Showing results by narrator "Graham Scott" in All Categories

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.

"[T]he longer I practise, the more I become convinced that the microscope is the sheet-anchor of the medical jurist." So declares "scientific investigator", Dr John Thorndyke, as he interprets the clues found in the likes of bloodstains, dust, ash, hairs and fibres, and broken glass, to evolve "an ordered train of evidence from a mass of facts apparently incoherent and unrelated," leading to the solution of the mystery. This book contains five tales of intrigue, murder, mutiny, pathos, and romance - including four in Freeman's then revolutionary "inverted detective story" format.

One of the best-loved collections in English poetry, A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad deals in simple, gently accessible language, with universal themes of life, death, love, and loss, set against the backdrop of the timeless Shropshire countryside.

Amiable but stolid peer Bill, Lord Dawlish, possessor of a slender income and a querulous fiancée, resolves to seek his fortune in America. But before he can even get on the boat, he discovers that the eccentric American millionaire whom he cured of slicing his approach-shots on the links at Marvis Bay a few months earlier has unexpectedly left him five million dollars, as a reward for his altruistic action. But to Bill, noblesse more or less obliges him to share the fortune with the old man's disinherited niece, Elizabeth.

Initially published in 1863, Five Weeks in a Balloon was the first novel in what would become the author's Extraordinary Voyages series. It tells the tale of a 4,000-mile balloon trip over the mysterious continent of Africa, a trip that wouldn't actually take place until well into the next century. Fusing adventure, comedy, and science fiction, Five Weeks has all the key ingredients of classic Verne: sly humor and cheeky characters, an innovative scientific invention, a tangled plot that's full of suspense and surprise, and visions of an unknown realm.

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.

In a genteel ABC teashop on the Norfolk Road, Miss Polly Burton (of the Evening Observer) spends her lunch breaks listening to a mysterious old man, as he unravels cases of murder, blackmail, theft, and deceit that have filled the headlines, and baffled police and public alike. But to him, they are not "mysteries" at all - for Polly's brilliant but eccentric companion, "There is no such thing as a mystery in connection with any crime, provided intelligence is brought to bear upon its investigation."

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. 

Fresh off his victory at The Battle of Lodi, Napoleon is planning to enjoy his lunch when a lieutenant arrives with the bad news that the dispatches he had been carrying were stolen. Infuriated, Napoleon threatens him with being court-martialed unless he can recover them. A woman appears who claims to know about the theft. Unconvinced of her story, Napoleon and the woman enter into a battle of wits in true Shaw style. Will the conqueror of worlds end up conquered by a woman? 

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. 

A year after the adventure of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Major Richard Hannay is plucked from the trenches of the Western Front, and sent on a perilous journey through the very heart of the German empire, to Constantinople. There, he and his small band of missionaries must frustrate a plot to ferment an uprising in the Islamic world aimed at dealing a crushing blow to Britain's interests in the East, and winning the war for Germany. 

R. Austin Freeman presents eight cases for his ingenious Edwardian "scientific investigator", Dr. John Thorndyke, including: a classic locked-room murder mystery; a race to find a disappeared child; a dead woman discovered on a train; the story of the vengeful ghost of a murdered Chinese mandarin; and the enigmatic Moabite Cypher. As ever, Dr. Thorndyke meticulously collects the evidence of footprints, dust, hairs, and fibres, and even a single blue sequin, to unravel the mystery and see that justice is done. 

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. 

Zuleika Dobson, internationally famous prestidigitator visits her grandfather, the Warden of Judas College, Oxford. But Zuleika, "though not strictly beautiful" is a devastatingly attractive young woman, and proves utterly irresistible among the all-male undergraduate body - including the snobbish and trend-setting young Duke of Dorset. Thus begins a chain of events that culminates in a very watery end to the Eights Week boat races... 

Listed in the BBC's "100 Novels That Shaped Our World", Psmith, Journalist takes Wodehouse's immaculate hero to the apparently dull city of New York, where he takes command of twee family periodical Cosy Moments, converts it to the yellowest of yellow journals, and embarks upon a crusade to unmask the owner of the notorious Pleasant Street tenements. But soon the staff of Cosy Moments find themselves dodging ambushes and assassination attempts, as the mysterious tenement owner tries to put them out of business - permanently; and war breaks out among New York's notorious street gangs.

The Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908, is one of the most beloved of all children's classics and has been adapted on multiple occasions for presentation on stage, in film, and as an opera. The action centers on the efforts of Mole, Rat, and Badger to discipline and reform their wealthy and self-destructive friend Toad, who lives in a splendid mansion known as Toad Hall.

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.... 

As METAtropolis: Green Space moves into the 22nd Century, human social evolution is heading in new directions after the Green Crash and the subsequent Green Renaissance. Nearly everyone who cares to participate in the wired world has become part of the "Internet of things", a virtual environment mapped across all aspects of the natural experience. At the same time, the serious back-to-the-land types have embraced a full-on paleo lifestyle, including genetically engineering themselves and their offspring.

Sylvie and Bruno was the last novel completed by Lewis Carroll and was published in two parts. The first volume, which is the subject of this recording, appeared in 1889. The story is presented by an unnamed narrator, who oscillates between two worlds: a fantasy fairyland, populated by characters similar to those in Alice in Wonderland, and the real world environs of a small village by the sea, in which the narrator has taken up temporary residence for health reasons. 

This classic collection of macabre tales, one of 10 such anthologies by Algernon Blackwood, was first published in 1916. It includes, "The Empty House", "A Haunted Island", "A Case of Eavesdropping", "Keeping His Promise", "With Intent to Steal", "The Wood of the Dead", "Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House", "A Suspicious Gift", "The Strange Adventures of a Private Secretary in New York", and "Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp".