In April, after a protracted absence due to my various health issues, Tales for Our Time returned with a classic and highly apposite short story by Edgar Allan Poe: The Masque of the Red Death. If you've yet to catch it, you'll find it here.
That was just my way of dipping a toe into the water, and seeing whether my decrepit self was up to it. So subsequently I dipped the other nine toes in, with a full-length serialisation of The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie. I'm delighted to say that that was to prove one of our most popular audio adventures of the last seven years. From First Fortnight Founding Member Philip Paustian:
Dear Mr. Steyn:
As the month runs out my 8th year as a club member has already begun. The Secret Adversary was fantastic.
From Texas Steyn Clubber Annie Laurie:
Just finished today and loved it. I really enjoyed the story, which was enhanced with such wonderful vocalizations. Thank you for this.
From John, a Montana member:
This story was great company for me while I was doing some deck building. I will always think of Burning Daylight when remembering the house painting I was doing while listening to the story. Now I have an Agatha Christie deck on my house.
Thank you, Mark.
From Stéphane, a First Fortnight Founding Member in Taiwan:
I'm very sorry to hear your voice failing when you do the weekly Q&A. For this reading, however, your performance is at its peak. Maybe not getting worked up about the constitution and facing just one 'Mr. Brown' adversary, instead of millions of illegals and a deep State embedded in the D party, keeps you in a more relaxed mood? May you do more such lovely readings and less 'Groundhog Day' commentariat on the threat of islam, the fiscal abyss or wokism...
Let's all enjoy Western literature with a good cup of good Chinese tea!
From Charlene, a First Day Founding Member:
Thank you for another fantastic TFOT. I really enjoyed this one. And now I'm torn between binge listening through the whole story again or going back to my favorite, The Riddle of the Sands. Actually most of your TFOT are among my favorites. You are way better than my Audible membership. Ta.
From a fellow First Day Founder Marc:
Splendid love and intrigue. I will miss my nightly getaway with this gem read by MS. I will miss the quirky music, too. I hope the next selection is as satisfying. Thank you Mark.
Well, here comes that next selection - an amuse-bouche just ahead of this month's meatier serialisation, which will commence as soon as I've gotten past next week's visit to London. This is the sixty-third audio adventure in our series Tales for Our Time - and our first venture into the work of Denmark's best-known author, Hans Christian Andersen.
As I explain in my introduction, it was Salman Rushdie's recent evocation of The Shadow in the context of his own misfortunes that started me thinking about its various allegorical interpretations. If you know Hans Christian Andersen only from "The Ugly Duckling", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and the like, this is a rather different tale:
It is in the hot countries that the sun burns down in earnest, turning the people there a deep mahogany-brown. In the hottest countries of all they are seared into negroes, but it was not quite that hot in this country to which a man of learning had come from the colder north. He expected to go about there just as he had at home, but he soon discovered that this was a mistake. He and other sensible souls had to stay inside. The shutters were drawn and the doors were closed all day long. It looked just as if everyone were asleep or away from home. The narrow street of high houses where he lived was so situated that from morning till night the sun beat down on it - unbearably!
To this young and clever scholar from the colder north, it felt as if he were sitting in a blazing hot oven. It exhausted him so that he became very thin, and even his shadow shrank much smaller than it had been at home...
And so it begins... To hear me read the first part of The Shadow, Mark Steyn Club members should please click here and log-in.
I apologise for the quality of my voice in this episode. I have had a rough couple of days health-wise - hence my absence from Wednesday's Clubland Q&A. No idea why whoever was manning the store back at Steyn HQ put my no-show down to "technical difficulties", but the only such technical difficulty was inside my chest.
We have all kinds of tales in our archives, from the leisurely comedy of Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat to P G Wodehouse with a social conscience in Psmith, Journalist - oh, and some fusty notions of honour and duty in a certain other fellow's The Prisoner of Windsor. Tales for Our Time in all its variety is both highly relevant and a welcome detox from the madness of the hour: seven years' worth of my audio adaptations of classic fiction starting with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's cracking tale of an early conflict between jihadists and westerners in The Tragedy of the Korosko. To access them all, please see our easy-to-navigate Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page. We've introduced a similar tile format for my Sunday Poems and also for our Hundred Years Ago Show.
We launched The Mark Steyn Club seven years ago, and I'm overwhelmed by all those members across the globe who've signed up to be a part of it - from Fargo to Fiji, Vancouver to Vanuatu, Cook County to the Cook Islands, West Virginia to the West Midlands. As I said at the time, membership isn't for everyone, but it is a way of ensuring that all our content remains available for everyone.
That said, we are offering our Club members a few extras, including our monthly audio adventures by Dickens, Conrad, Kafka, Gogol, Jane Austen, H G Wells, Louisa May Alcott, George Orwell, Baroness Orczy, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Louis Stevenson - plus a couple of pieces of non-classic fiction by yours truly. You can find them all here. We're very pleased by the response to our Tales - and we even do them live occasionally, and sometimes with special guests.
I'm truly thrilled that one of the most popular of our Steyn Club extras these last seven years has been our nightly radio serials. If you've enjoyed them and you're looking for a present for a fellow fan of classic fiction, I hope you'll consider our special Club Gift Membership. Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The chance to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly, such as next week's;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Booking for special members-only events, such as The Mark Steyn Christmas Show, assuming I'm ever again up to such demanding events;
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, assuming likewise;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to The Shadow but to all the other yarns gathered together at the Tales for Our Time home page.
One other benefit to membership is our Comment Club privileges. So, if you think The Shadow is a bust, feel free to have at it.
And do join us tomorrow evening for the conclusion of this Hans Christian Andersen story.
