Showing results by narrator "Graham Scott" in All Categories

The immaculate Psmith - newly emancipated from an unwilling participation in the fish business - donates an umbrella (not his own) to a damsel in distress; and to further press his suit, he follows her to Blandings Castle - seat of that amiable and boneheaded peer, Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth - in the guise of an absconded Canadian poet. And, for the best possible motives, Psmith is also embroiled in a plot to steal Lady Constance Keeble's fabulous diamond necklace - an endeavour which brings him into conflict with both professional rivals.

Richard Hannay, returned colonial mining engineer, is thoroughly bored with life in London, and only a day away from taking the next boat back to the Cape. But then he encounters mysterious American spy Franklin P. Scudder, on the run from foreign agents seeking to prevent him from revealing an assassination plot designed to throw Britain into war with Germany. And when Scudder is murdered in Hannay's flat, Hannay finds himself on the run from both the police and Scudder's enemies - and bound in honour to pursue the dead man's work and save his country from disaster.... 

James "Jimmy" Crocker - only son of a jobbing actor, former journalist, and now penitent playboy - returns to his native United States under an assumed name, after five years cutting a swathe through London Society on his rich stepmother's money. But far from picking up the threads of his peaceable pre-wealth life, instead Jimmy rapidly becomes enmeshed in plots and schemes of espionage and kidnapping. 

In Conrad's haunting novella, narrator Marlow recounts his experiences in the Congo Free State, and his chilling and perilous quest upriver in search of visionary ivory trader, the enigmatic Mr Kurtz. His journey, culminating in his eventual encounter with Kurtz, horrify and perplex Marlow, and lead him to question his own nature and values, and the whole concept of "civilization". 

Floyd Dell has been called "one of the most flamboyant, versatile, and influential American Men of Letters of the first third of the 20th century". Though he was primarily a newspaper and magazine editor, most prominently of the radical left-wing magazine The Masses, he also published many best-selling feminist works. As a staunch advocate of feminism, socialism, psychoanalysis, and progressive education, his writing greatly shocked the American bourgeoisie at the time, to the point where it became so controversial, he was put on trial twice for his subversive literature.  

Pudgy, scowling Ogden Ford, spoiled child of divorced parents with far more money than is good for them, is "the Little Nugget" - the El Dorado of the American kidnapping industry. When Ogden's father sends him to an isolated English preparatory school, Mr. Peter Burns, gentleman of leisure - persuaded by his brand new fiancee - becomes a master at the school in order to steal the Nugget and take him back to his doting mother.

P.G. Wodehouse's first full-length Jeeves and Wooster book is a sparkling collection of linked stories, in which Bertie Wooster is harried by his fearsome Aunt Agatha, determined to marry him off; snootered by his anarchic cousins, the twins Claude and Eustace, the curse of the human race; and lugged into every romantic misadventure of his warm-hearted boyhood friend young Bingo Little. But through all his tribulations - give or take the occasional difference over purple socks or Old Etonian spats - the ever-faithful Jeeves stands ready to haul Bertie out of the soup.

The Green Carnation is Robert Hichens' scandalous satire of the relationship between Oscar Wilde and his friend Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas. It was one of the works used against Wilde in his prosecution. Socialite Mrs. Windsor embarks upon her annual "Surrey week", a week of "perfect rusticity" in the country, with her cousin the widowed Lady Locke (and her young son Tommy), her French chef, her coachman and two tall footmen - and her three "wits": Madame Valtesi, Esmé Amarinth (Wilde), and Lord Reginald "Reggie" Hastings (Douglas).

Almost a decade and a half after the death of Oscar Wilde - and dealing with the fall-out of an unsuccessful and financially ruinous libel action - Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas for the first time gives his version of the disastrous relationship between the two men, and Wilde's eventual disgrace and imprisonment. He also examines the literary and cultural legacy of Oscar Wilde. 

When Mike Jackson's father suffers a serious financial setback, all Mike's hopes of "Varsity Blue" and a career playing his beloved cricket are dashed. Instead, he must go out and earn his living - in the alien world of the New Asiatic Bank, under the management of his nemesis Mr. John Bickersdyke. At first, all seems black; but then Mike finds that he has an ally, in the immaculate form of the irrepressible Psmith, who is likewise sentenced to a career in commerce. And Psmith has plans for the reform of Mr Bickersdyke....

Eternal optimist Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge conceives another foolproof scheme to make himself - and his adoring new wife, Millie - rich: chicken farming! "No expenses, large profits, quick returns. Chickens, eggs, and the money streaming in faster than you can bank it." Dragging along his long-suffering old friend, novelist Jeremy Garnet, Ukridge begins his enterprise on a borrowed farm, with "borrowed" hens and a total lack of knowledge. Things soon prove a little trickier than expected on the farm....

The first four stories were first published as a collection in 1891. The final story, "The Portrait of Mr W. H.", originally published separately in 1889, was later added to an expanded collection. All the stories deal with personal relationships and their inevitable influence on the course of a person's life. 

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), was an English writer, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian, biographer, and literary and art critic. Chesterton is best known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown. In The Club of Queer Trades, narrator 'Cherub' Swinburne and his friends, the eccentric former judge Basil Grant, and Basil's younger brother, private detective Rupert Grant, encounter six curious mysteries, each involving someone who makes a living in an extraordinary and bizarre - in the language of the time a 'queer' - way.

In the pretty little town of Sibley, NY, the court has adjourned for lunch, and Judge Evans and some of the leading lawyers of the district stand outside the courthouse discussing the limitations of the criminal classes. A stranger describes to them just how a man might commit a murder and avoid detection - and only minutes later, the widow Clemmens is discovered struck down in her parlor by an unknown hand in circumstances eerily similar to those described by the stranger.   

Once upon a time, people wrote fables featuring untrustworthy ravens, wicked wolves, insincere monkeys, and power-hungry lions. Told repeatedly through generations and spread throughout the world, classic stories abound in which noble heroes and heroines matched wits with these typically treacherous beasts. But what's that you say? You feel as though you're surrounded by just these sorts of characters at work? Well, you're not alone.

Calidore is a fragment of an unfinished romance and may be considered unique among Peacock's work. Composition probably commenced after the publication of Peacock's largest novel, Melincourt, in 1817. The action concerns the adventures of a young man, Calidore, who finds himself in Wales, en route to London in search of "a wife and a philosopher".

Thomas Love Peacock is today remembered as the author of seven satirical novels which many regard merely as literary curiosities. However, he was also a man of considerable learning, a skilled poet, and an astute literary critic. This collection includes Recollections of Thomas Love Peacock, an affectionate reminiscence by Sir Edward Strachey; Some Recollections of Childhood, a window into Peacock's early youth; "Four Ages of Poetry", in which he pokes fun at his contemporaries; and "The Last Day of Windsor Forest", an old man's recollection of a memorable episode.

The melodramatic romance by Goethe The Sorrows of the Young Werther, the story of a troubled aesthete who kills himself for love, was first published in 1774 and has since become one of the staples of German literature. Such extravagant productions lend themselves readily to parody and naturally attracted the attention of skilled satirists like Thomas Love Peacock. 

This extensive collection features stories of comedy, horror, monsters, strange worlds, guilt, enmity, whimsy, and avarice in some of the best of H. G. Wells' short fiction.

Nineteen tales of murder and mystery in the first three books to feature H.C. Bailey's golden age detective Mr. Reginald 'Reggie' Fortune: surgeon and general practitioner, a man interested in everything, but not in anything in particular, and with a vast store of eclectic knowledge that makes him the ideal man to advise the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard, and shine a light upon the darkest of deeds.