Arthur Conan Doyle's “Other” Short Stories: The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard

One lesson which I have learned in my roaming life, my friends, is never to call anything a misfortune until you have seen the end of it.  Is not every hour a fresh point of view? (pg 76)

I did not care much for The White Company or Sir Nigel, so as far as I was concerned, Arthur Conan Doyle was wrong when it came to estimating his historical fiction works as better than his adventures with Sherlock Holmes. Then I read The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard. While there is no doubt that history has proved Holmes to be the masterpiece—however begrudging—of Sir Arthur, I must admit I enjoyed these much lesser-known short stories immensely.

These stories, which follow the French brigadier through his missions and misadventures on behalf of France and Emperor Napoleon, are the sort of thing one expects from Victorian action-adventure penny dreadfuls. Swashbuckling, honor, secret missions, patriotism, are all part of the fun.  The heroes are brave and undaunted, the villains are dastardly cowards, and the safety of the nation and the values they uphold hang in the balance.

Looking Back at "Back to the Classics"

2015 was the year where I consistently forgot that I had signed up for a reading challenge, only to remember in December and quickly fill in the qualifying books from the previous months. It also was the year I exceeded my 100 Book annual goal (by a mere seven, of course, but I'll take what I can get), so it was not a total loss. In any case, I completed the Back to the Classics challenge hosted by karensbooksandchocolate.blogspot.com, and here are the results:

1.  A 19th Century Classic -- any book published between 1800 and 1899.

A Tramp Abroad

by Mark Twain

2.  A 20th Century Classic -- any book published between 1900 and 1965.

The Mystery of the Blue Train 

by Agatha Christie

It’s only taken reading the majority of her work, but I’m finally getting the hang of solving Agatha Christie’s mysteries.  I successfully deduced whodunit for The Mystery of the Blue Train and have felt immensely proud of myself ever since.  I wouldn’t say this was either Christie’s best-plotted puzzle or her easiest. Instead it strikes a pleasant chord between the two, and seemed to me an amalgam of Christie’s usual fare of Murder Mystery Set In The Heart Of England and her less famous espionage novels. I would recommend this to be “read” as an audio book, as there may (or may not) be a clue that’s more obvious when read in text.  It all depends on how hard the reader wants to make the detecting.

"Darkwing" by Kenneth Oppel

It’s the end of an era: the saurians who had been the dominant predator on Earth are dying out due to a mysterious sickness and through the machinations of all the other beasts, who have made a pact to exterminate this common threat by destroying any saurian eggs they find. About twenty years before Darkwing begins, however, a small group of chiropters who reject the pact and go to live on a secluded island as conscientious objectors. 

As our story begins, the young chiropter Dusk is about to make his first leap into the air. He’s a weak newborn, strangely built, and instinctively he wants to flap his sails like wings. As he grows up with his father Icaron, the leader of the island colony, his impulsive sister Sylph, and the rest of his family, Dusk is subjected to a great deal of pressure to conform or risk being shunned by his community. But Dusk is not like the others. Whereas in the story, the chiropters are a sort of pre-bat species (I immediately imagined them looking like sugar-gliders, though later in the book there are illustrations which contradict my mental image), Dusk is a true bat, with the ability to “see” in the dark and, much to the fear and confusion of the rest of his people, to fly.