Tomorrow, Saturday, Mark Steyn on the Town, my weekend music show will air at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and, because of non-synchronised springing into summer, 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific in North America. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~Tales for Our Time is a unique feature of The Mark Steyn Club - and, we're pleased to say, one of our most popular: our nightly audio serialisations of classic literature from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, via some neglected but highly pertinent gems such as Conan Doyle's tale of proto-jihadists preying on foolish westerners, The Tragedy of the Korosko.
Our current caper is The Quest of the Sacred Slipper, Sax Rohmer's Mohammedan caper of 1914. In tonight's penultimate episode, Cavanagh surveys the scene from his friend's window:
The house, with the capital of the Midlands so near upon the one hand, the feverish activity of the Black Country reddening the night upon the other, was infested by fanatic Easterns!
The "Black Country" is to the north of Birmingham. English Midlanders will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe there is anywhere in rural Warwickshire from which one can see over Birmingham to the Black Country beyond. As for the author's substantive point, a century later it is not just his friend's property but the entirety of Birmingham and the Black Country that is "infested by fanatic Easterns".
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Twenty-Two of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
Thank you for all your perceptive comments about this caper. À propos of our musings on the nineteenth/early twentieth-century novelist's habit of referring to real towns merely as "H-", "K-", "T-" or whatever, Sue Sims, a First Month Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
I've always assumed that the initial letter followed by a dash (and the equivalent '187–' for dates) was to provide some realism without the danger that some irritating pedant would say, 'But hey, I was living in Henley/Haseley Knob/Hatton in 1874 and nothing like this ever happened!'
That's possible, Sue - although it would be fun to turn Haseley Knob into the equivalent of Midsomer Murders or Angela Lansbury's Cabot Cove, with the highest murder rate in the world. Half-a-lifetime ago, I knew a girl from Haseley Knob. As far as I recall, nothing ever happened there.
I'll be right back here tomorrow with the conclusion of The Quest of the Sacred Slipper. If you're minded to join us in The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth season, you're more than welcome. You can find more information here. And, if you have a chum you think might enjoy Tales for Our Time (so far, we've covered H G Wells, Jane Austen, Dickens, Wodehouse, Kipling, Kafka, Gogol, Baroness Orczy, Victor Hugo, Louisa May Alcott, O Henry, John Buchan, Scott Fitzgerald and more), we have a special Gift Membership that makes a perfect birthday present.
