Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales

John Charles Dent, the author of these stories, was born in Kendal, Westmorland, England, in 1841. His parents emigrated to Canada shortly after, and the boy who would later become a Canadian author and historian was educated there. He studied law and became a member of the Upper Canada Bar, but practised for only a few years before returning to England to pursue a literary career, writing mostly for periodicals. He spent several years in England, then moved with his family to Boston for about two years, and finally returned to Canada to take a journalistic post in Toronto. He died in 1888, the year this collection appeared.

Dent is best remembered for his historical writing, so his turn to supernatural and detective fiction makes this book something of a curiosity. The volume opens with a prefatory sketch and then moves through its stories, which include The Gerrard Street Mystery in three parts, Gagtooth’s Image, The Haunted House on Duchess Street and Savareen’s Disappearance, the longest of them, in fifteen chapters. The tales belong to the tradition of Victorian magazine fiction, with its taste for strange coincidences, uncanny houses and puzzles that demand an answer.

The recording is divided into 25 sections and lasts around five and a half hours. Ten LibriVox volunteers share the reading, which gives the book a pleasing variety of voices.

This is a collection for listeners who like to explore forgotten corners of nineteenth-century fiction. It offers old-fashioned thrills, plots of their day and a glimpse of a writer who is better known to historians than to readers of horror.