The Recurring Doom: Tales of Mystery and Horror

Although best known as a biographer, critic, and editor, S. T. Joshi has devoted a portion of his career to the writing of mystery and horror fiction. As a teenager he became an enthusiast of the mystery story, especially the work of puzzlemeister John Dickson Carr, and wrote many detective tales as well as tales of supernatural menace. One early tale in this book, "The Recurring Doom," was written at the age of 17. In the first decade of this century Joshi write two hard-boiled crime novels, The Removal Company (a radical reworking of a story by W. C. Morrow) and Conspiracy of Silence, featuring his private investigator, Joe Scintilla, living in Depression-era New York. "Tragedy at Sarsfield Manor" is a novella featuring Scintilla. Joshi has gone on to write numerous tales inspired by H. P. Lovecraft ("Incident at Ferney," "Some Kind of Mistake"), along with other works that fuse mystery and weirdness. This omnibus sheds new light on the diverse and wide-ranging output of S. T. Joshi.