![]() ![]() The forces of snobbery and greed that move his characters, however, are timeless. Benson's collected ghost stories - of the 50 I must admit that more than a few are now just period pieces - the chills maybe too sedate and stately for current tastes and, en masse, Benson's conventions - the bachelor protagonist at some out of the way resort a tad predicatable - but the finest dozen or so are excellent 'The Bus Conductor' with it's eerie cry of 'room for one more', the rural. Veering sometimes into farce, the tales are generally amusing, though the particular foibles Benson skewers with his sharp pen are somewhat dated. A social-climbing hostess in ``Entomology '' determines to snare for her salon a psychologist she feels will be the next rage, while the protagonist of ``Music'' engineers the success of a terrible musician and thereby ensures her own social triumph. Miss Mapp appears in the title story, in which she is outwitted when she tries to get the better of a friend in a house-letting scheme. In ``A Breath of Scandal,'' a gentleman-scholar's relationship with his cook-housekeeper is ever so delicately questioned by his neighbors. ![]() The 26 stories here, published between 18 and most previously uncollected, are grouped by topic-Society Stories, Cruel Stories, Crank Stories, Spook Stories-the latter his term for his rather mild ghost tales. ![]() ![]() Benson, who died in 1940, is now chiefly known for the comic Mapp and Lucia novels which were successfully adapted for PBS, but he was also a prolific short story writer whose work satirized British society through a cast of droll and generally dotty characters. ![]()
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