This time it’s a real smorgasbord, I’m reading from these three anthologies and collections: (*asterisk indicates one I especially liked)
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- October 2000 ebook
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- Vintage Books 1966 pb
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- The Thinking Machine: 50 Novelettes & Short Stories by Jacques Futrelle
from The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes edited by Mike Ashley:
“Waiting For Godstow” by Martin Edwards *
“The Odour of Sanctity” by Kate Ellis
“A Traveler’s Tale” by Margaret Frazer *
“The Silver Curtain” by John Dickson Carr
“The Stolen Saint Simon” by Michael Kurland
“The Problem of the Crowded Cemetery” by Edward D. Hoch (Sam Hawthorne)
“Death Rides the Elevator” by Lois Gresh & Robert Weinberg
The Burglar Who Smelled Smoke” by Lynne Wood & Lawrence Block
from The Vintage Anthology of Science Fantasy edited by Christopher Cerf, Vintage 1966 mass market paperback
“The Great Automatic Grammatistator” by Ronald Dahl *
“An Egg A Month from All Over” by Idris Seabright
“There will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury.
from The Thinking Machine: Fifty Novelettes and Short Stories by Jacques Futrelle, 2018 trade paper
“Mystery of the Ralston Bank Burglary”
“Mystery of the Scarlet Thread” *
“Problem of Convict NO 97”
That’s it for this time!
Tip the Wink 
That is a mixed bag of short stories. I am glad you are enjoying them.
I don’t know much at all about Jacques Futrelle. I looked him up and his life was very interesting.
I’ve a similar mix, now to write something coherent about them.
Test!
(My comments weren’t posting too quickly. As opposed to being typed too quickly.)
Futrelle I would mostly read in “Hitchcock” anthologies…I’ve definitely read two of the three Cerf selections.
I’d read a few Thinking Machine stories in anthologies, liked them, so bought this doorstop. “Scarlet Thread” is one of the novelette length ones.
The Cerf anthology is a good one, Rick. I’m a big fan of the stories that Margaret St. Clair wrote under her “Idrris Deabright” pseudonymn. There’s a lot of great reading ahead of you in that book — wonderful stories by Wyndham, Kornblulth, Sheckley, Knight, Simak, Ballard, Davidspn, Clarke. Bester, Miller, and more, including a great piece of flash fiction by Fredric Brown.
I also see that Ashley’s MAMMOTH book contains one of my favorite Uncle Abner stories by Melville Davisson Post, “The Doomdorf Mystery.” I’ve probably read about twenty Thinking Machine stories by Futrelle and have found them a mixed bag, with more interesting tales than not among them.
All in all, I think you have some darned good reading ahead with these volumes.
Yep, a do plugging away, about four a day around chores, gardening and other stuff. Some of the Thinking Machine stories are novelettes, thus longer. Plus there was one of them in the Ripley anthology. I’m finding I’ve ready several of them before, but I’m rereading them anyway.
“Idris Seabright”
Curse my fumble fingers!
Knew what you meant.
You have a nice mix of stories to read. I’ve read The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes and The Vintage Anthology of Science Fantasy. Like you, I bought the massive The Thinking Machine: Fifty Novelettes and Short Stories but have yet to tackle it.
I’ve been reading it a little at a time for a while now. I’m enjoying most of them, especially when mixed with other anthologies and collections.
Good choices today, and not only because I’ve read all the Futrelles and the Lock Room anthology.
Currently reading the new MWA anthology, WHEN A STANGER COMES TO TOWN (which is the theme), edited by Michael Koryta. So far I’ve read three good ones:
S.A. Cosby, Solomon Wept (short and violent)
Alafair Burke, Seat 2C (the first pandemic story I remember reading)
Michael Connelly, Avalon (main character is a cop on Catalina Island, who spots a “tourist” getting off the ferry from the mainland with a gun in his waistband)
Also reading a couple of straight fiction collections, FEMALE TROUBLE by Antonya Nelson and LOVE AND HYDROGEN by Jim Shepard. The latter is quite a mixed bag with stories about “ordinary” people alternating with things about The Creature From the Black Lagoon and Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. There is one about a soccer player playing on Ajax with the great Dutch Forward Johan Cruyff (Ajax ia All About Attack!) and one about a guy who goes out after dinner for a walk and ends up lying down on the local airport runway as small planes are landing (Runway).
It’s all about variety, isn’t it? In most anthologies, I find I like a little better than two-thirds to three-quarters of the stories, even if they’re all pretty good there always seems to be one or two which are less so.
Roald Dahl is great. I enjoy his kids stories, but his adult short stories are particularly good.
I have a Very Thick collection of his stories, but it’s so big I’m a little afraid of that much Dahl.