Programming note: Join me tomorrow, Saturday, for the latest edition of my weekend music show, Mark Steyn on the Town, at Serenade Radio. The delights are diverse, including seasonal music from the Continent and the Commonwealth. It airs at 5pm UK time - which is 6pm Western Europe/12 noon North American Eastern. You can listen from anywhere in the world by clicking the button at top right here.
~It's always a pleasure to hear from listeners enjoying particular aspects of our nightly Tales. Maggie, a Pennsylvania member of The Mark Steyn Club from the English Home Counties, writes of last night's episode:
The rendition of Thomson's fever dream was one for the ages. Mr. Farjeon could not have asked for better.
Too kind, Maggie. It's very hard to go wrong with a scene like that.
In tonight's episode of Mystery in White, Jefferson Farjeon's "Christmas crime story" of 1937, David ventures out of the house in pursuit of a murderer:
When David left the house by the back window through which Smith had preceded him, to begin his overdue search for the cause of the murderer's scream—both the front and the back doors were blocked, but the mounting snow had only just reached the level of the window-ledge and it was possible to clamber out on to a white slope—he found to his relief that the flakes were descending a little less thickly. This was the one crumb of consolation in the unsavoury but necessary journey.
He rolled down the slope at an uncomfortable pace, and his first job on reaching the bottom was to pick himself up and to expel the mouthfuls he had taken during the roll. Then he looked about him for a clue to his next direction...
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Fifteen of Mystery in White simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, if you've a friend who's a fan of classic literature and want to give him or her a Christmas present with a difference, we hope you'll consider a one-year gift membership in The Mark Steyn Club. The lucky recipient will enjoy full access to our back catalogue of audio adventures and video poems - Conrad and Conan Doyle, Orwell and Orczy, Kipling and Kafka, and all the rest - which should keep you going until the next variant blows in from Wuhan, or at least until the cancel crowd has had all the books banned. For more details, see here.
Through the hellish plot twists of 2024, our nightly audio adventure goes on, so do join me right back here tomorrow for Mystery in White Part Sixteen, a few hours after the latest Serenade Radio edition of Mark Steyn on the Town.