John Minute, formerly an unscrupulous African mining magnate, has flown to England, but can’t escape his past. Constantly threatened by blackmailers, he fears death and financial ruin. At the suggestion of the commissioner of police, “The Man Who Knows” is hired to assist in determining the source of these threats.
Edgar Wallace · Adventure · 17 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
Roger Merton, a young naval lieutenant from the volunteer reserves, is on a balloon reconnaissance mission with an officer when their balloon loses its moorings and drifts into the fog. Blown to they know not where, Merton’s colleague bails, while Merton waits until he’s more certain of being over land. When he does parachute to safety, Merton finds that he’s not in enemy territory, but rather in one of the islands in the North Sea off the Scottish coast.
J. Storer Clouston · Drama · 33 ch
Standing in line in a long queue for a show at a theater, a young man collapses—and it quickly becomes apparent that he has been stabbed in the back. Inspector Alan Grant of the Metropolitan Police is soon on the case, though he finds it deeply puzzling—not least because the identity of the victim is itself a mystery. The Man in the Queue, published in 1929, was the first in a series of successful detective novels written by the Scottish author Elizabeth MacKintosh writing under the pen name Josephine Tey, though it was first published using the pseudonym “Gordon Daviot.”
Josephine Tey · Mystery · 18 ch
While investigating the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, a team led by Dr. Maracot is cut off from their ship and hurled to the bottom of the ocean. There, they find themselves in the remnants of the ancient civilization of Atlantis. Like some other later works by Arthur Conan Doyle, this novel shows elements of spiritualism and the supernatural, themes and ideas that interested him later in life.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Sci Fi · 7 ch
Following the events of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 and the sensationalist news reports and novels that framed the events as a race riot incited by members of the black community, The Marrow of Tradition was written as a critical response to these harmful reports and provided a perspective that had otherwise been ignored. Developed out of the stories and accounts provided by members of the black community in Wilmington and from his own experience growing up and living in North Carolina, the novel is a probable accounting of the events leading up to and surrounding the Wilmington massacre. On a hot and sultry night, Major Carteret sits anxiously beside his wife, Olivia, as she enters early labor.
Charles W. Chesnutt · Drama · 38 ch
Four years after writing his immensely popular The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum returned to the Land of Oz in this second book of fourteen he wrote about the magical country. Like its predecessor, The Marvelous Land of Oz has delighted children through the years, and has been adapted into stage plays, films, and comics.
L. Frank Baum · Fantasy · 25 ch
The Master Mind of Mars is the sixth installment in the Martian series. It was published as a novel by A. C.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Fantasy · 16 ch
Robert Louis Stevenson’s fascination with the mid-18th Century Jacobite rebellion in Scotland led to the production of his classic Kidnapped, along with its later sequel, Catriona. The Master of Ballantrae —written only a couple years after Kidnapped —shares the same evocative historical setting. The story revolves around the fractious relationship of the two sons of the Lord of Durrisdeer: the elder and duplicitous James, and Henry, the stolid younger brother.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Adventure · 15 ch
Like many of Hardy’s novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge is set in the fictional county of Wessex in the mid 1800s. It begins with Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, drunk on rum, auctioning off his wife and baby daughter at a village fair. The next day, overcome with remorse, Henchard resolves to turn his life around.
Thomas Hardy · Drama · 45 ch
Gilbert Standerton learns that he has been disinherited by his cantankerous uncle, and is forced to find a way to provide for his newly wedded high-society wife. After quitting his appointment at the Foreign Office, he develops a new interest in the stock market, and takes an avid interest in the antics of a gang of safe-cracking burglars. His wife becomes concerned as he frequently begins staying out late at night, and shows an unusual interest in a particular musical melody despite having lost interest in all of his other music interests.
Edgar Wallace · Adventure · 17 ch
The Mercy of Allah is a humorous, satirical novel on the methods by which the merchant Mahmoud rises from humble beginnings to massive wealth. The setting in a fictionalized Middle East provides deeply Catholic author Hilaire Belloc a “far-off land” in which to attack what he saw as the rapacious nature of the British businessmen, industrialists, and bankers of his day. Each episode of Mahmoud’s life satirizes greed, from small frauds and outright theft, to market manipulation, money-printing, and funding both sides in a long war.
Hilaire Belloc · Comedy · 15 ch
The Middle Five, written by the Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche, is a series of vignettes portraying La Flesche’s childhood growing up on the Omaha Reservation and attending a Presbyterian mission school. Published in 1909, the book portrays both the cultural conflicts arising from the assimilatory nature of the mission school and the youthful escapades of Frank (La Flesche’s younger self), Brush, Edwin, Warren, and Lester, who together make up the titular gang of schoolboys called the “Middle Five.” Like Zitkála-Šá’s short story “The School Days of an Indian Girl” from American Indian Stories, The Middle Five depicts life in an American Indian residential school, but takes place much closer to the reservation and thus portrays the interactions between the mission school and reservation life. It is regarded as a classic work of Native American literature and is often assigned in classrooms as a vivid firsthand account of 19th-century indigenous life.
Francis La Flesche · Drama · 17 ch
Spargo, reporter extraordinaire for the Watchman, stumbles over a murdered man in London’s Middle Temple Lane, and, based on a journalistic hunch, decides to investigate. As the circle of interest widens, strange connections start to emerge; connections that lead towards an unsuspected conspiracy of twenty years before. The Middle Temple Murder is one of the prolific J.
J. S. Fletcher · Mystery · 36 ch
Published in 1860, The Mill on the Floss was the second novel published by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans). Set in the late 1820s or early 1830s, it tells the story of two young people, Tom and Maggie Tulliver, from their childhood into early adulthood. Their father, Jeremy Tulliver, owns Dorlcote Mill on the river Floss, and the children grow to adolescence in relative comfort.
George Eliot · Drama · 59 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
Not content with having hollowed out the center of the Earth in his earlier novels At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar, in The Moon Maid Edgar Rice Burroughs has his hero voyage to the Moon, which also turns out to be hollow and inhabited on the inside by human-like creatures. The hero and his companion have a series of adventures there, and discover both the sophisticated Va-gas and the malevolent Kalkars. Time passes, and we turn to following the hero’s descendants as they fight against an invasion of the Earth by the Kalkars.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Sci Fi · 15 ch
The Moon Pool, in novel form, is a combination and fix-up of two previously published short stories: “The Moon Pool,” and “Conquest of the Moon Pool.” Initially serialized in All-Story Weekly, Merritt made the interesting choice of framing the novel as a sort of scientific retelling, going so far as to include footnotes from fictional scientists, to give this completely fantastic work an air of authenticity. In it we find the adventuresome botanist William T. Goodwin embarking on a quest to help his friend Throckmortin, whose wife and friends have fallen victim to a mysterious temple ruin on a remote South Pacific island.
A. Merritt · Sci Fi · 36 ch
The “Moonstone” of the title is a large but flawed diamond, looted from India at the time of the Mutiny by an unscrupulous British officer. Many years later, estranged from his family due to his licentious lifestyle, the officer bequeaths the diamond to his sister’s daughter, Rachel Verrinder, to be given to her on her 18th birthday. Due to the ill-omens surrounding the gem, this may have been an act of revenge rather than reconciliation.
Wilkie Collins · Mystery · 55 ch
Billy Byrne, a rough and unpolished young man, finds himself entangled in a series of unexpected events that lead him from the urban jungle of early 20th century Chicago to the high seas and, eventually, to revolutionary Mexico. When he and a wealthy heiress named Barbara Harding become shipwrecked on a remote island, the harsh realities of survival force Billy to reevaluate his values and confront his own identity. He undergoes a profound transformation, discovering hidden depths of courage, compassion, and integrity within himself.
Edgar Rice Burroughs · Adventure · 36 ch