โ Scribed by Fredric Brown
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
I'd been compiling this anthology for about a year and got 18 of the 23 stories from other anthologies and the original magazines โ but some of the book eluded me. I had nearly given up (collectors have made this a $100 book). Then Catfeeder hunted down the original book, scanned the missing pieces, and sent them to me. (For that I will be eternally grateful โ grateful enough, in fact, to do conversions of Regency Romances for a year โ yes, that! grateful.)
Anyway I put everything together in a very nice ebook, proofread every word (except for the HUGE bibliography at the end โ I just skimmed that) and now we all have a rarity that paper collectors have kept out of our hands for decades. (Hah โ stick that in your silly bookscases!)
**Great mystery and crime collection! Dancing Sandwiches is, of course, a classic, but so are The Dangerous People, Cain and Nightmare in Yellow. Everything is above average and fun...and twisted. There is one difference in this book than the original. While reading the Introduction, Pronzini praised one story so highly that I included it at the end -- Come and Go Mad. It's a sorta-mystery, sorta-fantasy, sorta SF, but mainly bizarre -- and worth reading.
Well here it is. Very satisfying for me. I love doing this.**
In these 23 stories, Brown never rails to surprise and delight. Time after time the reader anticipates the ending only to discover that once more the author has proved too clever. Yet Brown never โcheats,โ never feeds false clues, and his endings are always plausible. His imagยญination is by turns puckish, grim, outยญlandishโbut forever fresh.
Brownโs stories run from the fifty-word โMistakeโ to a novelette (โThe Case of the Dancing Sandwichesโ). In โGrannyโs Birthday,โ a two-page short short, with Granny supervising like a benign queen, the party goes splendidly, marred only by manslaughter and murder.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES