Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

Harry Houdini's greatest escape ever. While visiting Cairo as a tourist, Houdini and his wife are shown around the pyramids by a mysterious and slightly sinister guide who has a strange hollow voice and looks like an old pharaoh. What starts as a strange traveller's adventure to witness a duel at midnight on the summit of one of the pyramids, turns into a nightmare as Houdini is seized, tied up and lowered on a rope far into the bowels of the earth to an unknown tomb where the oldest and most sinister of the Egyptian Pharaohs dwell....

Kipling’s classic tale taken from the Just So Stories. In the old days, the Rhinoceros's skin used to fit him quite tightly... but after getting cake crumbs inside it, Rhino was forced to scratch himself - and his skin got baggier and his temper grumpier.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English writer best known for his fictional priest-detective, Father Brown.This collection features five of Chesterton's most intriguing cases:The Shadow of the SharkThe Hammer of GodThe Invisible ManThe Queer FeetThe Blue Cross

Who Was She? is a romantic mystery. The narrator is on vacation and discovers what he takes to be a secluded glen unknown to anyone else. But one day, he finds a wilted bunch of flowers and a book on the flat rock where he always sits. The book contains sketches and musings, clearly by an unmarried woman. The narrator finds a way to return the book, with his own message and an unlikely and mysterious correspondence begins, from which it becomes clear that this is the start of a strange unknown quest.

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. 'The Black Cap' is a sketch about a woman leaving her husband and eloping with her lover. But then her lover turns up at the station wearing a piece of totally inexplicable and unacceptable headgear....

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. A Dill Pickle is a wistful love story about a couple who meet again six years after their break-up, and for a moment the old passions, positive and negative, resurface in the course of a short intense conversation.

When Mr. Dillet buys a breathtakingly beautiful antique dolls' house from a dealer, he is delighted with his purchase and has it installed in his bedroom at home. When he goes to bed, however, he hears a clock strike one and then a strange scene unfolds before his eyes, leading him into a vision from the past in which he unravels a mysterious unsolved murder...

One of the hobbies of Charles Lindley Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax, was the collection of gruesome tales of the supernatural. These stories were told to him by friends, acquaintances and sent to him by strangers, and he duly recorded them in a book over the course of his long life - he lived to be 94. This is the complete collection in one volume.

An exceptional collection of strange and uncanny tales which cast various slants on that most grisly of events, the execution.

A grisly collection of despicable crimes told by some of the world's best writers.

Great Horror Stories is a vintage collection of some of the finest ghost tales, horror stories, and supernatural legends ever written, by the best writers the genre has to offer.

Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (1812-1885) was a Norwegian writer, scholar and collector of traditional folktales. Peter Gynt is the story of a hunter who gets the better of a group of trolls who like to take over peoples' farms.

'The Enchanted Knife' is the story of a young man who seeks to marry the princess. Her father sets him an impossible task to perform before he will grant the suit - but with the aid of the cunning princess and a magic knife, the youth is able to win his bride.

Maurice Baring (1874-1945) was an English short story writer, children's writer, novelist, travel writer and war correspondent during the First World War. The Glass Mender is a fairy story about a princess named Rainbow, who as a baby is cursed by a wicked fairy. If Rainbow hears or sees the spring, her happiness will end. Her parents decide to keep her in a tower for three months every year...but will they be able to keep her away from the spring forever?

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction and a close associate of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. 'A Suburban Fairy Tale' is a disturbing story set in an English family at the end of the First World War. While the parents are revelling in the end of rationing and enjoying the availability of all kinds of food which had been rationed, their young son is aware of the hungry birds chirruping in the garden. But are they actually birds? Or could they be hungry little boys like himself?

'Number Fifty-Six' is a humorous tale of a Chinese laundryman who gets to know his clients through their laundry habits. He is able to infer much from the state of the various shirts, handkerchiefs, waistcoats which are delivered to him for washing. Of all his clients he is most fascinated by number 56...a man with strangely fluctuating shirt habits. And then one fateful day, a dreadful set of laundry is delivered to him....

William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an English author. He produced a large body of work including horror, fantastic fiction, and science fiction stories. 'The Baumoff Explosive' (sometimes known as 'Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani') was first published in 1919. This story is one of Hodgson's most powerful and disturbing and is especially relevant to modern times because of its themes of blasphemy, religious mania, obsession with the crucifixion of Jesus, and suicide bombing.

Edmée Elizabeth Monica Dashwood, née de la Pasture (1890-1943), was a prolific English author who wrote under the pseudonym E. M. Delafield. She is best known for her largely autobiographical Diary of a Provincial Lady, which took the form of a journal of the life of an upper-middle class Englishwoman living mostly in a Devon village of the 1930s. In 'Squirrel in a Cage', she tells the story of the ending of a relationship between two lovers.

Marie Corelli (1855 - 1924) was an eccentric British novelist who enjoyed great literary success from the publication of her first novel in 1886 until World War I. Corelli's novels sold more copies than the combined sales of popular contemporaries, including Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling and she was the most widely read popular author of her day. Her fans included Winston Churchill, Mark Twain and the British Royal Family.

A fast-paced and engaging narrative about a medical assistant who despairs of finding the funds for his final year of medical school until, while defending himself against the belligerent spouse of a patient, he ends up knocking out the town's best candidate to defeat the local boxing champion, the Croxley Master. Learning that the impending fight carries prize money which would see him through his education, he agrees to step in as the new challenger and see whether he can defeat the Croxley Master.