検索キーワード： ナレーター "Graham Scott" すべてのカテゴリー

Unlike most of Peacock's novels, The Misfortunes of Elphin has a distinct plot, built around the adventures of prominent figures of Arthurian legend, like Taliesin, the bard, the princes Elphin, and Seithenyn and King Arthur himself. The drama comes to a satisfactory resolution when Arthur's wife, Gwenyvar, who has been kidnapped by the ambitious King Melvas, is restored to her husband, after some skilful negotiation by Seithenyn and a cunning abbot.

Unlike Peacock's other novels, Maid Marian has a substantial plot, based on the romantic legend of Robin Hood. As is usual with Peacock, the violence is presented in a rather humorous fashion and the characters indulge lavishly in eating and drinking. Beneath the veneer of this well-known and innocuous narrative, Peacock finds ample opportunity to satirize the foibles of church and secular government.

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.

Headlong Hall was the first of his seven novels, all of which display the same structure. There is a faint semblance of a plot, which is merely a device to bring together a bunch of voluble eccentrics, who converse on a wide range of topical issues. Headlong Hall is the rural seat of the ebullient Squire Headlong, who invites a number of philosophers, a clergyman, a musician, a novelist, and a phrenologist, to dine with him and share their views.

Between 1895 and 1898, H. G. Wells wrote five science fiction novels, which have become among the most celebrated examples of the genre. The first of these was The Time Machine, in which Wells explores not only the fascinating subject of time travel but also the potential dangers to human autonomy by the advance of civilization. Well's world-weary Time Traveller, who is the main narrator, is one of his most quirky and appealing characters.

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.

Holidaying in a country inn, wealthy Jephthah Mottram dies, poisoned by gas. But Mr Mottram was insured with the massive Indescribable Insurance Company, under its famously extravagant Euthanasia policy: with half a million pounds payable on death... except in the case of death by suicide. The Indescribable's somewhat desultory private detective, Miles Bredon, along with his wife Angela, is sent to investigate. Was Mottram's death suicide, or something more sinister?

A second collection of twelve cases for M. McDonnell Bodkin’s insightful but self-deprecating detective Paul Beck, a man who claims no more genius than “a little common sense,” and says of himself that “I just go by the rule of thumb, and muddle and puzzle out my cases as best I can.” Including the disappearance of a millionaire; murders on a golf links and on a train; a fabulous diamond necklace lost in the sea, and the theft of an actress’ rubies; a lucky discovery in a Hansom cab; and a doctor found standing over the dead body of his fiancée’s brother.

When Mordaunt Reeves and a group of friends playing a round discover the battered body of a man, clearly fallen from the viaduct, Reeves—a man a little too fond of reminding everyone that he was in Military Intelligence during the war—suspects that the police are not taking the death seriously, and persuades his friends to help him to investigate. Soon, theories of the crime begin to emerge.

The great medical jurist Dr John Thorndyke must unravel three intricate cases, as a wealthy American attempts to prove a preposterous claim to an English earldom, based only upon a startlingly tall old family tale; a hundredweight of platinum, worth a fortune, is stolen; and, most bizarrely of all, a severed human head is discovered in a box in the left luggage office of London's Fenchurch Street Station...

Mystery, murder, deception, obsession, and vendetta abound in Chesterton's third collection of eight adventures for the unassuming but insightful Father Brown; including a happily temporary demise for the little priest himself; a millionaire killed with an arrow from heaven; another disappeared from a sealed room; a maniac determined to possess a precious relic; and a decaying family and a mysterious portrait.

A pompous and pooterish city clerk with social pretensions relates anecdotes of suburban life in Edwardian England, as he and his patient and long-suffering wife, Eliza, deal with various crises and contretemps—including the vexed question of visiting cards; a malfunctioning music player; the mistreatment of the narrator’s hat; a mushroom (or toadstool) in the front garden; and the ongoing struggle to balance the household accounts …

Young prince Rasselas is discontented with life in the idyllic Happy Valley, where the children of the King of Abyssinia are confined for life amid every pleasure that the heart could desire. Along with his sister Nekayah, and his friend the poet Imlac, Rasselas escapes the Valley to explore the world and the human condition, so that they may each make their own choice of life. As they encounter different classes of people and modes of life, they come to understand better the elusive nature of happiness.

In Historic Doubts of the Life and Reign of King Richard III, Walpole defends Richard III against the common belief that he murdered the Princes in the Tower, and many of the other crimes laid at his door by the Tudor dynasty which followed Richard’s defeat at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. In this he has been followed by a number of other writers, including Josephine Tey in her classic 1951 mystery novel The Daughter of Time.

European tourists travel languidly along the Nile River to Abousir, at the southern frontier of Egypt, aboard “a turtle-bottomed, round-bowed stern-wheeler,” the Korosko. But Dervish warriors threaten danger and then attack and kidnap the tourists. In this novel, Doyle explores themes of British Imperialism and a defensive European perspective on North Africa; racial paternalism; and debates on interference with other countries’ politics and religions. This wonderful novel was first published in 1898, long before Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile.

Emma is a vivacious twenty-year-old, who has spent her life in the pleasant seclusion of a village community and who lives with her widowed valetudinarian father. Most of the neighbors admire and approve of her, except for George Knightley, a local landowner, who often expresses his disapproval of Emma’s highhanded and controlling tendencies, in particular her assumption of the unofficial role of matchmaker.

Seven more cases for HC Bailey's eclectic golden age sleuth Mr Reginald Fortune: surgeon, general practitioner, and advisor to Scotland Yard wherever surgery, medicine or kindred sciences can elucidate what is or is not crime. Including: a sudden death at Royal Ascot; a young doctor accused of a diamond theft; a strange country house burglary; an incident at the British Museum leading to a far darker crime; a vanished actress; and a diabolical murder at an orphanage, linked to an apparently accidental death and a near-fatal poisoning.

The plot follows the usual trajectory of a young girl falling in love and the relationship becoming compromised by unforeseen circumstances. In this case, Austen’s heroine is a naïve country girl, Catherine Morland, who has an addiction to reading the Gothic horror novels which were so popular in the Regency period. When she is invited to stay at the family seat of her love interest and discovers it to be a vast and ancient castle, her romantic imagination runs riot. What secrets lie hidden in this vast pile over which the widowed head of the house exercises an iron control?

Sally Meredith is in deadly danger after her mercurial uncle Fritzi, the genius chemist and inventor M. Frederic Lasalle, disappears into the night. He leaves her as the only person who knows how to open the Chinese puzzle box in which he has concealed the formula for his latest invention: a new gas, sudden, swift, and deadly beyond anything ever before devised. Soon, Sally is in the clutches of sinister foreign agents, and her former fiancé Bill Armitage, of the War Office, with the aid of a Scotland Yard detective, desperately searches for her …

This 1911 collection of thirty-three stories, selected and revised by the author from amongst his huge output of short fiction, includes tales of comedy, horror, monsters, and strange worlds. In his Introduction, Wells writes that the book brings together, “All the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again,” and that, “No short story of mine of the slightest merit is excluded from this volume.”