LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales

Major Richard Dumbarton and Emily Carewe haven’t seen each other in years, not since old grudges and other marriages got in the way. A chance reunion aboard an eastward-bound steamer changes that fast, deck chairs bribed into place and all. But romance runs into arithmetic when the subject of children comes up, and the resulting scramble to make the numbers work is pure Saki mischief. A quick, witty shipboard farce about love, superstition, and creative counting.

Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, was a British writer active in the early twentieth century, celebrated for short fiction that pairs drawing-room manners with a sly, sometimes wicked wit. His stories favor sudden reversals and characters whose composure cracks under the weight of their own absurdities, whether the setting is a country house, a dinner table, or, here, the deck of an ocean liner. Saki wrote several of his pieces as brief one-act playlets, letting dialogue alone carry the comic timing. He died in 1916, but his stories remain a staple of Edwardian comic fiction for their brevity, their bite, and their refusal to take romance, or superstition, entirely seriously.

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This story is a small masterpiece of exasperation from 1905. Ellis Parker Butler wrote "Pigs Is Pigs" as a jab at corporate red tape, and somehow, more than a hundred years on, it has only gotten funnier. Two guinea pigs arrive at a railway express office. A clerk named Mike Flannery decides they are pigs, the customer insists they are pets, and a single nickel of disagreement sets off a cascade of letters, departments, and, well, arithmetic. You’ll see.

Ellis Parker Butler, 1869 to 1937, was one of America’s most prolific humorists, an Iowa-born writer who turned out thousands of stories, essays, and poems across a long career. He published more than thirty books, helped found the Authors’ League of America, and wrote for nearly every major magazine of his day. Yet it was a single short story, "Pigs Is Pigs," dashed off in 1905, that made his name. It sold in the hundreds of thousands, inspired stage and screen adaptations, and quietly seeded a whole comic tradition of small creatures multiplying beyond all reason, a lineage that runs straight through to the tribbles of Star Trek. Not bad for two guinea pigs and a stubborn clerk.

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Frank Norris could grind a man down to nothing in three hundred naturalist pages. He could also, when the rent was due, write something this loose and this funny. "Two Hearts That Beat as One" sends two soldiers of fortune, one American, one English, gunrunning down the Pacific coast, where they make the oldest mistake there is and fall for the same woman. The cure they settle on is a boxing match. It does not cure them.

Frank Norris was thirty-two when he died, in 1902, which is the kind of fact that stops you cold, because by then he’d already written McTeague and The Octopus, the big grinding novels they still hand out on syllabi. But he wrote lighter things too, and the Three Black Crows were his rowdiest invention, three guns-for-hire who turn up in four different stories getting into trouble on land, at sea, and once or twice somewhere stranger. This was their first time out. It was collected after his death, in a book called A Deal in Wheat, in 1903.

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The note comes on heavy paper from somewhere in Bohemia, unsigned, promising a visitor who will not show his face. He turns out to be very large, very rich, and in a great deal of trouble. Somewhere in a small house in St. John’s Wood there is a photograph. Five attempts to take it have failed.

Holmes has three days, a wardrobe full of other men, and Watson, newly married and glad of the excuse, back at his side for an evening of breaking the law in a good cause.

The first Sherlock Holmes short story, from The Strand Magazine, 1891. Read by Don McDonald.
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As a boy he was teased for his tenderness. He kept birds, rabbits, a dog, a small monkey. And a cat, enormous and entirely black, who followed him from room to room and would have followed him into the street. Now he sits in a cell with a pen, determined to set the record down plainly. He is not mad, he tells us. He is not dreaming. Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 tale.
WARNING: Contains graphic animal and human violence.
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