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So, everyone here likes stories about spinsters getting back a bit of their own, right? “The Bachelor’s Christmas” isn’t that, but thematically it’s a cross between that and Colonel Crockett’s Co-operative Christmas. As you can probably imagine, I’m super into it.
Tom Wiggin is the rare Christmas story protagonist who doesn’t have any major problems. I mean, he didn’t get to marry the girl he was in love with, and his servants sometimes break things, but that’s about it. He’s also an incredibly delightful person; when we’re introduced to him it’s Christmas Eve and he’s generously tipping his servants for Christmas preparatory to hand-delivering presents to his married siblings and their families. They’re all booked for dinner with their in-laws, and Tom isn’t invited, which is the problem around which the story is centered, but not an actual problem. And Tom is such a mensch that he’s using his lonely Christmas to provide another, less well-off bachelor with a nice dinner.
And then he expands his plan. He knows a lot of other bachelors who have no Christmas plans, and a lot of spinsters, too — all the members of his social set who never got married, including the girl he wanted to marry. And they’re all in their late twenties and thirties now — old enough to take care of themselves, as he puts it on his invitations — so he throws a Christmas dinner party, with a dance afterwards, and everything is great.
The ending struck a bit of a false note for me, but I still recommend “The Bachelor’s Christmas” unreservedly, because the rest of it is pure Christmas story glee.
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By: Melody,
on 6/20/2013
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Check out the previous post in the series for stuff about short story series you’ve almost certainly heard of, and for my philosophy of short stories, which pretty much boils down to “they’re better when they come by the bookful and are all about the same character.”
These are the stories that I’ve written about here before. They’re in order from least to most awesome, which is not to say that the Our Square stories aren’t pretty good, or that Torchy isn’t a little higher on my list of favorite things ever than Emma McChesney. I mean, I put them in worst-to-best order by accident, and thought I might as well make a note of it.
Our Square
Samuel Hopkins Adams’ fiction is, mostly, ridiculously charming. He’s also occasionally pretty good at feelings (see The Clarion). He has a harder time mixing the two in short story form — what would be adorable or poignant in one of his novels sometimes ends up twee or depressing instead. He’s also hampered by what I guess must be a lack of creativity — I don’t know why else he’d choose to write variations on the same story over and over. Maybe it’s just another of the drawbacks to choosing to do your short story series about a location rather than a person or group of people. Still, overall Adams can’t help being ridiculously charming and occasionally good at feelings, and some of these stories are pretty great. Try “The Guardian of God’s Acre” in From a Bench in Our Square for the feelings and the eponymous “Our Square” in Our Square and the People in it for the first and possibly best iteration of the story Adams writes most often.
Pollyooly
The Pollyooly stories are super weird, funny, and surprisingly unsentimental about children. They also feature one of my favorite things in short story series, an improbably capable central character. And not just at grilling bacon. It’s not just that Pollyooly always lands on her feet — that category also includes characters who are constantly facing various kinds of doom, but manage to escape it somehow. Pollyooly never lets herself get that far — she’s too relentlessly competent for that. Conceptually Pollyooly is just like any other character with her own short story series: visually distinctive, really good at something, and exercising some kind of narrative gravitational pull. But the specifics make her different. She’s strange because she’s so mundane. This is the kind of setup where the beautiful orphan is supposed to be dreamy and imaginative, or bright and cheerful. Instead, Pollyooly is hardheaded, acquisitive, and totally lacking a sense of humor. It’s wonderful. The first stories here are the best, so start reading Pollyooly: a romance of long felt wants and the red haired girl who filled them</em>, and if you’re not enjoying yourself by the time Pollyooly finds employment as an artist’s model, you have my permission to stop. It’s also completely acceptable to skip the final book, Pollyooly Dances, which bears very little relation to the earlier stories.
Torchy
If you’ve read any of my previous posts on the Torchy stories, you’ll have noticed that I don’t know how to write about them at all. Part of it is that I love them unreasoningly. Part of it is that I have to consider the possibility that my intense reaction to them has nothing to do with their actually quality. I mean, maybe they’re not that good. I like them too much to be able to tell. That said, they’re textbook short story series, with a ridiculously resourceful main character, a well-defined and likable cast of characters, a great sense of place and time, and just enough adventure.
There’s basically no Torchy story I don’t recommend, although the last books in the series aren’t as unrelentingly awesome as the earlier ones. Start at the beginning, with Torchy. If at any point you are able to stop, I have nothing to say to you.
Emma McChesney
Emma McChesney is extremely unusual. She’s a woman — a single mother, even — in the 1910s who’s allowed to be ruthless, and smarter than the men around her. She’s also allowed to be sad sometimes, because Edna Ferber finds sad a lot easier than happy — as do many human beings, but few heroines of popular fiction from the 1910s. I know the secondary theme of this post is characters who are excellent at what they do, and no one is better at her ob than Emma McChesney.
Thinking about the Emma McChesney stories doesn’t overwhelm me with feelings the way thinking about Torchy does, but reading them is a perfect experience every time. They’re some of the few books I’ve talked about here that I feel comfortable describing as objectively excellent. It doesn’t even matter what you start with, but chronological continuity is nice, so I recommend Roast Beef, Medium.
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You know how sometimes your daily life saps your will to do anything you’re not actually required to do? So, yeah. That. But I wanted to drop by to talk about “The Fool’s Love Story”, which I read on the tail end of the Sabatini kick that started with my reread of Bardelys the Magnificent.
It looks like The Fool’s Love Story might have been Sabatini’s first published story — it’s the first listed on the uncollected stories list on rafaelsabatini.com, and…it reads young. It’s about a Hofknarr, or court jester, in a small German kingdom in the mid-17th century. He’s in love with a young woman who’s engaged to an unworthy Frenchman, and it doesn’t end too well for anybody, really, unless you count the fact that I was completely delighted by it. Which was why I wanted to say something about it, but probably not in the way you think.
This is the thing: this story is pretty terrible. The plot is ridiculous, the writing is more than ridiculous, and you’re sort of plopped down in the middle of a fully formed emotional situation that never really changes. Also, dying heroically and tragically tends to go over a little better if there’s a point to it. But it’s Sabatini, who pretty much always gets me where I live, and I was totally sold by the time I hit “lean, sardonic countenance,” halfway through the first sentence.
Basically, I suspect this is one for the Sabatini devotees — and I’d be interested to know if I’m right.
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By: Melody,
on 6/14/2012
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Of all the English classes I ever had, my 7th grade one was the best. And part of it was that my teacher was great, and part of it was that I realized that grammar is equal parts fun and fascinating — although I realize I may be alone on that one — but probably the single biggest factor was that we had to write an essay on a short story each week. And I could talk a lot about how helpful it was to have to churn out essays and learn to construct an argument and stuff, but what I’m here to talk about today is how much I hated the short stories.
Middle School and High School English classes do a lot to instill in kids the idea that serious literature is super depressing, and short stories, which tend to be sort of single-minded in pursuit of an idea, make it worse — at least with novels, there’s usually time and space to put in a few scenes that will make you laugh, or, you know, offer sidelights on a character that give you hope that they have inner resources to draw on and won’t spend the rest of their lives completely miserable. If they live to the end of the story, that is.
I mean, there were bright spots: “The Speckled Band.” Dorothy Parker. Vocabulary lessons. But I came out of Middle School English with the conviction that all short stories were terrible and that I would hate them forever, with a grudging exception for detective stories.
Anyway, the point of this is that for a long time I really believed I hated short stories — until a couple of years ago when I realized that I was reading short stories all the time, and loving them. It was just that they were short story series, character-driven and funny instead of literary and depressing. These days I get really excited when an author I’ve been enjoying turns out to have a series of short stories or two. So this is the first in what I expect to be a extremely rambling series of posts about those, and how much fun they are — starting with the super obvious.
Sherlock Holmes
It doesn’t get a lot more obvious than Sherlock Holmes, right? To the point where I don’t need to describe the series at all, because if you don’t already know the premise, you’ve been living under a rock since 1887.I’m only including the Holmes stories here to point out that they’re exactly the same as everything else I’m about to talk about — focused on a character, based around a central conceit, and closely tied to a specific setting. And all about a person who’s better at stuff than everyone around him, which is preferred, if not essential. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is, I think, the most fun — first collections usually are — and I retain my 7th grade fondness for “The Speckled Band,” although I think the one that kind of bowled me over the most when I first read it was “The Red-Headed League.”
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
The Return of Sherlock Holmes
Project Gutenberg doesn’t have the complete Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes or Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, but you get the idea. And the novels are sort of beside the point in this context, but I will freely admit that my favorite Sherlock Holmes Thing is Hound of the Baskervilles, which I love probably beyond reason.
Jeeves and Wooster
Then there’s P.G. Wodehouse. And if Sherlock Holmes is typical of the thing I’m trying to talk about, I don’t know what the Jeeves
I blame Eleanor for the amount of Mary Roberts Rinehart I’ve been reading lately. Every time I move on to something else, she tells me which Rinehart she’s reading and I get jealous.
Anyway, I read Love Stories last week. I was pretty sure I hadn’t read it before, but the first story seemed awfully familiar. It turns out I’d already read it in a magazine. But it holds up well. I mean, it’s Rinehart. Of course it does.
This book is kind of a precursor to the hospital romance comics from the 1970s that I read at my grandmother’s apartment when I was younger. All but the last two stories are set in hospitals, and all but the last one are romances. Lots of doctors and nurses. Lots of incidents recycled from or for K.
And mostly it’s fun. There were a couple of stories I didn’t like: “In the Pavilion” is an unconvincing nurse/patient romance. And ”Are We Downhearted? No!” made me increasingly upset as the heroine got less interesting and less independent in order to become “worthy” of the hero, who was kind of an ass. But I liked the rest, some more than others. “Twenty-Two” makes an excellent start to the book, because it’s, like, 90% of the other stories in a nutshell. If you don’t like “Twenty-Two,” you might as well put the book down. Which is not to say that it’s the best story in the book, although it’s definitely in the running. I think “Jane” might have been the most successful story, but it was also the least ambitious. It’s funny and sweet and not much else, but it doesn’t need to be.
“The Game” was sort of the most interesting to me. It has nothing to do with hospitals whatsoever, and not much to do with romance. The Scottish engineer has a vaguely tragic love story in his past, but the story’s about his relationship with the red-headed orphan he sort of adopts, and it’s painfully adorable.
I’m not feeling super enthusiastic about Love Stories right now, but I enjoyed it a lot when I was reading it. The stories here are distilled Rinehart, so you get <em>all</em> the feelings, but not much that will stick with you after they’re gone. Which is maybe what light reading is for.
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Until recently I knew Mary Cholmondeley only as the author of Red Pottage, a bestselling turn of the century novel that I feel like I ought to read — so much so that I now sort of don’t want to read it. Then I came across a short story of hers in Pearson’s Magazine and, as I skimmed past it, read just enough to be intrigued.
That story was “The Pitfall,” and I tracked it down in Moth and Rust. I often find, with author’s from this era, that what appear to be books of short stories are more often novellas bound with a few extra stories to make them book-length, and that’s the case here. “The Pitfall” is the last story in the book, and possibly the most interesting, because its protagonist is a bit of an antiheroine. Cholmondeley lets us know right away that Lady Mary Carden is dull and conventional and possibly a bit of a hypocrite, but she also shows us how to sympathize with her, and we do — or I did, anyway — much more than we would with a character whose author wasn’t aware that she possessed those qualities. And then Cholmondeley slowly leads Lady Mary to a cruel and indefensible act, and it’s horrible, but interesting.
Of the other stories in the book, only the titular novella is less depressing. “Let Loose” is a ghost story involving the death of a dog, which always kind of freaks me out, and “Geoffrey’s Wife” is a kind of appalling story about a young couple caught up in a mob. Both are sort of straightforward and narrow-focused, almost to the point of claustrophobia, and it works well for them. In “Moth and Rust,” Cholmondeley gets to stretch out a little more, with a story that’s larger in lots of ways: there are more themes, more characters, more plots, and more locations, as well as two intertwined love stories.
The love story that ends badly is that of Janet Black and George Trefusis. Janet is exceedingly beautiful and pretty intensely in love with George, but uneducated, uncultured, and, frankly, stupid. George is way above her socially, but he hasn’t got much going for him except his extreme moral rectitude. You can see where this is going. It’s the same place it always goes. Lady Anne Varney, pretty, quietly intelligent and intensely well-bred, has more luck with Stephen Vanbrunt, her rags-to-riches millionaire soul-mate. I enjoyed both characters very much — Stephen is innately sympathetic to children and dogs, but a little bit confused by women and society, and Anne has to negotiate the terrain very carefully to convince him that’s she’s not just interested in his money. They reminded me a bit of Lady Ethelrida and Francis Markrute in Elinor Glyn’s The Reason Why, except that the situation is reversed, and somewhat less ridiculous.
I think Mary Cholmondeley is pretty good, but she’s got an incredible gift for making me really uncomfortable. She writes the kind of stories where awful things happen, and she makes sure you can tell that the awful things are going to happen, so that you get to dread them for as long as possible. I have yet to decide whether this is clever or mean. Or, possibly, both.
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After I finished The Circular Staircase and The House of a Thousand Candles, I thought I’d continue on a Mary Roberts Rinehart kick. And I liked Tish, one of her books of stories about an eccentric spinster and her friends, but it didn’t make me want to read more Tish books. It made me want to reread Torchy.
Torchy is, like Tish, a character in a long-running series of short stories. But his are better than hers. I meant just to reread Torchy, but once I was done with that, I read Trying Out Torchy, On With Torchy, Torchy, Private Sec., and Wilt Thou Torchy and now I’m in the middle of Torchy and Vee.
In a lot of ways, Sewell Ford’s New York reminds me of Horatio Alger’s. Torchy lives in the same world of boarding houses and trains and dairy lunches as an Alger hero, allowing for the slight difference in time period, and he mixes with the same sorts of people: con men, magnates, spinsters and telegraph boys. The biggest difference–okay, no, the biggest difference is that I don’t know how much Torchy’s breakfast costs, but the second biggest difference is that Torchy actually is the street-smart smart-aleck that Alger thinks all his bootblacks and newsboys are.
Torchy is an office boy, and I suspect that Sewell Ford’s original intention was to have him bounce around from office to office. But in the second story Torchy arrives at the office of the Corrugated Trust, and Ford, apparently, realizes that there are books worth of material right there. The cast of supporting characters at Corrugated includes the grouchy boss, Hickory Ellins, his competent and fun-loving son Robert, and Mr. Piddie, the office manager, who loathes Torchy on sight. They’re around pretty much all the time. And there are others who we see pretty often–Marjorie Ellins is Old Hickory’s daughter, Skid Mallory is a young man working his way up in the Corrugated ranks, and Miss Vee is the girl Torchy falls in love with.
And really, once you break it all down, it’s hard to explain the appeal. I’m not quite sure what it is myself, except that it’s not often that a series of books has me feeling so completely gleeful as often as this one. Some characters, when they go around being smart and proving people wrong all the time, make me want to strangle them, but when Torchy is sent off with a message to someone and comes back having solved the entire problem, I feel like cheering.
Torchy is smart, but he’s not an ass about it. And he’s not the hero of every story.
And I think part of the appeal is the relationships between the characters, and the way they grow. I guess I’m thinking mainly of the two male Ellinses and Miss Vee. The Ellinses start out thinking of Torchy as an unusually cheeky office boy, but Robert starts sending him on personal errands and finding out how helpful he can be, and eventually both of them get to rely on him whenever there’s a confidential errand to be run. He gets to know the Ellins family, and he’s an usher at Marjorie’s wedding and best man at Robert’s, and they all really like him, and it’
Online literary magazine Every Day Fiction (BC) publishes one very short story each day that can be read over breakfast or lunch, during a commute, etc. Seeks very short (flash) fiction 50-1000 words for daily delivery. Deadline: Ongoing. Payment: $3. More details...
Queen's Quarterly (ON) is accepting submissions of articles, reviews, short stories (2500-3000 words) and poetry (up to six poems). Payment determined at time of acceptance and paid upon publication. More details...
Weekly magazine Literati (published with The News International, second largest English newspaper in Pakistan) invites submissions of short stories, book reviews, essays on writers, poetic prose, rants, interviews with fiction writers, and surveys of literary movements. Preference given to themes which concern Pakistanis and South Asians worldwide. Length: 1000-2000 words. Send submissions, as attached MS Word document to [email protected] and you will get a response within a week. Payment: 1500 to 2500 Pakistani rupees per published piece.
Dark Scribe Press (US) seeks short story submissions for an anthology of queer horror tales: Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet (publication: late 2008). Looking for edgy, provocative dark genre fiction – horror and dark psychological suspense only. No sci-fi/fantasy/mystery. Seeks stories about those terrors that populate the closets of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Length: 1000-7500 words. Email queries only to: [email protected]. Deadline: May 15, 2008. Once query receives a green light, the submissions deadline is June 30, 2008. Payment: US$.05 per word upon acceptance. More details...
Annual journal Flint Hills Review (US) invites submissions of poetry, short fiction, plays, and literary non-fiction. Publishes work with a particular interest in region: place, ethnicity, gender, and memory. Deadline: March 31, 2008. Payment: one free copy and discounted additional copies. More details...
I was never an avid reader of mysteries when I was younger, but now I find myself drawn to them time and time again. The Case of the Missing Marquess is one of the best I have come across in a while!
Imagine your mother leaving you. On your birthday. With not so much as a goodbye. This is the situation that Enola is facing.
Enola's mother is not the typical Victorian mummy. She does not see why Enola should be corseted up, and thinks that she can do perfectly well without male companionship. She even named Enola because of this (Enola is alone backwards).
Once it is clear that Enola's mother is not to return, the girl summons her much older brothers for advice. Mycroft and Sherlock. Perhaps you have heard of one of them?
That's right. Enola's brother is none other than Sherlock Holmes. If he can't find Enola's mother, who can?
There are more mysteries within the story than just the missing Mrs. Holmes, but this is the story that crosses the entire book. (And into the next, I am sure). The beauty in this title is in the details. Chock full of feminist thought, class issues, as well as adventure, The Case of the Missing Marquess is an easy sell to mystery aficionados, but a likely crossover to those kids who like adventure as well. And maybe a small sized step to take before some Sherlock Holmes!
A few weeks ago, I experienced an uncontrollable urge to read some adult books. But when I went to the library, I found myself drawn to titles that had a young slant of one kind or another. I was drawn to Holmes on the Range by Steven Hockensmith because of the Sherlock Holmes connection. Traditionally, Holmes has been connected with young readers, though I'm not at all sure if he's of much interest to them these days.
Holmes on the Range has a marvelous premise. A cowboy is exposed to some Sherlock Holmes stories and becomes so enamored of them that he wants to take up deducing himself. The book has a wry, dry, and earthy wit, many engaging characters, and what appears to be an authentic setting. Is it a book of interest to the young? Well, for older teens and early twenty-somethings, I think it could be.
Otto and Gustav Amlingmeyer are cowboys who drift from one cowpunching job to another. Otto is twenty years old (young character!) and known as Big Red because he's the enormous red-headed brother. (Ho! as one character often says. Red-headed brothers! Red-headed League!) Gustav is twenty-seven and known as Old Red because he's the older red-headed brother. Gustav is a bright guy. More than bright, maybe. But he is totally illiterate. Only his "little" brother, the youngest and only surviving member of their family, learned to read and write. He reads and writes well enough, in fact, to have worked in a feed store as a teenager.
It is young Otto who reads the Sherlock Holmes stories aloud to his brother while they're around campfires or in the bunkhouse. And it is Gustav, whose crazy uncle taught him not to believe in the predestination that many of their German calvinist neighbors still subscribe to, who cannot accept that he will be nothing but a poor, ignorant cowboy. He wants to be more. He wants to be a detective like his hero, Sherlock Holmes. (Who is real in the world of this book, though he doesn't actually appear.) He sets out to find himself a case to solve and find one he does. Solving the case means real life or death for the two brothers, but for Gustav it means spiritual life or death as well.
By the end of the book, the Amlingmeyers, who have had no direction in their lives other than staying together, both have plans for a future. Who am I? What am I going to be? Sounds like a YA-related theme to me.
And, really, in spite of the rather impressive body count by the end of the story, Holmes on the Range is a hopeful book.
Now the book includes what some might call classic western situations and some might call western stereotypes--the European ranch owners, the eastern dudes, the cowpoke who can't speak to women. Whichever attitude you take, Hockensmith does fun things with them. On top of that, the last generation and a half didn't grow up on a steady diet of TV westerns. This may be new, fertile ground for them. Or, having no concept of the Old West in their psyches, they may feel too removed from it to be interested.
It could go either way.
Don't hand this book off to some delicate thirteen-year-old looking to move up from Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, by the way. Hockensmith does some wonderful things with similis but a lot of them are built around the business of outhouses. The dead bodies are graphicly described. And some of the characters exhibit the racist attitudes you might expect of the 1890s. By no means are the black cowboys portrayed in a racist way. But there are a few racists among their compadres.
If you want a less-adult but equally entertaining western for younger readers, try Sunshine Rider, The First Vegetarian Western by Ric Lynden Hardman. The book was quite buzzworthy back when it was published in 1998. And that was when there were nowhere near as many Internet sites to create buzz.
Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars: The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas
Authors: Tracy Mack and Michael Citrin
Illustrator: Greg Ruth
Publisher: Orchard Books
ISBN-10: 0439828368
ISBN-13: 978-0439828369
The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas is the first in the proposed Baker Street Irregulars new series from Scholastic and I think it’s a great start. It begins with three tightrope walkers falling to their deaths in a London Circus and introduces the gang of street urchins that helps the great Sherlock Holmes in his crime solving.
Holmes has another case involving a missing and very valuable book and while he and Watson are solving other leads, the Irregulars, led by Wiggins and Ozzie get down to business with the circus folk.
The boys are all interesting and colorful characters with different stories and strengths. Ozzie in particular has quite a bit of depth and color. He’s the sick one of the bunch and very frail but has a razor sharp memory and an uncanny ability for copying documents. Wiggins is the leader and he’s the protective papa of the bunch always looking out for the others. I expect we'll find out more about the others in future books.
Besides the boys, there is the wonderful character of Pilar whom they meet in the circus. Pilar is a Spanish gypsy girl (fortune-tellers daughter) and seems to be able to genuinely see the future while going into a trance. She adds a dash of spice to the gaggle of boys.
The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas is full of details, reads like a casebook and has fine illustrations which give the book a good flavor. There’s Cockney slang, a glimpse of what life was like for the poor children of that time. It has a old style Victorian feel to it which gives the book a sense of authenticity.
Both boys and girls will love the book for its sense of fun and adventure. I’m looking forward to the next in the series.
Sometimes you just can't make these things up. Guess the next Sherlock Holmes. Aw, go on. Is it Jeremy Irons? Is it Alan Rickman? Is it Jason Isaacs?
Think again.
Favorite Quote From Article:
Unlike previous films this one is going to focus more on Holmes' physical attributes, including his talent for bare-knuckle and sword fighting, which were both mentioned in the original books. "Russell is the favourite for the role as it's felt he'll give the character the action-man-like qualities the part is going to require."
Just wondering if the seven percent solution is going to get its due.
Thanks to
LibrariAnne for the link.
This sounds positively delightful! I must read it.
I read this one and it kind of bugged me; I guess I kept thinking about all the serving class folks that had to work on Christmas to ensure his party was a success. But at least he seemed to pay really well. Also, his romantic issues were of his own making, which should seem adorable, but not really. He is, however, an entirely awesome uncle.
I read and enjoyed this last night. I pretty much agree with what Mel said about the serving class who had to work on Christmas and yes, he did pay well and didn’t begrudge anyone the money he paid. All in all, it was a fun Christmas read.
I agree on both points — the thing about making the servants work on Christmas bugged me at the time, and I should have mentioned it. And I think you’ve put your finger on why the romance bugged me — it’s entirely his own fault. But I love his family, and would probably read an equally long story that consisted solely of him hanging out with his siblings and their spouses and kids.
Yeah, I think we’re all agreed on that. Part of me feels like if he was a real person he’d think about the fact that he was making them work on Christmas, but that it never occurred to the author.