Showing results by author "Egerton Castle" in All Categories

Assembled and edited by Julian Hawthorne and first published in 1909, the Modern English volume of The Lock and Key Library features 16 classic mystery and detective stories by such luminaries as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Wilkie Collins.  

A highly unsettling collection of macabre stories in which death and the dead are key themes. Moon’s Gibbet by Egerton Castle, A Strange Goldfield by Guy Boothby, The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy, The Pistol Shot by Alexander Pushkin, The Premature Burial by Edgar Allan Poe, The Dead Hand by Wilkie Collins, The Famous Race between the Hearse and the Steamroller by Sidney Keyes, The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe, Nine O’Clock by Wilkie Collins, The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin.

An old man revisits the scene of a terrible incident from his youth. The place is Moon's Gibbet - where the body of a hanged murderer named Moon was hung, tarred, and fettered 35 years earlier. On that night, the man had been on that hill and had seen the body hung up. Once the hangman and his assistant had left, the hung body began to groan. At the same time an old man appeared, the father of the criminal, and between the two of them they managed to save the young man from the gallows. But this is only the start of the dreadful events of the evening.