Reading Report: November/December 2024

Read John Floyd’s “The Home Front” in “Punk Noir Press.”

Read more of “Sara Was Judith” by Julian Hawthorne.

Read Kaje Harper and E. H. Timm’s online offerings.

Started reading a bunch of Rudyard Kipling: Read “In the Rukh,” a story a lot of people don’t like. I did.

Read “The Return of Imray” (Creepy!) as well as “By Word of Mouth.” Both ghost stories, the latter a variation of the old ghost story about Ticonderoga. Also read another ghost story “The Lost Legion.” A very effective tale of soldiers and ghosts in India. Kipling swore that a lot of this story was true.

Read two of Kipling’s elephant stories: “Moti Guj—Mutineer!” and “Toomai Of the Elephants.” Read his “Red Dog” and The Miracle of Purun Bhagat.”

The above Kipling stories were collected in “Picking Up Gold and Silver,” a fine collection edited by M. M. Kaye.

Got the anthology “A Constellation of Cats,” edited by Denise Little. I love theme anthologies and this one from 2000 combines cats and “celestial influences.” Read “The Stargazer’s Familiar” by Mary Jo Putney, a charming little tale. Started reading “Three-Inch Trouble” by Andre Norton.

During the last several months I’ve been reading through the Barnes and Noble “100” anthologies of things like Vampires, “Hair-Raisers,” “Wicked Little Witch Stories” and the like. A treasure trove of very short genre stories. In “100 Sneaky Little Sleuth Stories,” they reprint five detective stories by pulp writer Leroy Yerxa about beat cop Paddy O’Sheen who comes off at first like the stereotypical Irish cop but has the detective skill of a Sherlock Holmes. Not a lot of character development except for his devoted relationship with his wife Marta. The stories actually surprised me with fairly placed clues for the reader to follow (if they’re clever enough!) including one that ties into something people would have known on the WWII homefront. Yerxa here is almost a precursor to Edward D. Hoch. I had never read Yerxa before and fortunately his stories are available in various places on the Web. He’d be better known if he hadn’t died in his 30s, after selling at least 70 stories in three years.

The O’Sheen stories collected here were:

“O’Sheen Minds the Baby,”

“O’Sheen Is Best Man,”

“O’Sheen’s Photo Finish,”

“O Sheen Sees Red,”

and “O’Sheen’s Sweet Tooth.”

There is one last O’Sheen story uncollected here; “O’Sheen Goes To the Dogs,” which is reprinted online. I found it and read it. Wonderful!

——–jeff baker, December 20, 2024