Audiobook · read by volunteers
Tales of Terror and Mystery
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
Read by Igor Teaforay, Dominic Moore, Betsie Bush, Justin Brett, roolynninms, Cori Samuel, Marta Kornowska, Jeremy Pavier, Reynard T. Fox · 12 chapters · 7 h 39
About the book
Sherlock Holmes made Arthur Conan Doyle famous, but his shorter fiction shows a writer with a very different appetite for the strange. These twelve stories ask you to listen to the dark. A pilot rises into the sky and meets something the air was never meant to contain. A strange object in a collector's study seems to carry the memory of a crime. A fashionable surgeon is drawn toward a catastrophe, and an explorer investigates a cavern in the hills that has a bad reputation. Doyle builds his effects slowly, letting a suppressed unease grow until it becomes dread, then lets the reader decide how much to believe. With nearly eight hours of readings from LibriVox volunteers, this is an ideal collection for a long, atmospheric evening. These are stories for a night with the lights turned low.
Introduction
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859 to 1930) trained as a doctor in Edinburgh and became one of the best-selling authors of his age. His Sherlock Holmes stories are known all over the world, but he often said that he wanted to be remembered for other work, and he wrote historical novels, science fiction, adventure tales and a large number of stories of the macabre. Tales of Terror and Mystery, published in 1922, brings together some of the best of these darker short stories in a single volume.
The collection includes The Horror of the Heights, The Leather Funnel, The New Catacomb, The Case of Lady Sannox and The Terror of Blue John Gap, among others. Their settings range from the early days of aviation to a Derbyshire cavern, from the drawing rooms of London to the quiet of a collector's study. What they share is a talent for making the reader believe, for the length of a story, that something unexplained may be waiting just out of sight.
Here the stories are read by a team of LibriVox volunteers, with a running time of nearly eight hours across twelve chapters. Each story can be heard on its own, so it is easy to take them in one at a time. Fans of classic detective fiction will find that Doyle's gift for pace and plot is just as sharp when the subject is horror, and anyone who enjoys ghost stories from the golden age of the short story will find a great deal to savor. They are perfect for a winter evening.
Public domain
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text