Showing results by narrator "David Ian Davies" in All Categories

Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens, first serialised in All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861. The action of the story takes place from Christmas Eve 1812, when the protagonist is about seven years old, to the winter of 1840. Great Expectations is written in a semi-autobiographical style, and is the story of the orphan Pip, tracing his life from his early days of childhood until adulthood.

When you find yourself in need of a few laughs, you can't go wrong with P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. "The Metropolitan Touch" delivers plenty of smiles, if not outright laughs. Bertie Wooster, our narrator, becomes entangled once again with the love life of his chum Bingo Little. Bingo has left the London high life for village England where he's found the girl of his dreams again. The trouble is that she has more and more suitors every week and has expressed little interest in Bingo.

A woman's life is thrown into disarray, the object of sudden publicity, when she receives a tobacco box filled with coarse salt and . . . two unmatched human ears. Why has she, of all people, become the recipient of so ghastly a package?

When a mysterious female visitor leaves her hat with a message at the door of Mrs. Hudson, Holmes and Watson find themselves always one or more steps behind a thief who leaves intriguing messages and challenges the great detective, again and again, to apprehend her. Though the clues are there, they leave Holmes completely baffled.

In "The Pit And The Pendulum" author Edgar Allan Poe weaves the story of a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition, tried and condemned to death and locked in a horrific torture chamber to meet his doom at the hands of his sadistic keepers.

The story centers on Tevye, the father of five daughters, and his attempts to maintain his Jewish religious and cultural traditions, as outside influences encroach upon the family's lives. He must cope both with the strong-willed actions of his three older daughters, who wish to marry for love - each one's choice of a husband moves further away from the customs of his faith - and with the edict of the Tsar that evicts the Jews from their village.

A letter from an old friend, Molesworth, sends Watson to Baker Street. Travelling to Winchester, he and Holmes find Molesworth bedridden. He believes he is being poisoned in revenge for the actions of his father in Peking during the invasion of the Forbidden City.

Holmes visits a Chinese poisoner and uses fingerprints to prove his case, but the outcome is not what he would have wished.

The novel tells the story of impoverished, embarrassment-prone Archibald "Archie" Moffam and his difficult relationship with his art-collecting, hotel-owning, millionaire father-in-law, Daniel Brewster, who is the father of Archie's new bride, Lucille. Archie's attempts to ingratiate himself with Brewster only get him further into trouble.

While assisting Holmes in an embezzlement case in Falmouth, Watson is called to aid Mrs. Ranstead, the survivor of a shipwreck. She and crewman Cluney were the only survivors from a ship that was transporting an ancient meteorite from St. John's to Falmouth.

This wonderful story takes us to a town called Kasrilevke, which is inhabited by poor but cheerful "little people" whose goal in life is simply to provide for the Sabbath.

Although written from a child's perspective, this is not a kids' book but a series of funny, poignant, and sometimes disturbing stories about life in a late nineteenth-century Russian-Jewish village.

The narrator in this story vows revenge upon a man named Fortunato. He takes advantage of Fortunato's ego and lures him down into the recesses of an underground vault to taste a rare wine, a cask of Amontillado.

An ancient Egyptian mummy comes to life, but not to chase anyone around a tomb. This is a science fiction story, not a tale of horror. If you look carefully, you'll find a little sarcastic humor here and there. The mummy has a story of his own to tell, and it's quite an interesting one, to say the least. Another example of Poe's fantastic imagination.

This lovely narrative tells the story of the soul of a quiet man who never hurt another human being, never complained even when he was hurt or humiliated by others, as it enters the Heavenly Court of Judgment.

A story about Lord Emsworth, keen that his fat pig, the Empress of Blandings, should win the 87th annual Shropshire Agricultural Show contest. Yet how he regains the appetite of his sow is truly worth listening to.

Reggie wakes up and hears a male voice shouting outside. It is that of this valet. When summoned, he mentions that he had been breaking up with his girlfriend. George is a friend of Reggie Pepper. George is sleeping in a deck and the others are discussing how an important prince was beaten up in the night by a unknown assailant, and how the police have an important clue. A guy comes to meet George and Reggie goes to his deck to wake George up. He finds that George is missing.

Dear old Freddie, don't you know, has been a dear old pal of mine for years and years; so when I went into the club one morning and found him sitting alone in a dark corner, staring glassily at nothing, and generally looking like the last rose of summer, you can understand I was quite disturbed about it. As a rule, the old rotter is the life and soul of our set. Quite the little lump of fun, and all that sort of thing.

A box full of shorn blond hair leads Holmes and Watson to the solving of a most complicated kidnapping.

The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is one of eight stories in the cycle collected as His Last Bow, and is the second and final appearance of Mycroft Holmes. Doyle ranked The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans 14th in a list of his 19 favorite Sherlock Holmes stories.

"A Descent Into The Maelstrom" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe that first appeared in the May 1841 edition of Graham's Magazine. In the tale, a man recounts how he survived a shipwreck and a whirlpool. It has been grouped with Poe's tales of ratiocination and also labeled an early form of science fiction.