Showing results by narrator "Cathy Dobson" in All Categories

Herbert Armstrong was a Welsh solicitor who murdered his wife by administering arsenic. His life was marked by love affairs and dubious business dealings. It is also probable that his hatred of his dull, respectable existence in a tiny rural village was one of the motives for his terrible crime. This story of the crime and trial of Armstrong is told by Edgar Wallace, who reported from the courtroom. On behalf of a newspaper syndicate, Wallace offered the convicted man £5,000 for his confession. The offer was refused.

When Gustavus Pulvertoft finds himself saddled with a horse with the power of human speech, he little imagines how quickly he will come a cropper. His courtship of the horse-loving Diana Chetwynd goes swimmingly so long as his talking horse is on good terms with Miss Chetwynd's grey mare... but when their trusty mounts fall out, a series of terrible events ensues which Pulvertoft is powerless to prevent. His determination to get revenge on the horse leads to his ultimate downfall.

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole (1884-1941) was a New Zealand-born English novelist, famous for his skill at scene setting and vivid plots. He was a best-selling author in the '20s and '30s and remains popular to this day. "The White Cat" is the story of a young American man in Hollywood who, being at the end of his financial possibilities, conceives a plan to marry a wealthy English widow.

A moving story of a random act of kindness. Old Tom Pickford, an elderly clerk at Tweedie's warehouse, is moved by the sight of a young boy on a London omnibus who is about to embark on a new life at sea. His thoughts drift back to his own boyhood in the country, which he left behind long ago. A wonderful study in characterisation and nostalgia.

Great Horror Stories is a vintage collection of some of the finest ghost tales, horror stories, and supernatural legends ever written, by the best writers the genre has to offer.

Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856 - 1925), known as H. Rider Haggard, was an English writer of adventure stories, often set in exotic locations, especially Africa, and a pioneer of the Lost World literary genre. Only a Dream is a ghost story about the strange experience of a widower about to remarry, who is visited on the eve of his wedding by the ghastly apparition of his dead first wife.

Mary Cholmondeley (1859-1925) was an English novelist and short story writer. 'Let Loose' is a supernatural ghost story where a young architect wishes to research a unique fresco in the crypt of a remote and ancient parish church in Yorkshire. The parish clergyman is remarkably reluctant to hand over the keys to the crypt and sets some odd conditions to their use. On the subsequent days after the young architect has opened the crypt, terrible and mysterious deaths begin to plague the village.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a preeminent Ukrainian-born story writer. He is particularly famous for those stories which veer in the direction of surrealism and the grotesque. The Cloak is one such tale. Akaky Akakiyevich is a reclusive and widely ridiculed lower official whose job is to copy letters. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence with his elderly landlady and has little money. But the harsh weather in St. Petersburg necessitates the purchase of a new cloak.

William Fryer Harvey (1885-1937) was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the mystery and horror genres. His most famous work is The Beast with Five Fingers, which is universally recognised as a masterpiece and one of the most iconic horror stories ever written. Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Yorkshire, he went to Balliol College, Oxford, and took a degree in medicine at Leeds. Ill health dogged him, however, and he devoted much of his recuperation to writing short stories.

A spectacular collection of outstanding half-hour short stories...perfect for commuters or bedtime listening. 'The Whistle' by Hugh Walpole, 'The Well' by W. W. Jacobs, 'The Scrupulous Father' by George Gissing, 'The Debt' by Edith Wharton, 'The Problem of the Five Marks' by Melville Davisson Post, 'The Purple Wig' by G. K. Chesterton, 'Pickman's Model' by H. P. Lovecraft, 'Humplebee' by Geroge Gissing.

Elizabeth, a young wife and mother, waits for her husband Walter to come home from the coal mine. She attributes his lateness to him having gone drinking. As time goes on, she goes to look for him and alerts his colleagues. It transpires he has been killed in a pit accident. Elizabeth's mother-in-law helps her to wash the corpse after it is brought home from the mine. The reactions of the two women are in stark contrast - and the experience of laying out the body shows Elizabeth how she and her husband never really knew one another in life.

"The Return" is an eerie ghost story about a man who returns to his home village after 20 years in the diamond fields of South Africa to see whether his sweetheart has waited for him.... When he returns, he finds that much has changed during his absence. But where is his beloved Rose Pascal?

A seafarer's story of when his ship was sucked into the terrifying maelström... a bottomless whirlpool of gigantic proportions and power... and how he survived to tell the tale.

Ernest Bramah (1868-1942) was an English author of 21 novels and numerous short stories and features. His humorous works have been ranked with Jerome K. Jerome and W. W. Jacobs, his detective stories with Conan Doyle, his politico-science fiction with H. G. Wells, and his supernatural stories with Algernon Blackwood. In his stories of detection, Bramah hit on the idea of a blind detective, Max Carrados, whose triumphs are all the more amazing because of his disability.

Mark Twain's brilliant tale of a train stuck on the prairie in a snowdrift, where the starving passengers resort to a daily ballot to select which fellow traveller will be sacrificed to provide the next meal. Will it be the succulent Mr. Harris of St. Louis, the juicy Mr. Messick of Colorado or the scraggy, tough Mr. Davis of Oregon? Twain's gentle gallows humour shines through the story and we find ourselves laughing out loud at the most grisly of details. Masterly!

Harry Garham made a great name for himself as a writer of light verse and humorous stories, including the inimitable Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes. His classic story, 'Biffin on the Bassoon', recounts a tale of decidedly amateur musician who inadvertently finds himself playing the bassoon solo at the inaugural performance by the London Philmelodic of Heinzmacher's Die Schöpfung, with comic results.

The "Mary Russell" was a trading boat that set sail from the harbour of Cobh in County Cork on 8 February 1828, carrying a cargo of mules bound for Barbados. When it returned to Cobh on 25 June 1828, the horrified people of Cork found a cabin awash with blood and the bound and battered corpses of the ship's crew.

When the prematurely middle-aged J.P. Huddle is recommended to take an “unrest-cure” by a friend, he little realizes that the other passenger in the railway compartment, the prank-loving Clovis, will take this as a personal challenge. The havoc which Clovis’s macabre and at times shocking practical joke causes is beyond anything that the sleepy hamlet of Tilfield has seen before. Hector Hugh Munro at his most macabre.

A celebrated doctor receives a visit from a new patient with a most peculiar ailment. He has an excruciatingly painful spot on his hand. But on examination, he can find nothing wrong with the patient at all. He assumes it is a psychosomatic illness, but the patient is insistant that the area of his hand be surgically removed. When the doctor declines this, the patient attempts to cut out the area himself, and the doctor is obliged to complete the operation after all.

Twilight in Italy describes Lawrence’s time as an educated working-class Englishman living among the Italian working men and women in the region around Lake Garda, from the Austrian Alps to the North, to Switzerland and finally Como and Milan. He captures the psyche of Italian peasants without ever romanticising or patronising them.