Some good reading

Standard EBooks continues to add to its library of beautifully formatted, downloadable, out-of-copyright, and thus free eBooks. This month, I noticed R. Austin Freeman's The D’Arblay Mystery, the ninth in their Doctor Thorndyke series. I've posted about the Dr. Thorndyke books several times before. Another is a book I haven't read since childhood, The Swiss Family Robinson.

Johann David Wyss was inspired by Robinson Crusoe but wanted a story his own children could learn from. Thus the novel’s various adventures are really lessons on topics as varied as farming, cooperation, animal husbandry, and frugality. The novel became a favorite of the castaway genre....

But my favorite discovery this month is the first book in which Albert Campion appears, Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley (1929).

George Abbershaw has been invited to a party at the gloomy old English mansion of a friend, along with a few people he knows, a few he doesn’t, and one he is sweet on. A suspicious death means George has to determine who can be trusted and who can’t, including a bespectacled young man named Albert Campion who seems to have shown up at the party uninvited. When things take a decided turn for the worse, George and the rest of the guests have to band together in an effort to extricate themselves from an increasingly perilous situation.

Although only a supporting player here, Albert Campion would be the protagonist of another sixteen novels and over twenty short stories, contributing to Margery Allingham being considered one of the four “Queens of Crime,” along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

Standard EBooks seems to intend to publish more of the Campion books as they become available.

Standard EBooks