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Mary Roberts Rinehart -- novelist, playwright, mother of the man whose name still graces a powerful publishing company -- was also a war correspondent during World War I. This volume, Kings, Queens and Pawns, first published in 1915, collects many of her reports.

I wanted to call these exercises "Casual Ablutions," in memory of the immortal sign in the washroom of the British Museum, but my arbiter of elegance forbade it. You remember that George Gissing, homeless and penniless on London streets, used to enjoy the lavatory of the Museum Reading Room as a fountain and a shrine. But the flinty hearted trustees, finding him using the wash-stand for bath-tub and laundry, were exceeding wroth, and set up the notice:these basins are forcasual ablutions onlyI would like to issue the same warning to the implacable reader: these fugitive pieces, very casual rinsings in the great basin of letters, must not be too bitterly resented, even by their publishers. To borrow O. Henry's joke, they are more demitasso than Tasso. -- Christopher Morley

Gladys Fleming had her doubts. Enough at any rate to engage Colonel Jefferson Davis Rand--better known just as Jeff--private detective and a pistol-collector himself, to catalogue, appraise, and negotiate the sale of her late husband's collection.There were a number of people who had wanted the collection. The question was: had anyone wanted it badly enough to kill Fleming? And if so, how had he done it? Here is a mystery, told against the fascinating background of old guns and gun-collecting, which is rapid-fire without being hysterical, exciting without losing its contact with reason, and which introduces a personable and intelligent new private detective. It is a story that will keep your nerves on a hair trigger even if you don't know the difference between a cased pair of Paterson .34's and a Texas .40 with a ramming-lever."Well, have you thought that it might just be suicide?" Kathie asked. "I have, briefly; I dismissed the thought, almost at once," Rand told her. "One, that if it had been suicide, Mrs. Fleming wouldn't want it poked into and two, I doubt if a man who prided himself on his gun-knowledge would want his self-shooting to be taken for an accident."

There be islands in the Central Sea, whose waters are bounded by no shore and where no ships come -- this is the faith of their people. In the mists before the Beginning, Fate and Chance cast lots to decide whose the Game should be; and he that won strode through the mists to MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI and said: "Now make gods for Me, for I have won the cast and the Game is to be Mine." Who it was that won the cast and whether it was Fate or whether Chance that went through the mists before the Beginning to MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI -- none knoweth.More than eighty books of Lord Dunsany's work were published and his oeuvre includes many hundreds of published short stories, as well as successful plays, novels and essays.

Included in this volume:"A Tale of London""Thirteen at Table""The City on Mallington Moor""Why the Milkman Shudders When He Perceives the Dawn" (also published in a chapbook)"The Bad Old Woman in Black""The Bird of the Difficult Eye""The Long Porter's Tale""The Loot of Loma""The Secret of the Sea""How Ali Came to the Black Country""The Bureau d'Echange de Maux""A Story of Land and Sea""A Tale of the Equator""A Narrow Escape""The Watch-Tower""How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None's Desire""The Three Sailors' Gambit""The Exiles' Club""The Three Infernal Jokes"

Included in this 1908 compilation are a number of Dunsany's classic tales: "The Sword of Welleran," "The Fall of Babbulkund," "The Kith of the Elf Folk," "The Highwayman," "In the Twilight," "The Ghosts," "The Whirlpool," "The Hurricane," "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth," "The Lord of Cities," "The Doom of La Traviata," and "On the Dry Land."

Desperate to discover a cure for the cyclical 48-year-fever, known as Trailmen's fever, Dr. Randall Forth persuades a colleague, Dr. Jay Allison, to undergo hypnosis. He calls forth a secondary personality, Jason Allison, is gregarious and an experienced mountain climber, while Dr. Jay Allison is a cold, clinical man with no outdoor skills. Jason is asked to lead an expedition into the Hellers to collect medical volunteers from among the Trailmen. Accompanying him are Rafe Scott, Regis Hastur, Kyla Raineach, a Renunciate guide, and several others. During the trip, Jay/Jason yo-yos between his two personalities - one warm and charming, the other distant and clinical. Jason, the warm personality, falls in love with Kyla..... By the time I got myself all the way awake I thought I was alone. I was lying on a leather couch in a bare white room with huge windows, alternate glass-brick and clear glass. Beyond the clear windows was a view of snow-peaked mountains which turned to pale shadows in the glass-brick. Habit and memory fitted names to all these; the bare office, the orange flare of the great sun, the names of the dimming mountains. But beyond a polished glass desk, a man sat watching me. And I had never seen the man before. He was chubby, and not young, and had ginger-colored eyebrows and a fringe of ginger-colored hair around the edges of a forehead which was otherwise quite pink and bald. He was wearing a white uniform coat, and the intertwined caduceus on the pocket and on the sleeve proclaimed him a member of the Medical Service attached to the Civilian HQ of the Terran Trade City. I didn't stop to make all these evaluations consciously, of course. They were just part of my world when I woke up and found it taking shape around me. The familiar mountains, the familiar sun, the strange man. But he spoke to me in a friendly way, as if it were an ordinary thing to find a perfect stranger sprawled out taking a siesta in here. "Could I trouble you to tell me your name?"

Nobody really wrote most of the stories. People told them in all parts of the world long before Egyptian hieroglyphics or Cretan signs or Cyprian syllabaries, or alphabets were invented. They are older than reading and writing, and arose like wild flowers before men had any education to quarrel over. The grannies told them to the grandchildren, and when the grandchildren became grannies they repeated the same old tales to the new generation. Homer knew the stories and made up the 'Odyssey' out of half a dozen of them. All the history of Greece till about 800 B.C. is a string of the fairy tales, all about Theseus and Heracles and Oedipus and Minos and Perseus is a Cabinet des Fées, a collection of fairy tales. Shakespeare took them and put bits of them into 'King Lear' and other plays; he could not have made them up himself, great as he was. Let ladies and gentlemen think of this when they sit down to write fairy tales, and have them nicely typed, and send them to Messrs. Longman & Co. to be published. They think that to write a new fairy tale is easy work. They are mistaken: the thing is impossible. Nobody can write a new fairy tale; you can only mix up and dress up the old, old stories, and put the characters into new dresses, as Miss Thackeray did so well in 'Five Old Friends.' If any big girl of fourteen reads this preface, let her insist on being presented with "Five Old Friends."