Some Persons Unknown by E. W. Hornung
Mar. 5th, 2019 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeNext up in the read-through was Some Persons Unknown (1898), a collection of short stories.
There are eleven stories, four of which are set in England, six in Australia and the last one on board a ship bound for Australia. They vary considerably in length, characters, subject matter, themes and general mood. The collection felt a bit uneven at times, but the stories are very good on the whole, and the variety was entertaining.
Hornung is good at using the short story format for strong effect: he implies a lot in a few words, and many of these stories—especially the shortest ones, which are not much more than ten pages—have a great unnerving atmosphere, a sort of quiet gruesomeness presented as it were sideways-on. I thought 'A Farewell Performance' (a version of the 'boy who cried wolf' story featuring Australian venomous snakes) and '"Author! Author!"' (about an unsuccessful playwright who descends into misery and sees his beloved work stolen by another writer) were particularly good. Placing stories like these alongside 'nicer' stories like 'Kenyon's Innings' (about a chronically ill boy who's befriended by the cricketer he hero-worships—incidentally, this seems to be the first major appearance of cricket in Hornung's writing so far!) and 'The Governess at Greenbush' (a young woman who rejected the man she loves and regrets it gets a second chance) only adds to the general unsettling feeling.
And then there's 'After the Fact', which is neither particularly nice nor gruesome in quite the same way as some of the shorter stories here. I have to mention it because, as has already been noticed, it is in many ways basically a proto-Raffles story. It was fun spotting the similarities, but the differences between this and the Raffles stories were also notable: in particular the absence of the strong bond and mutual trust between the Raffles and Bunny characters that's such an important element of the later stories.
Only one more to go before the Ides of March and The Amateur Cracksman! I look forward to it...
There are eleven stories, four of which are set in England, six in Australia and the last one on board a ship bound for Australia. They vary considerably in length, characters, subject matter, themes and general mood. The collection felt a bit uneven at times, but the stories are very good on the whole, and the variety was entertaining.
Hornung is good at using the short story format for strong effect: he implies a lot in a few words, and many of these stories—especially the shortest ones, which are not much more than ten pages—have a great unnerving atmosphere, a sort of quiet gruesomeness presented as it were sideways-on. I thought 'A Farewell Performance' (a version of the 'boy who cried wolf' story featuring Australian venomous snakes) and '"Author! Author!"' (about an unsuccessful playwright who descends into misery and sees his beloved work stolen by another writer) were particularly good. Placing stories like these alongside 'nicer' stories like 'Kenyon's Innings' (about a chronically ill boy who's befriended by the cricketer he hero-worships—incidentally, this seems to be the first major appearance of cricket in Hornung's writing so far!) and 'The Governess at Greenbush' (a young woman who rejected the man she loves and regrets it gets a second chance) only adds to the general unsettling feeling.
And then there's 'After the Fact', which is neither particularly nice nor gruesome in quite the same way as some of the shorter stories here. I have to mention it because, as has already been noticed, it is in many ways basically a proto-Raffles story. It was fun spotting the similarities, but the differences between this and the Raffles stories were also notable: in particular the absence of the strong bond and mutual trust between the Raffles and Bunny characters that's such an important element of the later stories.
Only one more to go before the Ides of March and The Amateur Cracksman! I look forward to it...
