The Lock and Key Library

July 27, 2016 1:55 PM

In 1909, Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel H.'s dashing, reckless son) released a wildly eclectic anthology called The Lock and Key Library: ten shotgun blast volumes of mystery, detection, horror, suspense, crime, decadence, and romance, comprised of stories, novel excerpts, folktales, and memoirs gathered from Russia, Denmark, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Japan, China, Tibet, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, India, Arabia, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Germany, France, England, Ireland and the United States.

The Lock and Key Library: The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations
Volume 1, "North Europe:"
-"The Queen of Spades," by Alexander Pushkin
-"The General's Will," by Vera Zhelikhovskaya
-An abridgement of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-"The Safety Match," by Anton Chekhov
-"Knights of Industry," by Vsevolod Krestovsky
-"The Amputated Arms," by Vilhelm Bergsøe
-"The Manuscript," by Otto Larssen
-"The Sealed Room," by Bernhard Severin Ingemann
-"The Rector of Veilbye," by Steen Steensen Blicher
-"The Living Death," by Ferenc Molnár
-"Thirteen at Table," by Mór Jókai
-"The Dancing Bear," by Etienne Bársony
-"The Tower Room," by Arthur Elck

Volume 2, "Mediterranean"
(Despite the title, this volume also contains legends and tales from the Middle East and Asia)
-"Shadows," by M. Palmarini
-"The Gray Spot," by Camillo Boito
-"The Stories of the Castle of Trezza," by Giovanni Verga
-"The Imp in the Mirror," by Antonio Fogazzaro
-"The Deposition," by Luigi Capuana
-"The Nail," by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón
-"The Moscow Theater Plot," by Alfredo Oriani
-"The Power of Eloquence," by Kikuchi Jun
-Tales from Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio
-"Viśākhā," "The Clever Thief," and "Mahaushadha," from the Tibetan Kah-gyur
-Tales by Ahmed ibn Hemdem Süheyli, a 16th century Ottoman writer
-Tales from One Thousand and One Nights
-Tales from Somadeva's Kathāsaritsāgara
-Tales from unnamed Persian sources
-Episodes from Herodotus' Histories
-"The Adventure of the Three Robbers," by Apuleius
-Pliny the Younger's letter to Licinius Sura

Volume 3, "German:"
-The Skeleton in the House, a novella by Friedrich Spielhagen
-"The Man in the Bottle," by Gustav Meyrink
-"Christian Lahusen's Baron" and "Well-Woven Evidence," by Dietrich Theden
-"Andrea Delfin," by Paul Heyse
-"The Singer," by Wilhelm Hauff
-"The Deserted House," by E.T.A. Hoffmann
-"The Versegy Case," by Karl Rosner
-"The Story in the Notebook," by Augusta Groner

Volume 4, "Classic French:"
-"Ines de Las Sierras," by Charles Nodier
-"An Episode of the Terror," "Madame Firmiani," "Z. Marcas," "Melmoth Reconciled," and "The Conscript," by Honoré de Balzac
-Zadig the Babylonian, a philosophical novel by Voltaire
(Hawthorne breaks his usual editorial silence to introduce Zadig as the first real detective story and praise its hero as the equal of Sherlock Holmes .)
-"D'Artagnan, Detective," an extended excerpt from Alexandre Dumas' Le Vicomte de Bragelonne

Volume 5, "Modern French:"
-"The Crime of the Boulevard," by Jules Claretie
-Seven stories by Guy de Maupassant
-"The Miracle of Zobéide," by Pierre Mille
-"The Torture of Hope," by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam
-"The Owl's Ear," "The Invisible Eye," "The Waters of Death," and "The Man-Wolf," by Erckmann-Chatrian

Volume 6, "French Novels:"
-Count Costia, by Victor Cherbuliez
-Andre Cornelis, by Paul Bourget
-"The Last of the Costellos," by George H. Jessop (actually Irish)
-"Lady Betty's Indiscretion," by Stanley J. Weyman (conspicuously English)

Volume 7, "Old Time English:"
-"The Haunted House" and "The Signal Man," by Charles Dickens
-"The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" and "The Incantation," by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
-"The Avenger," by Thomas de Quincey
-An abridgement of Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin
-"A Mystery with a Moral," by Laurence Sterne
-"On Being Found Out" and "The Notch in the Ax," by William Makepeace Thackeray
-"Bourgonef," by Charles Lee Lewes
-"The Closed Cabinet," by Gwendolen Gascoyne-Cecil
(A recording of this volume is available at Librivox)

Volume 8, "Modern English:"
-"My Own True Ghost Story," "The Sending of Dana Da," "In the House of Suddhoo," and "His Wedded Wife," by Rudyard Kipling
-"A Case of Identity," "A Scandal in Bohemia," and "The Red-Headed League," by Arthur Conan Doyle
-"The Baron's Quarry," by Egerton Castle
-"The Fowl in the Pot," by Stanley J. Weyman
-"The Pavilion on the Links," by Robert Louis Stevenson
-"The Dream Woman," by Wilkie Collins
-"The Lost Duchess," "The Pipe," and "The Puzzle," by Richard Marsh
-"The Minor Canon" (originally published as "A Flash in the Pan"), by William James Foxell
-"The Great Valdez Sapphire," by William Henry Moberly

Volume 9, "American:"
-"By the Waters of Paradise," by F. Marion Crawford
-"The Shadows on the Wall," by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
-"The Corpus Delicti," by Melville Davisson Post
-"An Heiress from Redhorse" and "The Man and the Snakes," by Ambrose Bierce
-"The Oblong Box" and "The Gold-Bug," by Edgar Allen Poe
-"Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams" and "Adventure of the Black Fisherman," by Washington Irving
-"Wieland's Madness," an abridgement of Wieland, the Transformation, by Charles Brockden Brown
-"The Golden Ingot" and "My Wife's Tempter," by Fitz-James O'Brien
-"The Minister's Black Veil," by Nathaniel Hawthorne
-"Horror: A True Tale," by John Berwick Harwood (another misfiled English writer)

Volume 10, "Real Life:"
-"A Flight into Texas," by Arthur Cheney Train
-True stories of postal robbery and mail fraud from P.H. Woodward
-"Saint-Germain the Deathless" and "The Man in the Iron Mask," by Andrew Lang
-Excerpts from The Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, by Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin
-"Fraudulent Spiritualism Unveiled" and "More Tricks of Spiritualism," exposés by magicians David Abbott and Hereward Carrington

posted by Iridic (6 comments total)

-If you don't care for Google Books, you'll find a number of stories from the middle volumes duplicated in Hawthorne's Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories, which is available at Project Gutenberg.

-Hawthorne was himself a writer of considerable ability. A good place to start would be David Poindexter's Disappearance, and Other Tales
posted by Iridic at 1:56 PM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

Wow, I'd never heard of this. Totally rad! Thanks!
posted by OmieWise at 2:27 PM on July 27, 2016

Holy crap, this is amazing. I've been working on an annotated chronology of Russian literature ever since 2009, I've made a serious effort to find and include women writers, and I've never even heard of Vera Zhelikhovskaya (second entry in the first volume)! This is a great post, and I thank you for it.
posted by languagehat at 2:38 PM on July 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

Thank you so much! I picked up Volume 5 at an estate sale and have been curious about the rest of the series.
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 2:53 PM on July 27, 2016

So it turns out that "The General's Will" is a translation of “Zaveshchanie” [The will], one of eight stories in Zhelikhovskaya's 1896 collection Fantasticheskie rasskazy [Fantastic stories], all of them online in Russian here. I went to some trouble to get that information, so by gad I'm sharing it here. And yes, I added Fantasticheskie rasskazy to my chronology, along with her very popular memoirs of her childhood.
posted by languagehat at 3:52 PM on July 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

That's super cool. The only thing I knew about Julian was from the published version of an excerpt of his dad's diary -- Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny, by Papa. In it, Nathaniel Hawthorne records what happens when his wife goes to visit relatives and takes their baby with her, leaving him alone with five-year-old Julian for twenty days.

It's a beautifully observed and written parenting memoir, basically, and showed me that parenting a five-year-old has changed little over the years. Nathaniel writes something like, "Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child's talk as I am!" and I just had to laugh out loud. Five-year-olds, man!
posted by BlahLaLa at 7:42 PM on July 27, 2016 [1 favorite]