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  • Cobb’s False Knight: 1. The Castle and the Cot — An Alarm

      THE FALSE KNIGHT or ROBBER OF THE BLACK FOREST A Story of Love, Mystery, and Adventure by SYLVANUS COBB, JR. Foreword The images the word “knight” conjures up might all be similar for most of us: Shining armour, bravery, jousting, glorious, bloody battles, castles, saving distressed damsels even perhaps. But isn’t it a strange… Read more

  • Cobb’s The False Knight

    Give me them good ol’ days of guns, of snakes, an’ gapin’ jaws Of wolves an’ ragin’ catamounts, with blood upon their paws; W’en six-foot heroes courted girls that they had snatched away From out a bloody bandit’s clasp, an’ tramped him into clay. I wish we had some writers now who understand the job,… Read more

  • J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Thirty-second Instalment

    We arrive at last at the denouement. The term is borrowed from the French dénouement, Aristotle’s Poetics first having made its way into English via André Dacier’s 1692 French translation, Poëtique d’Aristote Traduite en François avec des Remarques. In Aristotle’s Art of Poetry (1705) Theodore Goulston translates dénouement as “unravelling“: Over the next few decades,… Read more

  • J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Thirty-first Instalment

    It’s giving nothing away to say, here facing the penultimate chapter, that we’re fast approaching the end. The perfect place to spend a few minutes pondering not only ends — before it is too late, for one thing — but beginnings and middles as well. One of those perforated works of Aristotle’s, his Poetics, is… Read more

  • J.F. Smith’s Mystery of the Marsh — Thirtieth instalment

    Did anyone notice, ages ago, the noble Bunce occasionally nip over to Hearst’s farm at Deerhurst to court the farmer’s pretty daughter Susan — even trying to steal a kiss one time — before coming onside and making himself useful as an occasional lookout for her and Goliah while they canoodled in Mrs Hearst’s garden?… Read more