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The stories in A Ghostly Gallery were written over a period of sixty years, the whole length of Joan Aiken’s writing career; some appeared in her very first collections of what her father Conrad Aiken called “Twentieth century Fairy stories for the young of all ages.”


Stories include A Roomful of Leaves, where a boy escapes an unbearable family and disappears into the Elizabethan past, and the luminously uplifting Watkyn Comma about a ghost mouse who rescues a lonely heroine. These stories often inspired by dreams and myths are written to comfort and console. Some appeared in anthologies, such as a Pan Ghost Book, or in her own collections for younger readers, which came out in England and America. As she moved away from overtly scary stories towards the end of her life, these are her gentler tales of mystery and imagination.

Two of the stories have not previously appeared in an Aiken collection.
Dancing in the Air, and Lungewater

The Tavona is called to action once again!

When signals from space summon Vargo, the Professor joins the crew to conduct more research into the alien races their adventures have introduced to them. This journey takes them into the unknown reaches of the galaxy, trying to find a planet which has shifted orbit between solar systems. On their way they face snake aliens, tiny meteorites, and worlds where the air itself is deadly.

The eighth instalment in Captain W. E. Johns’ science fiction series brings more classic sci fi adventures from the legendary creator of Biggles.

In the second book of the Blue Gemini trilogy, Air Force Majors Scott Ourecky and Drew Carson continue to fly highly classified missions to intercept and destroy suspect Soviet satellites.

But after experiencing numerous close calls in orbit, the astronauts soon discover that not all perils reside in the sky. With his marriage already at risk because he cannot explain his frequent absences and strange activities to his wife, Ourecky learns that his unborn child may be in grave danger as a radiation consequence of his flights into space.
Even as the Ourecky and Carson accumulate successful mission after successful mission in space, other crucial events occur much closer to home. Interservice rivalries reach new heights as a caustic but highly influential Navy admiral schemes to steal control of the Project from the Air Force. Realizing that a Soviet GRU agent is operating in their midst, a shadowy team of counter-intelligence operatives scramble to shield the Project’s secrets from discovery, leading to a confrontation that bears fatal consequences.

As they train to accomplish more difficult missions against complicated targets, Ourecky and Carson are asked to volunteer to risk their lives one more time in an extremely hazardous rescue mission. The stakes are high; even as they leave the launch pad, there is no certainty that either man will return.

Top Gun heads to outer space in this throwback to the classic science fiction of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.

Strapped in to artificial wings spanning twenty-five feet across, your arms push a tenth of your body weight with each pump as you propel yourself at frightening speeds through the air. Inside a pressurized dome on the Moon, subject to one-sixth Earth’s gravity, there are swarms of chiseled, fearless, superbly trained flyers all around you, jostling for air space like peregrine falcons racing for the prize. This was the sport of piloting, and after Helium-3, piloting was one of the first things that entered anyone’s mind when Borealis was mentioned.

It was Helium-3 that powered humanity’s far-flung civilization expansion, feeding fusion reactors from the Alliances on Earth to the Terran Ring, Mars, the Jovian colonies, and all the way out to distant Titan. The supply, taken from the surface of the Moon, had once seemed endless. But that was long ago. Borealis, the glittering, fabulously rich city stretched out across the lunar North Pole, had amassed centuries of unimaginable wealth harvesting it, and as such was the first to realize that its supplies were running out.

The distant memories of the horrific planetwide devastation spawned by the petroleum wars were not enough to quell the rising energy and political crises. A new war to rival no other appeared imminent, but the solar system’s competing powers would discover something more powerful than Helium-3: the indomitable spirit of an Earth-born, war-weary mercenary and pilot extraordinaire.

Charlatans or Prophets? At best, the tiny Kandarian Air Fleet would fight until its last ship was blown into infinity. At worst, it would be annihilated without a chance. To young Captain Bors, either course was unthinkable.

The ruthless Dictator of Mekin had already subjugated twenty-two helpless planets. Now he wanted Kandar’s unconditional surrender, or his vastly superior forces would blast it out of existence.

It took a lot of guts, and the hope that is frequently born of despair, for a military man like Bors to throw in his lot with Talents, Incorporated, an untried, unscientific organization. Through peculiar gifts of extra-sensory perception, its personnel could, their leader insisted, out-think and out-guess even the most deadly dictator in the history of mankind. Could it? It just might.

And it just might not. . . . But there was absolutely nothing to lose, and a free world (and a beautiful girl) to win. Captain Bors made his decision, and the loaded die was cast!

There was nothing on the island big enough to kill a man, yet each new day brought with it another bloody death, another mysterious disappearance.

The first hint of something wrong at the outpost was the plane. It crazily circled the little island, its cargo-bay doors open, its radio dead. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment and then it dived downward, levelled and dipped again. It made a belly landing on the runway with its wheels still retracted.

There was a singular, dead silence and then a shot rang out.

The crew of two and the seven passengers had vanished, the cargo was strewn about and the fuel tanks had been emptied. And the pilot, after landing, had blown his brains out…

When experimental drilling on the pacific sea-bed breaks through the earth’s thin mantle, vast quantities of nitrogen, trapped for untold millions of years, are released into the atmosphere. As a result, the oxygen in the air becomes dangerously diluted. Whole areas of America are thrown into chaos as the inhabitants literally fight for breath. Two men and two girls put to sea in a yacht in a desperate effort to escape the terror, but terror, in a different and no less deadly form, pursues them relentlessly.

When MP Hugh Blakemore is shot dead in the Fulham Road, DCI Harry Brock and DS Dave Poole are assigned to the case. Months previously, Blakemore killed an inmate when visiting a prison, and although Blakemore was exonerated, Brock is convinced this is a revenge killing.

In an investigation with more ups and downs than fairground ride – and more lies than a villain’s alibi – the MP’s widow, her ex-husband and their daughter all play starring roles, along with a motley crew of actresses, American gangsters and criminals. And, along with murder, blackmail and corruption are in the air . . .

When a woman’s body is found by the Thames river police, floating opposite the Houses of Parliament in London, it doesn’t take DCI Brock long to work out that she has been murdered.

Further investigation reveals the woman was one of a stable of prostitutes run by a shadowy figure wanted in his native Australia. But the investigation presses other names upon Brock and Poole, and they must suffer several missed turns and pay the price for their assumptions before they get their man.

At four o’clock on a misty October afternoon in London, Evelyn Cross, blonde, nineteen and fashionably dressed, vanishes into thin air. Evelyn is the daughter of wealthy Raphael Cross. She has been seen going into the flat of Madame Goya, a fortune teller in Mayfair, but in response to Mr Cross’s distracted enquiries, Madame Goya swears that his daughter never entered her flat.

Then another millionaire’s daughter goes missing in the same block of flats, and Cross decides to employ the services of Alan Foam, Private Investigator.

But if Foam thinks this is a straightforward case of find the victim, he’ll need to think again …

‘A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times

An earthquake shakes Southern California and the Los Angeles Police Department. With no air-conditioning and a temperature around 98 degrees the heat is turned up when there’s a triple shooting of a highly respected Doctor, his wife and his nurse.

Can Lieutenant Luis Mendoza and his team solve the case while chaos reigns around them?

When Dave Fenner is hired to solve the Blandish kidnapping, he knows the odds on finding the girl are against him – the cops are still looking for her three months after the ransom was paid. And the kidnappers, Riley and his gang, have disappeared into thin air.

But what none of them knows is that Riley himself has been wiped out by a rival gang – and the heiress is now in the hands of Ma Grisson and her son Slim, a vicious killer who can’t stay away from women, especially his beautiful new captive. By the time Fenner begins to close in on them, some terrible things have happened to Miss Blandish …

In the second Lemmy Caution novel, the FBI man is sent by his bosses to Casablanca to investigate the disappearance of two million dollars, which have seemingly vanished into thin air. There he meets Carlotta de la Rue, the eponymous Poison Ivy, whose character is based on a true-life femme fatale nightclub singer.

Lemmy soon uncovers a gang of gold smugglers, whose boss might be Rudy Saltierra, Carlotta’s boyfriend. She, in turn, may or may not be on Lemmy’s side …

This is vintage Cheyney, with a stunning twist.

Dany Ashton is invited to spend a holiday at her stepfather’s house in Zanzibar – the mysterious ‘House of Shade’, where Captain Rory Frost buried a fortune in gold a hundred years before – but even before her plane takes off there is a stolen passport, a midnight intruder, and a murder.

And it isn’t long before the air of gaiety and nonchalance that opens the tropical house party fades into dawning terror, as Dany and the rest of the house-guests learn that one amongst them is determined to take the hidden treasure – at any cost.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

Anthony Price ingeniously combines the machinations of British Intelligence with the legend of King Arthur in an extraordinary thriller that crackles with suspense from start to finish.

A US Air Force plane mysteriously vanishes on a flight from its base in Britain, and its ace pilot with it. The CIA investigates the missing pilot, and makes some odd findings – finding that will take British Intelligence officer David Audley back to the sixth century in an absorbing battle of wits with the Soviet secret police.

By the CWA Gold Dagger award-winning author of Other Paths to Glory

An innocent enough advertisement, placed by General Maxwell, retired war hero and beloved squire of Duntisbury Royal, equally innocent hamlet nestled in the English countryside. But the results are explosive…

Although it seems obvious that the IRA’s stars are rising, there’s a more global type of conspiracy in the country air. The CIA and the KGB are suddenly sniffing around, along with British Intelligence Chief Dr David Audley – whose intuition for mischief and espionage puts him right in the midst of the action.

When Mike Rodenska, a former journalist and recent widower, visits his old friend Troy Jamison in Florida, he’s shocked at what he finds. For despite the parties, the shapely women, the devil-may-care air that surrounds Troy and his friends, Mike can see a life slowly coming apart. The only question is: why?

Putting together the pieces of his friend’s life – and downfall – turns an ordinary visit into a mystery that Mike Rodenska is compelled to solve …

In his epic adventures in the alternative Twentieth Centuries, Chrononaut Oswald Bastable, member of the League of Temporal Adventurers, has crossed and re-crossed many different time-streams. Some of his previous experiences have been told in The Land Leviathan and The Warlord of the Air.Now, in what may be the last communication from him, he tells of a world in which the Bolshevik Revolution never happened…

The Steel Tsar finds him travelling backwards in time from a shell-shocked Singapore to a Russian Empire seething with conflict and preyed on by motley bands of rogues and adventurers. Here he meets up with fellow-time-traveler Miss Una Persson, and together they change the course of a history whose legendary deeds exceed the bounds of everyday imagination and glitter in the exuberant land of the eternal present.

It is 1973, and the stately airships of the Great Powers hold benign sway over a peaceful world. The balance of power is maintained by the British Empire – a most equitable and just Empire, ruled by the beloved King Edward VIII. A new world order, with peace and prosperity for all under the law. Yet, moved by the politics of envy and perverse utopianism, not all of the Empire’s citizens support the marvelous equilibrium.

Flung from the North East Frontier of 1902 into this world of the future, Captain Oswald Bastable is forced to question his most cherished ideals, discovering to his horror that he has become a nomad of the time streams, eternally doomed to travel the wayward currents of a chaotic multiverse.

The first in the trilogy, The Warlord of the Air sees Bastable fall in with the anarchists of this imperial society and set in train a course of events more devastating than he could ever have imagined.

Josetta is a princess of one of the Five Families. But she is far from the throne, so she is free to spend her days working in the poorest sections of the city.

Rafe Adova lives the life of a career gambler in those slums. He has no real ambition – until the night he helps a girl names Corene, who looks like she’s stumbled into the wrong bar.

Josetta is fascinated by the man who has helped her sister. Rafe is unlike anyone she’s ever encountered – someone seemingly devoid of elemental blessings.

Rafe is also drawn to Josetta, but when he is assaulted by foreign mercenaries and the reason behind the attack is discovered, Rafe and Josetta realise that the truth could endanger not only their newfound love but also their very lives . . .

Following the development of massive airships, naïve Londoner Bert Smallways becomes accidentally involved in a German plot to invade America by air and reduce New York to rubble. But although bombers devastate the city, they cannot overwhelm the country, and their attack leads not to victory but to the beginning of a new and horrific age for humanity. And so dawns the era of Total War, in which brutal aerial bombardments reduce the great cultures of the twentieth century to nothing. As civilization collapses around the Englishman, now stranded in a ruined America, he clings to only one hope – that he might return to London, and marry the woman he loves.

Written in the prophetic technological vein of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Griffith’s epic masterpiece tells the story of a Great War which never was. Airship squadrons and steam fleets clash over the world’s great kingdoms, leaving panic and devastation in their wake. What is the secret of the mysterious dark “Angel,” Natasha? Can anyone stop the tyrannical ethernauts who pilot the stately war machines? Will the British Empire crumble and fall prey to the anarchists of the air?

The finest tale ever written of fabled Atlantis, The Lost Continent is a sweeping, fiery saga of the last days of the doomed land. Atlantis, at the height of its power and glory, is without equal. It has established far-flung colonies in Egypt and Central America, and its mighty navies patrol the seas. The priests of Atlantis channel the elemental powers of the universe, and a powerful monarch rules from a staggeringly beautiful city of pyramids and shining temples clustered around a sacred mountain.

Mighty Atlantis is also decaying and corrupt. Its people are growing soft and decadent, and many live in squalor. Rebellion is in the air, and prophecies of doom ring forth. Into this epic drama of the end of time stride two memorable characters: the warrior-priest Deucalion, stern, just, and loyal, and the Empress Phorenice, brilliant, ambitious, and passionate. The old and new Atlantis collide in a titanic showdown between Deucalion and Phorenice, a struggle that soon affects the destiny of an entire civilization.

Margaret St Clair is best known for her shorter science fiction and fantasy, much of the latter written under the pen name of Idris Seabright. She has a remarkably ironic sense of humor, and many of her stories have social or philosophical themes.

Contents:
Idris’ Pig (1964)
The Gardener (1949)
Child of Void (1949)
Hathor’s Pets (1950)
The Pillows (1950)
The Listening Child (1950)
Brightness Falls from the Air (1951)
The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles (1951)
The Causes (1952)
An Egg a Month from All Over (1952)
Prott (1953)
New Ritual (1953)
Brenda (1954)
Short in the Chest (1954)
Horrer Howce (1956)
The Wines of Earth (1957)
The Invested Libido (1958)
The Nuse Man (1960)
An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas (1961)
Wryneck, Draw Me (1980)