"I have myself, in my complex nature, a hunger after all which is bizarre and fantastic." (pg. 6)

A good and endearing collection of short stories from the prolific Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The stories were conceived, Doyle's preface tells us, to be of the sort enjoyed by the reader round a fire on a winter's night. They meet this conception very well; Doyle, a master of popular storytelling who combines pace and flow with an everyman intelligence, provides a mildly exercising yet untaxing collection of crowd-pleasers in the mystery genre. All are between 10 and 15 pages and can be enjoyed individually or binged, ideally in front of a fireplace, in a longer session. A pleasant time will be had by all.

This vibe is enough, and a good thing too, for on closer inspection the stories show themselves to be lesser lights in Doyle's glittering constellation. For all the tantalising mystery and colour of the stories – macabre scenarios, exotic pets, ancient treasures and locked rooms – the solutions are usually benign or cliché – long-lost twins, men in the disguise of women's clothes, etc. It adds a slight tinge of disappointment on each story's end, but never enough to spoil the story, or the wider experience. An anonymous reference to Sherlock Holmes in 'The Lost Special', one of this collection's better stories, reminds us that Doyle's best work lies elsewhere, but Round the Fire Stories provides an uninterrupted sequence of tasty, if frivolous, treats. ( )

This collection reads a bit like Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, but without the infamous detective. Quite a few of the stories had a macabre style that reminded me more of Edgar Allan Poe than of Doyle’s other work. Pot of Caviar, The Sealed Room and The Brown Hand were a few of the darkest pieces.

Other tales were easily solved with some critical thinking, similar to the Holmes books, but always with fun twists along the way. One deals with a museum break-in (The Jew’s Breastplate), an unexpected death (The Black Doctor), a visit to an eccentric relative (The Brazilian Cat), and a disappearance on a train.

BOTTOM LINE: A great collection of mysteries and ghost stories for a dark night. I missed Sherlock Holmes, but it was a treat to read some of Doyle’s other work. ( )

A fairly interesting selection of mystery stories, a collection first published in 1908. Some of the stories are crying out to be Sherlock Holmes stories (Man with the Watches, The Black Doctor, B.24 and possibly The Japanned Box and The Beetle Hunter) while The Lost Special alluded to Holmes (as an unnamed amateur investigator who says that one must eliminate the impossible and then whatever remains is the truth, no matter how improbable), though I found the resolution of the mystery implausible in this case. Implausibility was also a feature of one or two others, such as The Jew's Breastplate. Some others were a little more pedestrian or rather predictable in their resolution (The Club-Footed Grocer, The Usher of Lea House School, The Brown Hand, Jelland's Voyage). Finally, some were quite horrific and Poe-esque (especially The Leather Funnel, Pot of Caviare, The Sealed Room, perhaps also The Brazilian Cat and The Fiend of the Cooperage). Finally, Playing with Fire presaged the author's own later obsession with spiritualism. A collection worth reading. ( )

I suspect the book I took out of the local public library most often during my middle school years was an edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Round the Fire Stories, first published in 1908 and reprinted several times since. I recently came across a copy of the 1991 Chronicle Books edition and bought it, knowing I'd enjoy a re-read of the stories. Conan Doyle does not disappoint. These are some of his creepiest and most suspenseful works, at times surpassing even the Sherlock Holmes stories in quality (Holmes makes a few uncredited cameo appearances in these stories, but is otherwise absent).

In the preface, Conan Doyle writes "In the present collection those [stories] have been brought together which are concerned with the grotesque and with the terrible - such tales as might well be read 'round the fire' upon a winter's night. This would be my ideal atmosphere for such stories, if an author might choose his time and place as an artist does the light and hanging of his picture. However, if they have the good fortune to give pleasure to anyone, at anytime or place, their author will be very satisfied." I was of course too impatient to wait for winter nights, but summer evenings sufficed just as well; if the author of these knew just how much pleasure these works have brought to me over the years, I suspect he'd be very satisfied indeed.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2007/08/book-review-round-fire-stories.html ( )