(I must say, though, the one character I did want to give a good shaking was the heroine of “Making Allowances For Mamma,” for the way she kept putting her flighty mother before her husband!)
The stories are mostly set in California, with a few forays to Boston and New York. It’s a California of the Edwardian era that seems like another world nowadays, with the different settings—from suburban bungalows to country villages to remote ranches, and even an electrical power plant deep in the redwood-forested mountains—evoked in beautiful detail. It isn’t often that a volume of short stories impresses me this much, but now that I’ve finished the book, I’m going back and re-reading them to savor them a second time. Definitely one of my favorite reads of the year.
Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby is available for free on Kindle, Nook and in various formats at Project Gutenberg. This is an entry for the weekly blog event Friday’s Forgotten Books, hosted by Patti Abbott.
Top Ten O. Henry, Revisited (with runners-up)
Last year about this time, I did a series of blog posts spotlighting my ten favorite short stories by O. Henry, one of my all-time favorite authors. I had some rather grand ideas for the series, which included winding up with a poll to see which story was the reader favorite, but it so happened that I couldn’t get Blogger’s poll feature to work. So that fell a little flat. But it was an enjoyable challenge selecting my favorites and trying to write a little about why I liked them. I thought it would be fun to re-post the list this year, and as a bonus, add a few more favorites that come next in line.
As I explained last year, I left off Henry’s two best-loved stories, “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief,” even though they’re both undoubtedly terrific, in favor of spotlighting some lesser-known gems. This was my list:
- Friends in San Rosario
- The Man Higher Up
- Calloway’s Code
- The Green Door
- A Chaparral Prince
- The Pimienta Pancakes
- Springtime á la Carte
- Art and the Bronco
- The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss
- The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein
And here are some of the runners-up—some that just missed getting into the top ten, or that I’ve come to appreciate more since making the list:
- The Last Leaf
- The Roads We Take
- Christmas by Injunction
- Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet
- The Lonesome Road
- The Romance of a Busy Broker
Have you read any or all of these stories? Which is your favorite?
Book Review: Uncle Abner, Master of Mysteries
Abner was silent for a moment.
“It is the law,” he said, “but is it justice, Dillworth?”
“Abner,” replied Dillworth, “how shall we know what justice is unless the law defines it?”
“I think every man knows what it is,” said Abner.
“And shall every man set up a standard of his own,” said Dillworth, “and disregard the standard that the law sets up? That would be the end of justice.”
“It would be the beginning of justice,” said Abner, “if every man followed the standard that God gives him.”
I saw this one day in the “Recommended for You” or “Customers Also Bought” section of the Kindle Store, I can’t remember which, and since it was inexpensive and looked interesting, I picked it up. I’m glad I did! Published in 1918, it’s a collection of eighteen excellent mystery short stories in a unique setting—rural Virginia in the early 1800s.
Comparison to G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, which I’ve been reading and enjoying, are apt, though the two detectives in many respects are polar opposites—one a small, mild, English Catholic; the other a big, stalwart American Protestant. There is a strong religious element to the Uncle Abner stories. Abner’s faith is at the root of his belief in justice that drives him to find the correct solutions to a variety of crimes. Justice is the theme of the collection as a whole. Some of the stories demonstrate the limits of human law, while still reinforcing its importance, but above all stress the existence of a higher justice, and the conviction that all guilty parties will meet the justice of God even if they are beyond the reach of human law.
As a reader of Westerns, a number of elements in the description of life in Virginia at this period struck familiar chords—the grazing, driving, selling (and sometimes stealing) of cattle and journeys on horseback. A number of the stories involve disputes over land, another familiar feature in the Western. “A Twilight Adventure,” a neatly constructed story concerning cattle thieving, demonstrates the dangers of both lynch law and circumstantial evidence. Last year I read Frank Lawrence Owsley’s Plain Folk of the Old South, and the Uncle Abner stories reminded me of Owsley’s description of the livestock-raising economy of the early South, which bore a strong resemblance to that which later developed in the West.
The stories are narrated by Abner’s young nephew, who is present at the scene of some of them, and relates the others second-hand. There is also a foil for the detective in the person of Squire Randolph, the justice of the peace, an honest but talkative and pompous man who is continually baffled by Abner’s line of reasoning until the moment when the truth is revealed. Abner’s methods are similar to Father Brown’s in that he sees the truth a lot sooner than the other characters or the reader, but drops cryptic remarks along the way that all make sense in the end. He also frequently deals with skeptics who deny the existence or power of God. There’s a great historical flavor to the whole book, and the writing is also excellent, with some beautiful, atmospheric descriptive passages equal to those in Chesterton. Definitely a great read for anyone who loves classic, old-fashioned detective stories; a fine piece of entertainment with deeper, edifying elements as well.
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