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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Raconteur of the Exotic,
By
This review is from: The peculiar exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes
In a gentlemen's club, retired Brigadier Ffellowes recounts exotic and mysterious tales from his travels abroad. His subjects include, among other things, the keeper of the sea serpents, Nazi invaders who met an older threat in Greece, a Basque town that has no cemetery, a strange Irish hunt, and why the Brigadier will never eat crab or go on safari again.Even though the first of these stories was published in 1968, they have the flavor of your favorite old tales of the fantastic and 19th-century ghost stories, H. Rider Haggard and A. Merritt and G.K. Chesterton, and lively stories told in the good old British style with lean rich prose and a self-deprecating twinkle in the eye.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gentleman's adventure tales of supernatural encounters,
By A Customer
This review is from: The peculiar exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes
At a gentlemen's club, a British adventurer tells of his encounters with the exotic and supernatural: ghosts, neanderthals, monsters, and strange cults. Should appeal to fans of similar tales from Avram Davidson and Manley Wade Wellman.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Tales From the Gentleman's Club,
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This review is from: The peculiar exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes
I confess that I have never been overly fond of the Brigadier Donald Ffellowes stories by Sterling Lanier. The problem is not with the writing, which is generally quite good. Nor is it the type of story, for I am generally quite partial to a good club story.
No, the problem is that the old soldier is constantly telling stories about his own heroic adventures. And while we are told that he does so "with a twinkle in his eye," there isn't much doubt that he is meant to be taken as a reliable narrator. He doesn't quite become the club bore, but there are times when he teeters on the brink of stuffiness. I am just not as enamored of the Brigadier (_not_ General) as the more respectable members of the gentleman's club. That being said, I suspect that most readers will like the seven stories in _The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes_ (1972). All were originally published in _Fantasy and Science Fiction_ between 1968 and 1970. Most of the stories feature some aspect of the mythical or supernatural world breaking into our own. "A Feminine Jurisdiction" has to do with dirty doings on a Grecian isle. It suffers a bit because it uses a plot that has been done a multitude of times before, specifically by William Sambrot with "Island of Fear" (1958) and Sir L.E. Jones with "The Eyes of Phorkos" (1961). Similarly, "The Leftovers," involving a prehistoric holdover, is a bit on the predictable side. But the other five tales are much more unusual. Two stories-- "His Only Safari" and "Soldier Key"-- explain why the Brigadier no longer goes Big Game hunting or eats crab or lobsters. He Has His Reasons. "The Kings of the Sea" involves a man who has a relationship with some northern sea people and a woman who meddles in things that don't concern her. "His Coat So Gay" recounts the events of a Washington fox hunt that take a sinister and demonic turn. And "Fraternity Brother" educates us about the connection between burial practices and the world's oldest secret society. At present, this book is available only in hardback at collector's item prices; at least, I'm not aware of any paperback version. The reader must decide how much money he or she would like to invest in these tales. I would like to see at least some stories in the series come out in paperback form.
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