the pages of magazines.  Ernest Bramah was one of the first to give his character a physical disability.  In this tale he introduces Max Carrados, whose chance encounter with a private inquiry agent is an opportunity to prove that blindness is no impediment, and possibly even an asset, in detective work.

Max Carrados might be literature's first blind sleuth, but what really elevates Ernest Bramah's stories are the humanity with which he imbues the character, and the zingy wit of the writing.

Saint Paul Public Library librarian János reads "The Lenton Croft Robberies" by Arthur Morrison, from The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.

When Arthur Conan Doyle first began publishing his Sherlock Holmes short stories in 1891, they became an instant hit in Britain and North America.  The popularity grew so overwhelming to Doyle, who feared that the stories were overshadowing his "serious" literary work, that he killed off his own hit character just two years later.  With the public still clamoring for more short crime fiction, a flood of other authors launched their own detective series.  Though little remembered today—particularly since Doyle relented and resurrected Holmes a decade later—many nevertheless remain worthy reads.

One of the first authors to churn out his own series of detective stories was Arthur Morrison.  He deliberately made his character, Martin Hewitt, the opposite of Sherlock Holmes in many respects.  Where Holmes was irascible, hard to deal with, and disparaging of the police, Martin Hewitt is a genial, easygoing fellow who often works closely with authorities.  Unfortunately, this also makes him a rather blander character, but Arthur Morrison makes up for this with really good plots for most of his stories.