Masterpieces of Mystery in Four Volumes: Mystic-Humorous Stories — Background and Themes

Recurring Images: The Threshold Between Worlds

Several stories hinge on liminal spaces—gardens, hammocks, doorways—where the boundary between natural and supernatural blurs. In Blackwood's tale, the climax occurs in a garden hammock, a suspended space between indoors and outdoors, waking and dreaming. The narrator describes a "monstrous leaping shadow" cast on the lawn and an acrid smell "like a certain châlet in the Alps," grounding the eerie in sensory detail. Similarly, E. F. Benson's "The Man Who Went Too Far" uses a garden after a storm, where a scream shatters silence and a "black shadow" with "hard hoofs" skips away. These thresholds are not just settings but active agents: they mark points where characters cross from safety into encounter.

Voice and Tone: The Humorist's Deflection

French's volume showcases how humor can reframe mystery. Mark Twain's contribution, "Mr. Bloke's Item," uses deadpan newspaper prose to report a ghostly visitation, undercutting the eerie with bureaucratic absurdity. The humorist, French writes, "takes nothing either in earth or heaven seriously." This tonal shift is structural: after Blackwood's atmospheric dread, Twain's piece offers comic relief. Brander Matthews's "The Rival Ghosts" similarly treats spectral rivalry with wit, while Chester Bailey Fernando's "Chan Tow The Highrob" blends detective work with cultural comedy. The anthology thus trains the reader to expect both shivers and smiles, often within the same story.

Movement Between Scenes: From Parlor to Peril

The stories frequently move characters from domestic interiors to exposed outdoor spaces, mirroring a psychological journey from safety to vulnerability. In "May-Day Eve," the narrator travels from the hospital to a friend's country house, then from the house to the garden at night. Benson's tale shifts from a bedroom to a terrace to a hammock, each step increasing exposure. This spatial progression is echoed in Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens," where the protagonist's obsession drives him from his study into a microscopic world. The editor's arrangement amplifies this pattern: interior scenes of conversation or reflection give way to exterior confrontations, creating a rhythm of retreat and advance.

The Editor's Hand: French's Curatorial Choices

French's foreword and acknowledgments reveal a deliberate curatorial strategy. He thanks Brander Matthews, Anna Katharine Green, and others for "helpful advice and suggestion," and notes that some stories appear "for the first time in any collection." The volume is part of a four-volume series, each with a different thematic focus (mystic-humorous, ghost, detective, etc.). French's selection favors authors known for both popular and literary appeal: Blackwood, Machen, Conan Doyle, Maupassant. By grouping them under a single rubric, he invites comparison across styles. The table of contents shows a careful alternation: Blackwood's long opener, then O'Brien's scientific horror, Gautier's exotic fantasy, Twain's comic piece—a sequence that keeps the reader off-balance.

Readers approaching this collection should attend to the interplay between its two promised modes. The mystic stories often build dread through sensory detail—smells, shadows, sounds—while the humorous ones deflate that same dread through irony or absurdity. French's arrangement rewards reading in order, as each story comments on the one before. For those interested in early twentieth-century genre blending, this volume offers a curated sample of how mystery writers experimented with tone, moving between the eerie and the comic without settling into either.

There’s something about French’s foreword—that notion of mysticism as the quiet middle ground—that lingered with me long after I put the anthology down. It made me think of a different book I once came across, one that treats the supernatural with the same gentle, amused hand. My Father, the Cat — Background and Themes shares that curious warmth, as if the strange were simply part of family life, nothing to fear or explain away.