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‘a delightful amateur sleuth novel with a well balanced mix of domestic and academic life and a strong sense of place.’ [Stage Fright]

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Be afraid . . . be very afraid

Posted on Sep 26, 2014 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

0451205960.01._SL130_SCLZZZZZZZ__Books that have really scared you do tend to stick in the mind. When I was nine or ten I got hold of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ‘The Engineer’s Thumb’ gave me pause for thought, but ‘The Speckled Band’ frightened me so much that I couldn’t finish the book. I have read them many times since. But I’ve never been able to track down a short story that I read in my twenties that gave me such a real visceral shock that I remember it to this day. I really wanted to read it again and see how the writer did it. Trouble was I couldn’t remember either the name of the author or the name of the story. I remembered the central idea and I thought that the writer was American. I had an idea that it was inĀ an anthology edited by Hugh Greene in the 1970s, The American Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, but though there are some splendid stories in there, this wasn’t one of them. I concluded that I wasn’t going to be able to track it down. It went on being a niggling little question.

And then, earlier today I was browsing Writing Mysteries: A Handbook by the Mystery Writers of America, edited by Sue Grafton and came across this in an article about endings by John Lutz: ‘In my short story “The Real Shape of the Coast” written for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the detective, an inmate of an insane asylum, eventually reaches the inescapable conclusion that he himself is the murderer.’ Bingo! It didn’t take long to track down an anthology that contains it, and a copy of A Century of Noir: 32 Classic Stories is winging its way to me from Motor City Books in Detroit.

So I’ll soon find out: will the story still be scary and how did he pulled it off? I’ll let you know.

Is there a story in your past that makes you shiver at the very thought of it?

2 Comments

  1. moira @ Clothes in Books
    September 29, 2014

    OK, I had to go and find this one. ‘Don’t Look Behind You’ by Frederic Brown, which I read in a Hitchcock collection many years ago. It is TERRIFYING because it manages to convince you, the reader, that you are going to die. It is incredibly creepy, and leaves you looking over your shoulder. I really wouldn’t have wanted to read it if I’d been alone in the house…

    Reply
    • Christine Poulson
      October 5, 2014

      Oh wow . . . I read it on-line last night. I think that lessened the impact a bit, but I still felt jolted by the twist near the end, and if I had been reading it in print and alone in the house, I’d have wanted to have my back to the wall.

      Reply

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