Reading progress update: I've read 21 out of 320 pages.
This week has been slumpish. I haven't felt like diving into any heavy reads or even full length novels or really anything that required a lot of focus. So, poetry and short stories and Paul Temple, and even this only a few minutes at a time, were the only reads I engaged in this week. Not that poetry doesn't require some focus etc. ... but poems are short and you don't generally need to remember a plot or characters from one poem to the next.
Anyway, I did manage to start Capital Crimes, which is a collection of short stories with London as a theme.
The first story in the book was The Case of Lady Sannox by Arthur Conan Doyle.
I have read this story before in a superb collection of ACD's (non-Holmes) short stories called Gothic Tales, and I found it stomach-turning then. On the re-read, it's still makes me wince, but then I am not a fan of horror ... and this falls into the horror genre for me.
However, I think I also appreciated the story a little more on the re-read for its pointing out issues regarding xenophobia and domestic violence. It's one of ACD's stories that I thought was quite modern, ahead if its time even, for story first published in 1893.
Btw, all of ACD's stories are available online for free.
I am not sure I will write an update for all of the other stories in Capital Crimes, but for reference the stories included in the collection are:
The Case of Lady Sannox - Arthur Conan Doyle
A Mystery of the Underground - John Oxenham
The Finchley Puzzle - Richard Marsh
The Magic Casket - R. Austin Freeman
The Holloway Flat Tragedy - Ernest Bramah
The Magician Of Cannon Street - J. S. Fletcher
The Stealer of Marble - Edgar Wallace
The Tea Leaf - Robert Eustace and Edgar Jepson
The Hands of Mr Ottermole - Thomas Burke
The Little House - H. C. Bailey
The Silver Mask - Hugh Walpole
Wind in the East - Henry Wade
The Avenging Chance - Anthony Berkley
They Don't Wear Labels - E. M. Delafield
The Unseen Door - Margery Allingham
Cheese - Ethel Lina White
You Can't Hang Twice - Anthony Gilbert
10
