Guy Boothby (1867–1905)

A romance/thriller/crime/adventure story. Our hero is a down to earth everyman australian who inexplicably switches to a Holmes level detective whenever the plot calls for it, and gets involved in the nefarious plans of Dr. Nikola through a sequence of badly plotted coincidences.
Our villain Dr. Nikola is a proto-bond villain complete with cat and suffering the usual personality defects. Absurdly convoluted plan, check! Inability to dispatch enemies, check!
Don't get me wrong there are things to like here. Theres some humour here and there, also the writing overall is pretty good in the technical sense. However while you as a reader can never tell what will happen next it doesn't feel like the author knew either.
The plot just wanders around aimlessly before the writer just seems to give up and retreat with the remains of his dignity.
An interesting historical piece for Bond or mesmerist villain fans.… (altro)

Six connected stories in which Simon Carne infiltrates high society in late 1890s London and proceeds to rob it blind. He steals jewels, wedding presents, royal gold, rigs a horse race to win it, and thwarts an Irish bomb plot, while stealing the money meant to finance it. He even poses as a private detective to investigate the robberies he's conducted. All this with the help of his butler, Belton. They expose the folly of the British upper class like P.G. Woodhouse's Bertie Wooster and Jeeves might do, if they were criminals - and Bertie were smarter.… (altro)

“Haunted or no, there was something so uncanny in the appearance of the old gables, fast rottering to ruin, that even in the crepuscular light and early evening, persons would hurry by it with a shudder, while later at night, many would go a long way round rather than pass its weather-worn walls.” (Quotation pos. 337 “The Phantom Riders” by Ernest R. Suffling)

Theme and content
A collection of ghost stories set in the Victorian and Edwardian time. Written by different authors, these twenty-one old gothic tales too are multifaceted, but always gripping and spooky. The reader meets phantom riders, haunted houses and haunted rooms, the dead sexton, Mr. Morgan in Australia who always hurries home before it gets dark, and a friendly ghost who helps his descendants and real true stories about eerie appearances with no logical explanation. Mysterious things happen in these nights around Christmas, where the snow is falling and shadows might be not only shadows but also something else.

Conclusion
This selection of traditional ghost stories, written in the poetic language of the olden times, is a perfect read for the dark winter nights around Christmas time.… (altro)