The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales

John Charles DentProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.0
Word count
294K words
Chapters
30

Tags

English Originals Horror and ThrillerForeign Literature Weird TalesSuspense ThrillerThrilling PlotGerrard Street MysteryGothic AtmosphereComplex HumanityPsychological InsightCriminal PsychologyShort Story CollectionExotic Culture

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales by John Charles DentAuthor: Dent, John Charles, 1841-1888,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Nov 1, 2004

Editor's review

This collection of short stories by Canadian author John Charles Dent features several weird tales, led by "The Gerrard Street Mystery." Classified under American and Canadian literature, the works embody the typical pleasures of nineteenth-century popular weird fiction: mystery, strange occurrences, and suspense in equal measure, with short lengths and direct plotting. Its value lies in showing one facet of the English-language weird short story tradition; it offers casual readers entertainment and gives scholars of nineteenth-century North American popular literature a useful sample. Dent's background in law and historical writing shows in narratives that emphasize the unfolding of events and the drawing together of clues, giving the stories the feel of old-fashioned detective fiction. The book suits分段 reading on a commute or before bed rather than a single sitting; readers interested in the Gothic tradition or early suspense fiction should note how atmosphere is built and how solutions are revealed. Note that this is an old public-domain work whose language and pacing differ from contemporary genre fiction.

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Reading tips

  1. Read each story independently in any order, starting with the one whose title appeals most.
  2. Note how each story sets up its mystery and draws its clues together; treat them as samples for observing short suspense writing.
  3. When encountering old-fashioned English expressions, don't check every word; grasp the plot first, then revisit key passages.
  4. For study, after each story, retell the plot and solution in two or three sentences.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30

FAQ

Are the stories in this book based on real cases? Judging by the title and style, these are fictional narratives with weird and suspenseful elements, not records of real cases. Read them as nineteenth-century popular short fiction, not reportage or historical archives.
Do the stories have a continuous plot? This is a short story collection; each story stands alone, led by "The Gerrard Street Mystery," with the rest being weird tales of the same kind. You can start with any story without losing a main thread by skipping around.
How difficult is the English, and what level is it suitable for? The text is nineteenth-century English, with slightly older sentence structures and vocabulary than contemporary fiction, but the stories are strong and short; intermediate English readers can finish with a dictionary. If you seldom read English originals, start with the shorter pieces.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

John Charles Dent Author · Canadian · 1841–1888

John Charles Dent (1841–1888) was a Canadian journalist, writer and historian. Born in England, he moved to Canada as a child. He served as editor of the Toronto Evening Telegram before turning to historical writing. His major works include the four-volume Canadian Portrait Gallery (1880–1881) and The Story of the Upper Canadian Rebellion (1885–1886), as well as Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 and the weird-fiction collection The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1887, he died in Toronto. Public information is limited, but his histories combine a journalist's narrative skill with careful use of sources, offering useful insight into nineteenth-century Canadian politics and society.