Showing results for "David Edgar" in Thriller & Suspense

A fourth floor room, a door locked with the key inside, no way in, no way out. Edgar Allan Poe is the true grandfather of the murder mystery. Decades before Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Poe gave us C. Auguste Dupin, a man able to solve mysteries through observation and deduction.

Actor David Ian Davies' telling of Poe's Gothic horror tale "The Tell-Tale Heart" captures this classic narrative of the unnamed murderer in all its exquisite vileness, its self-effacing insanity that poses rationality where none exists.

A vile affliction, the Red Death, a disease that kills rapidly with a seizure and bleeding from the pores. Torturing and scarring the land. But Prince Prospero is neither affected nor intimidated. More and more of his subjects die by the day. But still he fears not. He does however gather his friends and acquaintances, locking himself and his retinue away in a fortified abbey built with seclusion in mind. Time progresses and the Red Death is now at it's height. The Prince decides to host a masked ball to ease everyone's fears.

Mental illness though can still carry a stigma. A case of ‘you’re not trying hard enough’, ‘or knuckling down and getting on with it’. But in more recent decades mental issues have come to be recognised as an illness, a disease rather than an affliction. We all remember horror stories of lobotomy’s and electric shock being used to ‘cure’ what society viewed as anti-social behaviour but illness, mental or physical is very real. Depression, schizophrenia, breakdown, psychosis are alarming events to have or to witness.

This book was an instant best-seller and became (and remains to this day) an international sensation, much like Harry Potter today. The story of the infant son of an English Lord and Lady marooned on the coast of Africa made its author famous and wealthy. Adopted by the she-ape, Kala, Tarzan becomes a "mighty hunter, mighty fighter" - the first superhero in American literature.

Written in 1915, Beyond Thirty is a fascinating tale of the future after World War I as seen from 1915 - as the carnage and slaughter on the fields of France stunned the world, and men of good will all wondered where civilization was headed. For Edgar Rice Burroughs, "The Great War" results in a two century division between the eastern and western hemispheres. Inhabitants of Pan-America are forbidden to cross the 30th parallel. Europe and the Old World are forever cut off from America.