A city man moves to the suburbs with humorous results – gardening, automobiling, and golfing become new avocations. The book „The Adventures of a Suburbanite” includes two chapters on golf: „The Royal Game” and „Advanced Golf.” The subjects of humor in this book are mostly the two neighbors’ opposing opinions about all aspects of domestic and rural life, the gardening, and a variety of slapstick troubles with an automobile. Why is the neighbor so obsessed with his car? Wher...
First published in 1920, „Swatty: A Story of Real Boy” is another breathtaking tale from American author Ellis Parker Butler (December 5, 1869 – September 13, 1937). Butler, the author of more than 30 books and more than 2,000 stories and essays, is most famous for his short story „Pigs is Pigs” in which a bureaucratic stationmaster insists on levying the livestock rate for a shipment of two pet guinea pigs that soon start proliferating geometrically. His writing spanned mo...
Ellis Parker Butler was an American author in the first half of the 20th century. He was the author of more than 30 books and more than 2,000 stories and essays, and is most famous for his short story „Pigs is Pigs”. His writing spanned more than forty years and his stories, poems and articles were published in more than 225 magazines. More of this popular author’s fun, a bundle of absurd complications and ridiculous situations arising from a young married couple’s scheme t...
At Sydney’s scandalous Artist’s Ball... a gunshot... a falling body... Call Inspector Knox of the CIB. „The Little Grey Woman” is rather short story and moves along very quickly but there’s plenty of tension and some genuinely creepy moments. Recommended for lovers of the offbeat. The Artists’ Ball was a real, and occasionally scandalous, costume ball held in Sydney for many years. Aidan de Brune walked round Australia in two years, and so he is able to give a thoroughly Au...
How many R S Allersons can there be in Sydney? More to the point, how many gang bosses named R S Allersons? The master mystery-story teller Aidan de Brune presents another breathtaking novel „"The Unlawful Adventure"”, written in 1932. It is a highly entertaining little thriller with absorbing interest and complicated plot. The characters are broadly drawn but vivid, the plot movers along at a breakneck pace, and it’s rather luridly sensationalistic for its era. The book is...
„The Pursuits of Peter Pell” is an episodic novel in 12 parts by Aidan de Brune, set in Perth, Australia. Peter Pell is a con man. That’s essentially it. He engages in a lot of humorous adventures and situations. It’s told in sequential short story format. As the novel is rather short and quite fast-paced with a lot of scenery-changes and adventures, this nice. Aidan de Brune was a big name in Australian literature but is forgotten today. He was a prolific author who wrote ...
Meet the famous Australian author Aidan de Brune and his latest mystery „The Murders at Madlands”. Eight persons are assembled in the dining room of the palatial home of Sir Rupert Haffervale, Sydney’s business magnate. Five of them are his associates, prominent men in the life of the city. The sixth is the star reporter of a big daily. The occasion is the formal handing over of control of a huge trust to Sir Rupert’s niece and heiress on her coming of age. At noon, as the ...
Aidan de Brune has been described as the Edgar Wallace of Australia. De Brune was a Canadian-born writer who settled in Australia. His latest novel, „The Shadow Crook,” certainly justifies the claim. It is an amazing story of a master criminal who terrorized Sydney, taunted the police, and baffled the finger-print experts. „The Shadow Crook” raided the detective offices in Sydney, bound and gagged the fingerprint expert, and ransacked his records. Who was he? Why did he tak...
There is always a special thrill of excitement about a mystery story, especially when the main characters cover their tracks successfully. „The Phantom Launch” is an Australian story through and through, its main setting being Sydney and Melbourne, and the swiftness and sureness with which both the launch people and amateur sleuths act will keep the reader breathless. Wireless plays an important part in this story. We defy any reader to guess the perpetrators of the crimes ...
„The Kahm Syndicate” is another breathtaking novel by the master of mystery Aidan de Brune, a colorful and prolific Australian writer whose opus is well worth saving from oblivion. Who will control the mean streets of Darlinghurst? This and another answers you can find here. The story is fast-paced with some surprising twists, well written and great to read. This genuine mystery story takes the reader from one exciting episode to another with all the adroitness and ingenuit...
„The Green Pearl” (1930) is the second adventure in the „Dr. Night” trilogy by Aidan De Brune, (1874-1946). Aidan De Brune was a Canadian-born writer who settled in Australia. This second story is gaudy crime yarns, which steadily veers into fantasy by the end (gravity powered aircraft without engines...) and features a very unlikely Asian villain who is as different from Fu Manchu as you can imagine: a small, colorless man of uncertain central Asian origin whose principal ...
Another breathtaking novel by the master of mystery Aidan de Brune. What is the secret of the derelict mansion in the Australian countryside? „The Fortune-Telling House” is a fast-paced mystery, with good twists and turns where you can find the answer. Aidan de Brune provides a thrill of another sort! The author has acquired an admirable technique of the sort demanded by the novel of intrigue and mystery. De Brune is one of those thriller writers who were in their day wildl...
De Brune’s novel „The Flirting Fool” is a thrilling court-room melodrama previously only published as a newspaper serial. The story is fast-paced with some surprising twists, well written and great to read. Readers of Aidan de Brune’s novels may always count on a story of absorbing interest, turning on a complicated plot, worked out with dexterous craftsmanship. Nineteen novel length serials, two novella serials, and eighteen short stories, all except one published in Austr...
„The Dagger and the Cord,” „The Green Pearl,” „The Unlawful Adventure” and other thrilling tales of mystery and intrigue have made Mr. de Brune popular with Australian fiction readers. Nineteen novel length serials, two novella serials, and eighteen short stories, all except one published in Australian and New Zealand newspapers between 1926 and 1935. „The Grays Manor Mystery” enhances his reputation. It is a story packed with mystery and intrigue and Aidan de Brune keeps t...
Aidan de Brune was a big name in Australian literature but is forgotten today. He was a prolific author who wrote in a variety of genres. Lots of novels by De Brune were reputedly published in the USA under various pseudonyms, but these have not been traced. A new story by this popular author entitled „The League of Five.” The plot is laid mostly in Sydney, and centers round a mysterious band which goes under the name from which the tale takes its name. A love interest thre...
Another breathtaking novel by the master of mystery Aidan de Brune (Herbert Charles CULL). A dead man and three dead snails. What could it mean if not murder? The story is fast-paced with some surprising twists, well written and great to read. This genuine mystery story takes the reader from one exciting adventure to another with all the adroitness and ingenuity of de Brune’s previous successful books. One is left gasping with suspense as the many clues are unraveled only t...
Dated 1928. „By Airship to Ophir”, written by Fenton Ash, tells the story of an airship and two aircraft meander round central Africa picking up an assortment of natives in a search for the fabled land of Ophir, which is eventually reached and found to be inhabited by a race of people of Arab/Hebrew mien. This fantasy adventure would suit anyone interested in old fantasy novels for children and young people. Fenton Ash is the first and main pseudonym of UK civil engineer an...
Early science fiction, a cult classic, an enjoyable adventure. The story opens when our hero and his friends go to South America to look for radium, which has anti-gravity properties, and battle with a race of cruel Inca-type people who use the radium to fly, and disguise themselves as giant birds and terrorize the locals. „The Radium Seekers” is a fairly good novel written by Frank Aubrey. Francis Henry „Frank” Atkins (1847–1927) was a British writer of „pulp fiction”, in ...
The works of Fenton Ash are highly prized among bibliophile collectors of classic sci-fi and fantasy. Fenton Ash was a pseudonym of Francis Henry Atkins (1847-1927), who contributed widely to the pre-science fiction pulp magazines, writing at least three Lost-World novels along with much else. „In Polar Seas” is a romance of adventure in the frozen North, targeted mainly at juvenile readers but billed as being „for readers of all ages,” it describes the adventures of a team...
As may be imagined from the title, Mr. Fenton Ash’s book does not lack for marvelous adventure. „A Son of the Stars” novel is a complete rewrite of Fenton Ash’s earlier novel „A Trip to Mars. An exciting science fiction adventure, in which two heroes journey on a trip to Mars, where they have various adventures. In „A Son of the Stars” the heroes, who bear the names Gerald Wilton and Jack Lawford in „A Trip to Mars,” are called Bruce Mortimer and Maurice Somers. The names o...
Frank Aubrey was a pseudonym of Francis Henry Atkins (1847-1927), who contributed widely to the pre-science fiction pulp magazines, writing at least three Lost-World novels along with much else. The first and most successful of the three was „The Devil Tree of El Dorado: A Romance of British Guiana”, which capitalized on the contemporary interest in the Roraima Plateau lying athwart the disputed border between Venezuela and the British colony; Monella, the mysterious giant ...
„The Black Opal: A Romance of Thrilling Adventure” was written by Fenton Ash and was first published in 1906. It is a lost race adventure novel set in a medieval kingdom in the Sargasso Sea. Fenton Ash is the first and main pseudonym of UK civil engineer and author Francis Henry Atkins (1847-1927) who was a writer of „pulp fiction”, in particular science fiction aimed at younger readers. He was involved in a scandal at the turn of the century and sentenced to nine months im...
An exciting science fiction adventure, in which two Edwardian schoolboys Gerald Wilton and Jack Lawford journey on a trip to Mars, where they have various adventures and help to suppress a revolt. The story opens in the Southern Seas with the fall of what is at first taken for an immense meteorite, but really is a Martian airship. The heroes, in company with a few other denizens of this earth, are invited to return to Mars, and what they do and see there, make a tale well w...
Fenton Ash (pseudonym for Francis Henry Atkins) also known as Fred Ashley, Frank Aubrey (1840 – 1927), wrote a number of „scientific romances” beginning with „The Devil Tree” (1896). He was involved in a scandal at the turn of the century and sentenced to nine months imprisonment for obtaining money by deception. After leaving prison he dropped the name Frank Aubrey and – in his early 60s, following a three-year hiatus – began writing as Fenton Ash. „The Island Of Gold” (19...
