Showing results by narrator "Graham Scott" in All Categories

Listed in the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World, Mr. Standfast is the third of Buchan's thrilling, fast-paced World War I adventure novels, following The Thirty-Nine Steps, and Greenmantle, in which Brigadier-General Richard Hannay is reluctantly plucked from the trenches of the Western Front, to undertake a vital secret mission against a German spy ring operating among pacifist elements in England.

It's hard to find a lesser man than Apropos: a con man, a knave, a scalawag...and those are his finer points. This time, Apropos winds up a stranger in a strange land called "Chinpan," populated by those who speak a different language and live by a code of honor, neither of which Apropos can comprehend. And yet it is here that he begins to examine his life and question whether he can aspire to become more than the hard-bitten cynic he's always been.

A fifth collection of eight golden-age detective mysteries for H. C. Bailey's eclectic scientific detective Mr. Reginald Fortune. Including a stock market bubble and a sudden death; a wealthy businessman threatened by a mystery man; a mountaineering accident in the shadow of the Jungfrau; a curious archaeological discovery; a series of crimes in a quiet cathedral close; and two very different violent deaths, with an unexpected link.

Mr Fortune Explains is HC Bailey's sixth collection of eight golden-age mysteries for the eclectic surgeon-detective Mr Reginald Fortune. Including a child kidnapped from a picnic; a milliner's assistant vanishing from home without a word to her friends; a strange visit, followed by a violent attack on Mr Fortune himself; a raid on a jeweler's shop, and the theft of a photograph; an ill-situated rock garden, and a haunted man; a rigidly saintly clergyman suspected of a trivial theft; a dead policeman and a broken bicycle lamp; and a curiously disturbing picture in the Paris salon.

On the eve of the Civil War, Kirby Jensen is the youngest of three children living on a hardscrabble ranch in Southwestern Missouri. But in 1861, shots were fired in Charleston harbor, and Kirby's father and brother went to war. Smoke Jensen: The Beginning follows the Jensen clan during these volatile years, from Civil War battles to border state raids to the kind of frontier justice achieved only by bullets and blood.

The unlikely heroine of this novel is the bashful and unadventurous Fanny Price, who occupies a Cinderella-like position in the residence of her wealthy cousins, the Bertrams, at Mansfield Park. Fanny is the butt of ridicule for the young Bertram sisters (Maria and Julia), and is relentlessly bullied by her manipulative and penny-pinching aunt, the widowed Mrs Norris.

Nine of Wodehouse's funniest stories, as the Oldest Member reminisces about misadventures among the golf-obsessed. Including the eponymous 'goof' Ferdinand Dibble, a man whose non-success at golf has reduced him to such a state of diffidence as to hamper his romantic aspirations; high-stakes betting on the course among America's tainted millionaires; the heroic Rollo Podmarsh, persevering in the best round of his life under sentence of death; and the saga of William Bates, Jane Packard, and self-confessed vers libre poet Rodney Spelvin.

After a tragic accident kills their father and their mother perishes during childbirth, sisters Norah and Magdalen discover their parents had only been married a matter of months and therefore the girls were actually illegitimate. Their uncle inherits the entirety of the family fortune, refusing to provide the girls with anything as they make their way out into the world. Using her love of the stage and all things dramatic, Magdalen enlists the help of her distant relative, Captain Wragge, a known professional swindler, to regain her inheritance and the right to her name.

First published in 1847, Jane Eyre was the last and most popular of the novels composed by the Brontë sisters. The narrative bristles with energy and passionate conviction, and is one of the first novels written from the perspective of a child.

A second collection of twelve cases for M. McDonnell Bodkin’s insightful but self-deprecating detective Paul Beck, a man who claims no more genius than “a little common sense,” and says of himself that “I just go by the rule of thumb, and muddle and puzzle out my cases as best I can.” Including the disappearance of a millionaire; murders on a golf links and on a train; a fabulous diamond necklace lost in the sea, and the theft of an actress’ rubies; a lucky discovery in a Hansom cab; and a doctor found standing over the dead body of his fiancée’s brother.

Three gentlemen not wholly useless to their country—a lawyer, a banker, and a cabinet minister—have suddenly fallen into a state of profound ennui. Each seeks to rediscover the comfort of their lives through ‘the tonic of difficulty': adopting the nom de guerre of ‘John Macnab', they take to poaching in the Highlands of Scotland, issuing challenges to three landowners and declaring their intention to take a salmon or a stag on their lands between specific dates. But can they overcome the challenges they have set themselves, and escape with their reputations intact?

The novel opens with Mr. and Mrs. Parker’s visit to Sanditon, a village on the coast of Sussex. Sanditon is being developed into a bathing-place under the patronage of the two principal proprietors of the parish, Mr. Parker and Lady Denham. Mr. Parker suffers an injury and receives assistance from a local farmer, Mr. Heywood. The latter’s daughter, Charlotte, is of marriageable age and has three eligible suitors: Lady Denham’s foppish son, Sir Edward; Mr. Parker’s devil-may care brother, Sydney; and Arthur, who is an unemployed hypochondriac.

In "The Happy Hypocrite", mischievous Cupid compels disreputable Lord George Hell to win the love of sweet young Jenny Mere by assuming a saintly mask of true love to disguise his own wicked features. "Zuleika Dobson" tells the story of the effect of the devastatingly attractive Miss Dobson on the all-male undergraduate body of Oxford, culminating in a watery end to the Eights Week boat races. And in "Seven Men", Beerbohm blurs the boundary between fact and fiction to tell the incredible stories of six men (Beerbohm himself is the seventh) from the world of the 1890s.

Aged merchant Mahmoud relates to his young nephews the story of his rise to fabulous riches. From being kicked out (literally) from the family home by his exasperated father, with only the barest patrimony to sustain him, the young wastrel goes from rags to riches, and back again, aided only by "providence" - and his very inventive wits.

The classic horror story of dual personalities gone too far, this full-cast narration explores the attempts of Utterson, a London lawyer, to investigate the strange occurrences surrounding his friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and the shocking discoveries he makes along the way. The impact of this story has been so strong that "Jekyll and Hyde" has become part of our vernacular, referring to those who are outwardly good but inwardly evil.

Eternal optimist Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge conceives another foolproof scheme to make himself - and his adoring new wife, Millie - rich: chicken farming! "No expenses, large profits, quick returns. Chickens, eggs, and the money streaming in faster than you can bank it." Dragging along his long-suffering old friend, novelist Jeremy Garnet, Ukridge begins his enterprise on a borrowed farm, with "borrowed" hens and a total lack of knowledge. Things soon prove a little trickier than expected on the farm....

When Robin Anstey KC comes upon the beautiful Miss Blake, who has been wounded while courageously attempting to detain a fleeing murderer, he calls upon his long-time legal collaborator Dr. John Thorndyke to investigate the killing. But what at first looks like a mere robbery gone wrong, leaving a scene awash with clues, in fact proves to be far from straightforward. And while trying to untie that knot, Thorndyke also interests himself in the still more complex mystery of Miss Blake's family inheritance, and the cat's eye pendant....

Twelve years on from the events of The Three Hostages, Sir Richard Hannay begins to fear that his idyllic existence with his family in their Cotswolds home is a little too comfortable, merely the placid acceptance of encroaching old age. But then echoes of a past adventure during his days in Africa, and an old oath to protect the son of the man whom he saved then, draw him—along with son Peter John and old friend Sandy Clanroyden—into new danger, and a showdown on the remote Island of Sheep....

Since retiring from business, the chief obsessions of American millionaire J. Preston Peters are his dyspepsia and his collection of Egyptian scarabs. So, when fluffy-minded peer Lord Emsworth - father of Freddie Threepwood, fiancé of Mr. Peters' daughter, Aline - absent-mindedly pockets the gem of Mr. Peters' collection, and puts it on display in the museum at Blandings Castle, Mr. Peters offers rich rewards to anyone who can get the precious scarab back for him...without causing a scandal. Two impecunious young American exiles in London rise to the challenge.

In the pretty little town of Sibley, NY, the court has adjourned for lunch, and Judge Evans and some of the leading lawyers of the district stand outside the courthouse discussing the limitations of the criminal classes. A stranger describes to them just how a man might commit a murder and avoid detection - and only minutes later, the widow Clemmens is discovered struck down in her parlor by an unknown hand in circumstances eerily similar to those described by the stranger.