Published in 1915, The Thirty-Nine Steps is a thriller set in Britain on the eve of the First World War. The novel’s protagonist, Richard Hannay, is an expatriate Scot who has just returned to London after many years in South Africa working in the mining industry. He finds England extremely dull and is just considering returning to South Africa when he is accosted by another inhabitant of the block of flats where he is living.
John Buchan · Thriller · 11 ch
In A Princess of Mars, John Carter is transported to a Mars inhabited by strange civilizations and embarks on various adventures on his quest home. Often held up as a seminal example of pulp science fiction, A Princess of Mars is the first entry in Burroughs’ epic Martian series, and the first to feature the character of John Carter. Though often categorized as just a pulp adventure tale, A Princess of Mars was hugely influential on many budding science fiction writers, professional scientists, and explorers of the day.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 29 ch
After the apparently natural death of wealthy widow Madame Harlowe, a blackmailer accuses her niece of murder by poison—an accusation he knows to be false. The famous French detective Inspector Hanaud is called in, with Madame Harlowe’s death only an excuse to investigate a series of anonymous blackmailings the local police have been helpless to solve. The police exhume Madame Harlowe’s body and find no trace of poison, defeating the blackmailer—yet there’s a treatise on untraceable poison in the house library.
A. E. W. Mason · Mystery · 26 ch
Robur the Conqueror, also published as The Clipper of the Clouds, opens in Philadelphia at a meeting of the Weldon Institute, a club of balloon enthusiasts. A stranger named Robur asks to address the members, then tells them that the future belongs to heavier-than-air machines. He mocks the club’s giant balloon, the Go-Ahead, and insults its members until the meeting erupts in chaos.
Jules Verne · Sci Fi · 23 ch
The King in Yellow is a fascinating, almost two-faced work. The first half consists of five legendary weird tales, loosely tied together by a fictional play—the eponymous King in Yellow —that drives those who read it mad. Celebrated by authors like H.
Robert W. Chambers · Horror · 11 ch
A pretty American implores wine enthusiast Ricardo to alter his plans for an upcoming visit to vineyards in France to protect her friend, who she fears is threatened by ominous occult forces. He tries to evade responsibility, only to find that his plans have been switched for him. Thrust unanticipated among unfamiliar guests at the chateau, including, unexpectedly, the pretty American, he witnesses odd events and senses sinister intrigue.
A. E. W. Mason · Mystery · 29 ch
Young Pyotr Stepanovitch returns to the small town of his father and attempts to start a revolution that will ultimately remake the very fabric of society and bring forth a new social and political order. In order to realize his plan, Pyotr recruits a few men into his group, who are believed to be one cell among many spread throughout the country. Demons is told by a semi-omniscient narrator, and focuses mainly on the lives of middle- and upper-class Russians.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Psychological · 34 ch
The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1927, collects the final set of Sherlock Holmes stories authored by Arthur Conan Doyle. All of the included stories appeared previously in The Strand Magazine between October 1921 and April 1927. As usual, the mysteries generally purport to be accounts written by Holmes’s friend Dr. John Watson.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 13 ch
Chemist Robin Gaunt believes he’s discovered the key to lasting world peace—in the form of the horrific poison gas he’s just perfected. Gaunt is certain that once the British government has the formula, no nation will ever dare start a war, for fear of the consequences. But Gaunt vanishes before can turn over the formula, and people start turning up dead—victims of some unknown poison.
H. C. McNeile · Adventure · 14 ch
The Return of Sherlock Holmes is the third collection of Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, published in 1905. It includes stories published in The Strand Magazine in 1903 and 1904, bringing Holmes for the first time into the twentieth century. Doyle had memorably “killed off” Holmes in a struggle with his nemesis Professor Moriarty in the story “The Final Problem,” which had appeared in 1893 (and which is included in the collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes ).
Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 13 ch
The Valley of Fear is the final novel in the Sherlock Holmes series by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The story originally appeared over several issues of the monthly Strand Magazine in late 1914 before being published as a standalone work. While Doyle would continue to publish Sherlock Holmes short stories until 1927, The Valley of Fear remains Holmes’ final long-form appearance.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 15 ch
His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes is the fourth collection of Sherlock Holmes stories published by Arthur Conan Doyle. It begins with a preface by Dr. John Watson, supposedly written in 1917, assuring the reader that Holmes is still alive but living in quiet retirement in Sussex. This collection contains the well-known stories “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans,” in which Holmes has to track down stolen plans for a new kind of submarine; and “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” in which a Cornish family is found one morning driven mad or dead, with expressions of horror on their faces.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Mystery · 8 ch
A draper’s assistant takes to the road on a cycling holiday and falls in with a young woman riding alone along the English coast. A comedy of runaways, rescuers, and mistaken motives that turns into a gentle story of freedom and first love.
H. G. Wells · Comedy · 26 ch
Aubrey, a young gentleman moving in London society of the early 1800s, meets the mysterious Lord Ruthven, recently arrived to London, at a party. Aubrey finds himself intrigued by the cold and expressionless Ruthven, and soon finds himself agreeing to travel with him on a trip across the continent. As their trip progresses, Aubrey is shocked at Ruthven’s sadistic and degenerate behavior, and can’t help but note how anyone who Ruthven meets ends up debauched and ruined.
John William Polidori · Horror · 3 ch
Choirmaster John Jasper has two secrets: an addiction to opium, and a burning love for Rosa, the fiancée of his nephew, Edwin Drood. When Edwin vanishes without a trace one night, his uncle becomes just one of the suspects in Edwin’s disappearance, as it turns out that several other residents of the town of Cloisterham also seek Rosa’s affections. Who’s the real murderer?
Charles Dickens · Mystery · 24 ch
Lewis claimed to have written The Monk in just ten weeks, when he was twenty-one years of age. He published the first edition anonymously, sensing that the controversial and then-pornographic nature of the novel would stun society. And so it did—the book was so sensational, so salacious, and so scandalous, that after he put his full name (and title, as a member of Parliament) on the second edition, his reputation hardly recovered for the rest of his life.
M. G. Lewis · Horror · 19 ch
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of Mark Twain’s most enduring novels. During a stay at a modern-day English castle, the narrator meets a mysterious stranger. The stranger, Hank Morgan, is an engineer from Connecticut, and proceeds to weave a satirical, biting, and hilarious tale of how he traveled back in time to find himself in the court of the legendary King Arthur.
Mark Twain · Comedy · 47 ch
Sometimes described as thrilling, sometimes as comic, and sometimes as metaphysical or spiritual, The Man Who Was Thursday is perhaps a little of each. The tale begins when an undercover policeman infiltrates a mysterious Anarchist group. As the novel progresses, things become more comic and improbable, and eventually evolve in to a sort of abstract, dreamlike state.
G. K. Chesterton · Thriller · 16 ch
Father Brown is a Catholic priest, but a slightly unusual one in that he’s also an amateur detective. Unlike his more famous literary cousin Sherlock, Father Brown takes a less analytical and more intuition-oriented approach to solving the many murders that he happens to come across. This collection of short murder mysteries is Brown’s first appearance on the literary stage.
G. K. Chesterton · Mystery · 12 ch
Edgar Allan Poe is famed for his unsettling short stories, but he also wrote a full-length novel, his only one: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Framed as the recollections of an adventurous stowaway, Pym begins as a swashbuckling adventure novel, and after growing increasingly weirder, ends on a surreal note worthy of the best of Poe’s short stories. Despite Poe himself calling it a “a very silly book,” Pym went on to become one of his most-translated and influential works, coloring the themes of future adventure and weird fiction writers like Jules Verne and H.
Edgar Allan Poe · Adventure · 27 ch