"Famous mystery stories" by J. Walker McSpadden is a collection of short stories written in the early 20th century. The anthology gathers notable mysteries—supernatural, psychological, and detective—from American and European writers, framed by the editor’s brief critical introduction to national styles and tones. Readers can expect everything from playful hauntings and ironic legends to sea-bound terrors, scientific fantasias, and classic cases built on circumstantial evidence.The opening of the collection presents an introduction in which the editor contrasts French, German, and Anglo-American approaches to mystery, previewing tales by Erckmann-Chatrian, Hoffmann, Irving, Crawford, O’Brien, Maupassant, Gautier, and Anna Katharine Green. It then launches into Richard Harris Barham’s comic ghost piece “The Spectre of Tappington,” where a young officer at an old Kentish manor keeps losing his breeches to a supposed spectre until his friend discovers he’s been sleepwalking them into a shrubbery, after which harmony—and a wedding—ensues. Next, Erckmann-Chatrian’s “The Mysterious Sketch” follows a destitute artist in Nuremberg whose night drawing uncannily depicts an unseen murder; accused of the crime, he later sketches the real killer from a glimpse in the market, prompting the butcher’s confession and his own release. The beginning of Hoffmann’s “The Deserted House” shifts to a narrator obsessed with a dilapidated home on a glittering avenue: a jeweled hand appears at a curtai…
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