I'm reviewing Martin Edwards' collection of classic short stories for Shiny 5, so you'll have to wait till April for the full review. But here's something to whet your appetite -- the opening paragraph of the first story, 'The Case of Lady Sannox' by Arthur Conan Doyle. No Sherlock Holmes here, but a cracker of a story.
The relation between Douglas Stone and the notorious Lady Sannox was very well known both among the fashionable circles of which she was a brilliant member, and the scientific bodies which numbered him among their most illustrious confrères. There was naturally, therefore, a very widespread interest when it was announced one morning that the lady had absolutely and forever taken the veil, and that the world would see her no more. When, at the very tail end of this rumour, there came the assurance that the celebrated operating surgeon, the man of steel nerves, had been found in the morning by his valet, seated on one side of his bed, smiling pleasantly upon the universe, with both legs jammed into one side of his breeches, and his great brain about as valuable as a cup full of porridge, the matter was strong enough to give quite a little thrill of interest to folk who had never hoped that their jaded nerves were capable of such a sensation.
If that doesn't make you want to read the whole story -- only ten pages long -- I don't know what would. It's brilliant.
