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May 12, 2005
The Healing Power of Literature
It's May 12th, 40 degrees, and overcast. I could console myself that at least we don't have snow on the ground ("the year it snowed on Mother's Day" is still fresh in everyone's mind around here). Instead, I got back into bed after my 1st cup of coffee and read Richard Harding Davis's In the Fog, a truly fine mystery story. It's a trick story, really, but I like well-done trick stories; this one cheered me up considerably this morning.
I used to own a copy in one of those anthologies of Conan Doyle's competitors edited by Hugh Greene, but I haven't seen the book in a while (it may well be in a box somewhere . . . ). I came across someone else's anthology of pre-World War I mysteries in a used bookstore last week and bought it in part because "In the Fog" was one of the stories in it that I had read (along with the endlessly annoying Jacques Futrelle. There's little accounting for taste, but I find "The Problem of Cell 13" an over-anthologized representative of the type, so much so that I can't reject a volume based on its inclusion.)
Davis turns out to have been an interesting character -- one of the yellowest of the yellow journalists.
Even though I've provided a link above to a Project Gutenberg e-book version, I can't read fiction that way. I buy books. For $4 I got 14 short stories, only 6 of which I had read before (pretty good odds for me in this genre), 5 of which I was willing to read again (damn Futrelle, taking up space). It helps pass the unseasonable return to winter.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at May 12, 2005 7:29 AM