Black Veil & Other Tales (Mystery & the Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural) [Paperback]

Mark Valentine (Author)

Book Description

Series: Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural | Publication Date: June 12, 2008

Selected & Introduced by Mark Valentine The Gateway of the Monster... The Red Hand... The Ghost Hunter To Sherlock Holmes the supernatural was a closed book: but other great detectives have always been ready to do battle with the dark instead. This volume brings together sixteen chilling cases of these supernatural sleuths, pitting themselves against the peril of ultimate evil. Here are encounters from the casebooks of the Victorian haunted house investigators John Bell and Flaxman Low, from Carnacki, the Edwardian battler against the abyss, and from horror master Arthur Machen s Mr Dyson, a man-about-town and meddler in strange things. Connoisseurs will find rare cases such as those of Allen Upward s The Ghost Hunter, Robert Barr s Eugene Valmont (who may have inspired Agatha Christie s Hercule Poirot) and Donald Campbell s young explorer Leslie Vane, the James Bond of the jazz age, who battles against occult enemies of the British Empire. And the collection is completed by some of the best tales from the pens of modern psychic sleuth authors.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Wordsworth (June 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1840220880
• ISBN-13: 978-1840220889
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,449,910 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, not great, October 18, 2009

By 

Literary Omnivore (Utah, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Black Veil & Other Tales (Mystery & the Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural) (Paperback)

After reading half this book, I was going to give it only one star. Fortunately, I kept reading; the better stories are all clustered at the back of the book. I gave it three stars because many of the stories are only fair or even poor--a couple, such as 'The Curious Activities of Basil Thorpenden,' could best be described as fantasies or reveries, and one, 'The Necromancer,' is a jingoistic, cartoonish Victorian version of James Bond.
Overall, the stories are just okay. If you enjoy Victorian and Edwardian settings you'll probably like them but I think there are better collections available. One thing I did like was the cover art. What I took to be a monk standing in a cemetery in the small photo shown on Amazon turned out to be Death, with his scythe, standing on a hill and staring down at a sunlit village. I had never heard of the artist, listed as the late Max Wislicenus (1861-1957), and enjoyed seeing his work. The oil painting, 'Musing Death, is apparently in the collection of a German museum, the Neue Galerie, Kassel, Germany.