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Short Stories
219 Plays2 years ago
Reading in bite sizes is a great way to test out a new genre or author. This week, Sarah and Brook share some of their favorite short stories.
Works and authors mentioned"The Three Apples" 1001 Nights
Gongan Stories
Monk
CSI
Bones
"The Lottery" (1948) Shirley Jackson
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) Shirley Jackson
"The Tell-tale Heat" (1843) Edgar Allan Poe
The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) Edgar Allan Poe
"The Monkey's Paw" (1902) WW Jacobs
"A Terribly Strange Bed" (1852) Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone (1868) Wilkie Collins
Six Against the Yard (1937) The Detection Club
FaceOff (2015) Thriller Writers of America
“The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb” (1924) Agatha Christie
Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014) Otto Penzler (ed.)
The Adventures of Philip Marlowe
The Cabinet of Curiosities (2022) Netflix
Marple: Twelve New Mysteries (2022)
For more informationInstagram: @cluedinmystery Contact us: hello@cluedinmystery.com Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com
Transcript
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Transcript
Introduction and Love for Mystery
00:00:11
Speaker
Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke. And we both love mystery. Hi Brooke. Sarah, it's so good to be talking with you again. I know I've said it before, but this is my favorite time of the week. Same here.
Historical Roots of Mystery Fiction
00:00:28
Speaker
So today we're going to be talking about short stories and Sarah has a little summary to start us off.
00:00:36
Speaker
The short story has roots in narrative tradition or storytelling, stretching back to our earliest ancestors. In our historical mystery episode, we learned that some of the earliest historical mysteries were actually short stories. And I gave the examples of the three apples from One Thousand and One Nights and Gong An stories featuring Judge Di and Judge Bao.
00:00:56
Speaker
Modern mystery fiction has no shortage of short stories to choose from. The earliest authors of crime fiction, many of whom we've spoken about on past episodes, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Catherine Greene, and Wilkie Collins, published multiple short stories, so readers have lots of options to choose from. And of course, Agatha Christie has some masterful examples.
00:01:18
Speaker
Readers can find short stories from many mystery subgenres, and these are great ways to either sample an author or a subgenre if you don't want to commit to a full-length novel. This is the same if you're watching TV. You can watch an episode of a crime show like Monk or Bones or CSI, and most of the time everything is wrapped up at the end, which I think for me at least is one of the things that I find most satisfying about short stories.
The Art and Skill of Writing Short Stories
00:01:41
Speaker
They can usually be finished in one sitting, though there isn't a standard definition or length or word count,
00:01:48
Speaker
and how you and I define a sitting might vary. As an author, I appreciate the skill required to write a short story. I haven't managed to write one yet, but I think it would be fun to give it a try. So Brooke, I thought today we could start by talking a little bit about some of our favorite short stories or short story collections.
00:02:09
Speaker
Yeah, I would love to. I read a bulk of short stories. I mean, we all do when we're probably high school students. It's definitely something that is in our curriculum then. But then I went on to do a English Lit major. And that was a way for us to survey an entire era of literature or a genre or maybe
00:02:34
Speaker
a large work of an author in a really short matter of weeks. So we read lots and lots of short stories, which I much preferred over the whole excerpt technique. That's not nearly as satisfying. So I think if I look back, some of the favorite ones that I read over the years were The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. She also wrote The Haunting of Bill House.
00:03:00
Speaker
Um, of course my, my Poe stories tell tell heart in cask of Amontillado. Um, and I loved the monkey's paw, which for a real, a lot of years, I actually accidentally attributed to Poe because it has that very Poe vibe to it, but it's actually written by WW Jacobs.
Accessibility and Impact of Short Stories
00:03:20
Speaker
Oh, yeah, those are those are great short stories. And yeah, you know, you're right. Monkey Spa definitely feels like a Poe story. Yeah. And it's much, much later, you know, he wrote that in 1902 and Poe was writing in the 1840s. So it's interesting to see that thread of
00:03:40
Speaker
Of a style, I guess, going through and this week to get ready for the show because you had already read a terribly strange bed and I had not. So I read that this week and I felt like that same very Gothic eerie tone to that story as well, which I loved.
00:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, and so that's a Wilkie Collins short story, and I really enjoyed that. And I think one of the things, one of the other things that I really like about short stories is they're very accessible, right? And again, I think that's because of their length, but I actually found a terribly strange bed easier to read than The Moonstone.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yes. Right? Like it just is for whatever reason, maybe because every word counts in a short story, it's just more accessible. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that's true for any of the older authors that we look at from the, you know, maybe 18 or early 1900s, 1800s or early 1900s.
00:04:47
Speaker
The writing style was much more verbose. And so I agree, The Moonstone, while the story was pretty intriguing, it was a very lengthy book to get through. And I found myself really liking Wilkie Collins' style and
00:05:06
Speaker
approach so much more through the short story. And I think it was maybe because we didn't have like the long, you know, pages worth of description of something, because like you say, every word counts in a short story. So I thought I would share a few examples of either short stories or short story collections if listeners were looking for a particular sub genre.
Challenging Stories from the Detection Club
00:05:33
Speaker
So I'm going to start with
00:05:35
Speaker
a collection that was published by the detection club. And so listeners will remember that this is a invitation only group of authors that was started in the 1930s. And some of the original members published an anthology of stories called Six Against the Yard. So it was originally published in 1937.
00:06:02
Speaker
and re-released in 2014 with an essay. In the 2014 version, it includes an essay by Agatha Christie. In this book, each author has tried to write a perfect murder and real-life Scotland Yard superintendent comments on each story explaining how he solved it and how it wasn't actually a perfect murder.
00:06:27
Speaker
So the authors of the stories include Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Croft, Marjorie Allingham, Ronald Knox, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Russell Thorndyke. So this is a really great sample of stories from Golden Age authors. And at the time when this was published, they would have been amongst the best of the genre.
00:06:47
Speaker
I mean, they still are. I don't know if these are the best stories that these authors wrote because I haven't read anything else by some of them, but I really like the premise. I actually listened to this and I really enjoyed it, especially the debrief from the superintendent. Yeah, that sounds fantastic. I would love to grab that one too, Sarah.
00:07:16
Speaker
Another example of an anthology published by a group of writers this time, it's from the Thriller Writers of America. And they've published several anthologies. And one that I enjoyed from them was called Face Off, which, so this one was edited by Dave Baldacci.
00:07:40
Speaker
And all of the stories are co-written, so two well-known thriller authors pair up their characters. For example, Lee Child's Jack Reacher and Joseph Finder's Nick Heller. And they put them in a situation that obviously they would never encounter in their series, but it's kind of like a crossover episode that you sometimes get in TV.
00:08:05
Speaker
and Valdati introduces each story and talks about how the authors approached writing it. And that for me was as interesting as the stories because I just like hearing how stories come to be.
Christie's Iconic Short Stories
00:08:20
Speaker
So let's talk a little bit about Agatha Christie and all of the short stories that she wrote. So she published 14 collections of stories featuring 50 stories with Poirot as the detective, 20 with Miss Marple, several with Tommy and Tuppence, and as well there were several that were standalone that didn't feature one of her famous detectives.
00:08:46
Speaker
Some of those collections are a sample of stories featuring, you know, multiple different characters, and others just feature one sleuth. So, you know, there's some collections that are just Ms. Marple's stories or just Poirot's stories.
00:09:03
Speaker
Um, and then there's, uh, the last seance, which is, you know, some of her spookier tales. And then, uh, she's got, um, I just noticed there's one that is, you know, winter themed. Mystery is one that's summer. Brooke, do you have a favorite Christie short story?
00:09:20
Speaker
Oh, that's a hard one, Sarah. Um, I think that I would pick something from the last seance. I really loved that collection. Um, you've got a little bit of psychological thriller, you've get some detection fiction, and those are such two different skill sets to write such different kinds of stories. So I really enjoyed that collection and I loved the adventure of the Egyptian tomb.
00:09:45
Speaker
That's a Poirot short story. I love ancient Egypt and it's a great story and you get all of Poirot just packed into one sitting. It's really great.
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, I have to say I actually think I prefer the Poirot short stories to the Poirot novels. And again, you know, I don't know if that's, like we said, with Wilkie Collins, because I think I get that Christie's writing is pretty accessible, whether you're reading one of her novels or one of her short stories. But there's something a little punchier, I think, with Poirot short stories than in the novels.
00:10:25
Speaker
So when I was doing a little bit of research for this episode, Brooke, I realized that G.K. Chesterton, who was one of the detection club members, his series, Father Brown, is exclusively short stories.
00:10:43
Speaker
I did not know that. Well, having them written as short stories, that explains why they were so great as television episodes. Exactly. It's almost as if he wrote them for TV, although, of course, he didn't. There's a bookshop in New York called the Mysterious Bookshop, I think.
00:11:03
Speaker
And its founder, Otto Penzer, has edited several collections of short stories in different themes. So there's one, the Black Lizard book of locked room mysteries. And I really enjoyed this because it had some surprises. There was a Sherlock Holmes story written by Stephen King. Oh, wow.
00:11:26
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I thought that was really cool. There's one around hard-boiled and noir detective fiction, so a collection of short stories around that. So I would encourage anyone to check out any one of those collections if they were looking for a particular theme.
Short Stories in Radio Dramas
00:11:47
Speaker
Additionally, if someone was looking for hard-boiled or noir, I would point them to some of the radio dramas that were produced in the 1940s and 50s. So there's The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, and I believe there's also a series featuring Sam Spade as the detective. And you can find those, I think there's lots of places to find those online if you're looking to
00:12:14
Speaker
to hear some of these stories, and those are excellent ones to listen to. And again, if you're reading a short story, it's just a much shorter commitment that you're making to see if this is something that you're really interested in reading more of.
00:12:34
Speaker
The fact that short stories are such a great entry point into mystery fiction is probably one of my favorite things about them. Recently, a friend was asking her daughters, 14, 15, I would say, and she was saying, you know, do you think that she would enjoy Agatha Christie? Because she likes to read sort of cozy mystery in this from contemporary authors. And I said,
00:12:58
Speaker
You know, get her to read a couple of the short stories because sometimes, especially for a younger reader, a whole novel of any of the Golden Age authors might be a little overwhelming. But once you have experienced a short story and you understand how an author
00:13:14
Speaker
How they write how they describe things the way that they even plant clues and wrap things up then I think you'd be more ready to grab a longer a longer piece and I also think that they're so great because you know I
00:13:30
Speaker
hit a bad reading slump during the pandemic. I think a lot of us probably did. And then even to get back into, because then it had been such a long time since I'd picked up a thick book. And so I think short stories can be a great way to get yourself out of a reading slump. You get the payoff sooner. As you said, you know, it's a one or two hour investment of your time and it kind of helps you remember why you love reading and maybe kind of dip your foot back in.
00:14:00
Speaker
As you're making all these great suggestions, I this last week realized that I've been seeing on Netflix, the cabinet of curiosities and didn't really register what they were, but they are six standalone.
00:14:15
Speaker
mystery horror stories. So I think we get really used to on some of the
Modern Takes on Mystery Fiction
00:14:20
Speaker
streaming providers that there are episodes that are continuous to tell the story. But what's great about these are these are six stand-alones. So they very much are in that short story tone and vibe. You're going to love these. So if you're looking for a television example of these,
00:14:40
Speaker
Um, I think they also, and this is something I find in short story mysteries much more. Do you often feel like sometimes there's like a moral of the story or sort of like a message built in underneath more so than with like a novel? Yeah, it's, it's interesting you say that. I mean, I, and I think that's the, maybe that's the history of short story.
00:15:04
Speaker
maybe in that observation you're seeing the history of short story, right? Because I think a lot of the early stories that were being told had that moral of the story lesson that was behind the story, right?
00:15:21
Speaker
Right, the cautionary tale. Exactly.
New Miss Marple Stories
00:15:25
Speaker
So in terms of Agatha Christie short stories, there actually was a series of 12 new Miss Marple stories that was commissioned by the Agatha Christie estate and released earlier this year featuring Ruth Ware, Ellie Griffiths, Lucy Foley. And so these authors write more suspense
00:15:51
Speaker
type books, but have written some, each of them has written a Miss Marple story. And I haven't read any of them yet, but definitely something that I'm going to be checking out soon.
00:16:05
Speaker
I have sampled just a couple and you're in for a treat, Sarah. I am so blown away by the way these authors can take on the voice of Agatha. And I can't wait for us to both read it and then discuss what we have to say about the different stories.
00:16:28
Speaker
So thanks, Brooke. I think this has been a really great conversation about short stories and some ideas for people who might be looking to read in a different genre.
Conclusion and Invitation
00:16:40
Speaker
I agree. In this time of year when you have maybe some time off work during the holidays, it's a great time to pick up a short story and enjoy.
00:16:50
Speaker
So for today, everyone, thank you so much for joining us on Clued In Mystery. I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah, and we both love mystery. Clued In Mystery is produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers at Silvermansound.com. Visit us online at CluedInMystery.com or social media at Clued In Mystery. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or telling your friends.