The Edge of the Chair

by Joan Kahn

CONTENTS

The Sixth Capsule or Proof by Circumstantial Evidence by Edmund Pearson
Fool's Mate by Stanley Ellin
The Axeman Wore Wings by Robert Tallant
Stone from the Stars by Valentina Zhuravleva
The Queen of Spades by Alexander Pushkin
Billy: The Seal Mission by Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden
A Watcher by the Dead by Ambrose Bierce
Tea Party by Harold Pinter
Death Draws a Triangle by Edward Hale Bierstadt
The Net by Robert M. Coates
Prisoner of the Sand by Antoine de Saint Exupery
The End of the Party by Graham Greene
The Last Inhabitant of the Tuileries by Andre Castelot
Jesting Pilot by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner)
Shattering the Myth of John Wilkes Booth's Escape by William G. Shepherd
A Piece of Steak by Jack London
The Game of Murder by Gerd Gaiser
On the Killing of Eratosthenes the Seducer by Kathleen Freeman
The Adventure of Clapham Cook by Agatha Christie
The Last Night of the World by Ray Bradbury
"They" by Rudyard Kipling
The Chair by John Bartlow Martin
Old Fags by Stacy Aumonier
Dead Men Working in Cane Fields by William Seabrook
How the Brigadier Lost His Ear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Dry September by William Faulkner
Rattenbury and Stone by F. Tennyson Jesse
Sing a Song of Sixpence by John Buchan
The Murder in Le Mans by Janet Flanner
Sleeping Beauty by John Collier
The Shadow of the Shark by G. K. Chesterton
A Small Buried Treasure by John Fischer
The Horla by Guy de Maupassant
Scrawns by Dorothy L. Sayers.

Genres: Horror, Short Stories

560 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[Shawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

FIRST TIER: Another huge anthology knocked down (as I've mentioned before, when I was populating this iteration of my reading list, I deliberately chose the largest anthologies on my "to read" shelf to fill my "anthology" slots). As a boy, Joan Kahn was the first anthologist whose name I ever took note of, having enjoyed her "Some Things..." series in junior high school. Thus, her introduction here, in which she discusses how daunting it was assembling this book (her very first anthology) was of interest to me. She notes being aware of quality and variety, and especially flow - which I appreciated. And, as well, she mentions her decision to include non-fiction, which is a little more problematic for me.

SECOND TIER: So, what is this book, then? A large anthology of "Suspenseful" reading - mystery stories, detective stories, weird stories, adventure stories and, yes, various bits of true-crime & historical non-fiction. I'll be honest and say I read only some of these specific selection, after spending time reading and not enjoying the WWII espionage piece, "Billy: The Seal Mission" by Stewart Alsop and Thomas Braden. So, I have no reactions noted for "The Last Inhabitant of the Tuileries" by André Castelot (some French Revolution article) and "On the Killing of Eratosthenes the Seducer" by Kathleen Freeman (about ancient Greece). Maybe that's your thing - it's not mine, and in that vein I think I'll discuss the rest of the non-fic before we advance to the fiction.

THIRD TIER: So, the non-fiction here is mostly true-crime related or historical in nature, and runs the gamut. Weakest to strongest: the aforementioned "Billy: The Seal Mission" - about some WWII-era espionage, wasn't interesting to me (outside of the details of how hard it was to be a resistance fighter), "Rattenbury & Stoner" by F. Tennyson Jesse (about a famed Murder murder case in the 1920s in which a working-class driver, involved with his Mistress, murders her aged husband) was interesting in that it was intended to "set the story straight" (or at least offer some food for thought) about the woman in the case, whose morality and character were much maligned in the press, which led to her suicide after being found innocent. Nice look at culture & class hypocrisy, but still, long winded for all that. "The Murder In Le Mans" is about the famed case of the incestuous Papin sisters, servants in Paris who murdered/mutilated their Mistress and her daughter. Though it seems obvious the girls were schizophrenics, Janet Flanner spends her time haughtily and smugly dismissing all the other opinions of their motivation at the time (oh, those silly demmed Marxists and Surrealists!) - one presumes her work will fade into history as well.

But the remainder of these were enjoyable. "The Sixth Capsule or Proof by Circumstantial Evidence" by Edmund Pearson relates a late 19th Century case from New York City in which a girl at a boarding house seems to die from some minor medication she took, only for it later to be revealed she was poisoned by her secret lover (and medical student) who was hoping it would all be marked off as a pharmacist's error. This would make a good Rick Geary adaptation, with all kinds of interesting details (like a jailhouse visit from aspiring journalist Algernon Blackwood, and in general a view of 19th Century Sociopathology, or at least malignant indifference). "The Axeman Wore Wings" by Robert Tallant relates the still-unsolved story of the 1913 murder and assault crime wave in New Orleans, delving a bit into the details of how the courts and police became tied up in mistaken assumptions. Edward Hale Bierstadt's "Death Draws a Triangle," about a mid 19th Century NYC "honor killing" of a man by a supposedly cuckolded husband, is focused on how a great judicial injustice was the outcome of political influence (by Tammany Hall, looking to take down Horace Greeley) and moral panic and falsely stoked "outrage". "Prisoner of the Sand" is an excerpt by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry about his (and a co-pilot's) small plane crash in the North African desert, and survival in an inhospitable realm. Involving. The really good thing about "Shattering the Myth of John Wilkes Booth's Escape" by William G. Shepherd is that it is NOT an "history's mystery" type thing that asks "who knows?", but instead is an in-depth investigation and debunking of the long-lived claims of an old drunk in Oklahoma (eventually a suicide) who claimed to be Lincoln's assassin. What then arises are the more interesting questions of why this man would claim such a thing, but guilt projection, narcissism and his status as a compulsive liar all seem likely to be involved. John Bartlow Martin's "The Chair", meanwhile, tells the details of a 50s era spree killing by two ne'er-do-wells (one of whom ends in the electric chair) while filling us in on the young man's semi-tragic background as a sufferer of brain trauma as a child that left the compulsion and control areas of his mind seemingly damaged, thus leaving us with the realization that everyone knew this kid was going to end up coming to a bad end, but that there was no (and really still is no) social program in place to help him. William Seabrook introduces the world to the idea of Haitian zombies in the excerpt "Dead Men Working in Cane Fields," which is interesting because even here is the suggestion that the victims are not really dead but merely drugged. Finally, "A Small Buried Treasure" by John Fischer relates an anecdote of tomb robbery, contraband, betrayal and revenge from rural Greece - a fun read. And now the fiction...

A note about the weakest stories here - my ascribing them as such may have something to do with the fact that I'm not really a fan of Mystery and Detection short fiction, so those pieces here indicated may be perfectly fine for fans of such, they were just not to my tastes. "Tea Party" by Harold Pinter is not a mystery story, just a piece of modernist fiction that went right over my head. "The Game of Murder" by Gerd Gaiser is also sort of modernist, relating a swanky party in which the game of "murder in the dark" is played, only for a real victim to appear, to the anguish of the person marked as "murderer" and the puzzlement of the narrator (randomly chosen as "detective"). It seemed like a neat idea but I found the translation clunky and the story unsatisfying. That fastidious Belgian detective Monsieur Poirot (written with a great "voice", granted) solves the mystery of a disappearing servant in Agatha Christie's "The Adventure of The Clapham Cook" - cute, but also a good example of why I don't read a lot of this kind of thing. "How the Brigadier Lost His Ear" by Arthur Conan Doyle relates how a Naploeonic-era officer, involved in the ransacking of Venetian art treasures, has a thrilling and romantic adventure. Eh. Similarly, John Buchan has one of his jolly English fighting toffs befriend a South American president being stalked by assassins in "Sing A Song of Sixpence" - and it's all a jolly good bore. Finally, I downgraded (from a previous reading) G.K. Chesterton's "The Shadow of the Shark" which is a (not uninvolving) "locked room" type mystery in which a man is found dead at the tide line on an isolated stretch of beach, with no footprints in evidence anywhere about him. And what does a single starfish have to to do with it all? There's lots of neat stuff here (talk of shark gods, and a fish-masked stranger at the window) but also a lot of dubious (and frankly, insulting) psychological and metaphysical posturing before we get the solution....ohh, hum!

Good but a little off were: "Fool's Mate" by Stanley Ellin, a crime story where a henpecked husband fantasizes an outspoken doppelganger as a chess partner (his wife won't let him have visitors), who then goads him to murder. Cute. Valentina Zhuravleva's "Stone from the Stars" is a strange little bit of science fiction in which a hollow meteorite divulges an enigmatic space traveler - a huge, synthetic brain- which sadly begins to die rather quickly, and is incapable of communication . More of a "laying out of ideas" (in this case, about cybernetic minds and how they'd work) than an actual story, but interesting. On the opposite end of the story spectrum, Stacy Aumonier's "Old Fags" is a conté cruel about characters living in poverty (the titular hobo makes money by retrieving cigarette and cigar ends from the gutter) and a churlish young dog-walker who seduces and abandons a girl. Not bad, I upgraded it on this reread (the milieu is well-developed, and the class conflict sketched well).

Solidly good were: In "The Queen Of Spades": rumors of a magical "trick card combination" (ascribed to Saint Germaine) that will always win in gambling leads an opportunistic young man to romance a young woman, servant of an old dowager who supposedly knows the secret, so as to obtain access. But even with ghostly assurance, things do not work as planned in this Alexander Pushkin classic. Pleasant. A man impulsively murders his ex in a Manhattan vestibule (in Robert M. Coates' "The Net") and is then wracked by paranoid fear as he flees into the streets. Great little crime story, focusing almost exclusively on the killer's unsettled mental state. Similarly, in "The End Of The Party" by Graham Greene, anxiety wracked twins attend a party they did not want to attend, which worryingly includes a game of hide and seek in the dark, leading to a tragic and creepy ending. Changing things up, Lewis Padgett's "Jesting Pilot" features the population of a sealed city in the future, whose entire psychological development is overseen by specially bred Controllers, who are now attempting to deal with an individual who asks too many questions...and the Controllers are incapable of finding a way to solve problems...well done. Previously, I was not a fan of Rudyard Kipling's "They", but on the re-read I found some things to appreciate in this tale of a traveler (in a newfangled motor coach) who stumbles onto the sprawling property of a blind landholder, said grounds seemingly populated by dozens of half-glimpsed children. Not so much a good read for the story, per se, as for the details: some wonderful landscape descriptions (the forested area lies near the sea), the woman's flashes of telepathic empathy, a desperate dash by motor car to save a dying child. A very sedate, melancholy story that's not scary but interesting. "Dry September" by William Faulkner tells of the events leading up to a lynching in a small town, giving use sparse, colloquial and lyrical sketches of some of those involved (including inadvertently). Nice us of prosaic (repetitive and uninformative) dialogue. Powerful. And again, 360 degrees from that is the black comedy of "Scrawns" by Dorothy L. Sayers in which a young housemaid girl, newly arrived at the remote titular estate, finds herself in a Gothic nightmare of disfigured servants and a lunatic Master. Are they really digging a grave for her out in the garden? Suspenseful black comedy.

Four stories here were undoubtedly excellent: In Ray Bradbury's deliberately non-hysterical and gentle "The Last Night of the World", all adults everywhere have the same dream - that the world will end that night, and thoughtfully accept it. Nice, Bradbury at his most concise and human. An aging Australian boxer muses over what the sport gives and takes from you, before entering into a match in "A Piece of Steak" by Jack London, which is an incredibly well-written and moving piece, kind of a turn of the century kin to Rod Serling's "Requiem For A Heavyweight." Sad, incisive, moving. John Collier spins a version of the old "careful what you wish for" trope in "Sleeping Beauty", in which a rather Romantic Englishman becomes besotted with a radiant young woman he finds in an sideshow exhibit in an American backwater town, who is supposedly resting in an unbreakable trance. He must possess her, but this proves more difficult than he anticipated, not to mention what awaits him when, having installed her in his manor in England, he finally succeeds in using modern medicine to break her trance. A wry, cynical piece, well told. Finally, it is always a pleasure to re-read "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant, one of my top-ten favorite stories ever. If you've never read it, the plot is simplicity itself. A happy man, prone to occasional bouts of melancholia, finds these bouts increasing in frequency and now paired with lassitude, depression and general anxiety. As these feeling increase, and he seeks to dispel them through travel and camaraderie, he experiences night terrors (and a classic "nightmare/old hag" event) which cause him to begin to believe that there is an invisible, intelligent being plaguing him and sapping his energy. On the other hand, we could also just be reading a step-by-step description of a mental breakdown from an articulate man succumbing to madness as the relentless new complexities of modernity (including news media, and breakthroughs in psychology and the natural sciences) overwhelm him, eventually transforming the new world into an "other" to resist, and then become subjugated to. In the end, his distress leads to a rash action with terrible results and abject despair. I really can't give this story enough accolades - Maupassant's subtle handling of the material is astonishing its balance and the narrator's vacillation between transports of paranoid despair (in which he sees the natural world as crude and ugly) and cosmic transcendence are masterful.

And, whew!, that's the whole thing!

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Edge of the Chair is an anthology of both fact and fiction.

The fiction stories are by authors such as Alexander Pushkin (The Queen of Spades); Ambrose Bierce (A Watcher by the Dead); and others such as Graham Green, Harold Pinter, Jack London, Agatha Christie, Rudyard Kipling, and William Faulkner. John Buchan, G.K. Chesterton, Guy de Maupassant and Dorthy L. Sayers also contribute to this section. There are more but I list the ones who have not since disappeared into obscurity. (The book was published in 1967.)

The above writers do not always write of the supernatural but also mystery and suspense. Some, like Pushkin's Queen of Spades offer a combination of the supernatural and the psychological. The stories range from thrilling to entertaining but all were fun to read.

Bierce's A Watcher of the Dead also combines the psychological with the supernatural or so we are lead to think. Two men bet a third man that he won't spend the night in the room with a dead body because our primitive psyche will project supernatural conclusions, over riding what our senses tell us. The third man decries any notion that man cannot reason himself out of any situation and accepts the bet. The conclusion arrives with unforeseen consequences that inflict everyone involved.

Dry September by William Faulkner is horrible not because of its suspense but because of its all too accurate and harrowing picture of the South in Jim Crow times. A woman, for no other reason than loneliness and a desire for attention and importance, falsely accuses a black man. This offers certain citizens of the town, one thug in particular, to act out his own criminal proclivities with the contemporary culture on his side. Not even because most of the people in the town like him or agree with his intent, but because it's easier to stand by and do nothing.

For my entire review cut and paste the following link:
http://sharonhenning.blogspot.com/201...