Search Results for: noise

Mycroft has turned detective…

A masterclass of classic crime – ‘A triumph of ingenuity and horrific simplicity’ Boris Karloff

‘A very clever thriller’ Raymond Chandler


In an English country village, a recluse and a beekeeper team up to catch a cunning villain.

Far from the noise of Victorian London, Sydney Silchester’s two passions are privacy and honey. But when his honey supplier is found stung to death by her hive, the search for a new beekeeper takes Sydney to Mr. Mycroft, a brilliant man who has retired to Sussex to take up precisely this occupation, and who shares many traits with the great detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Mycroft, himself no stranger to crime-solving, immediately senses the bloody hand of murder. But what villain would have the mad intelligence to train an army of killer bees? And will Mycroft risk his own life to find the killer?

BLINDING LIGHT, NOISE BEYOND SOUND – A JOURNEY INTO NOTHINGNESS…

Imperial Intelligence Agent Brion Bayard was catapulted into nothingness by an unknown force and woke to find himself in a universe not his own. Surrounded by hulking, cannibalistic ape men who called themselves Hagroon, Bayard was soon entrapped in a web of time lines. He found himself running from the Hagroon into the arms of Dzok, the educated monkey man of Xonijeel; transported by Dzok to a universe where Napoleon the Fifth was in power and left there to the tender powers of the beautiful witch Olivia; struggling with the bonds of a fictitious past, always striving to regain his lost universe of Zero-zero Stockholm so he could bring the warning which might save his world from sudden, violent death…

No. 11 India Crescent is officially a dead address. Its absentee owner, General Tygarth, and his wife are reported to be living abroad, but it is so long since they have been seen in the town that few remember them.

Only one or two people recall its tragic story of domestic tyranny, ill-starred love and early death; only Mr Spree the lawyer knows that the old General has ordered the house to be closed for a certain number of years. Now, in a fortnight’s time, the house is to be reopened.

But to Elizabeth Fetherstonehaugh, the young governess at No. 10, the night noises coming from the house next door are fast becoming an obsession …

A choice collection of seven short stories by one of America’s foremost storytellers and the author of the best-selling Travis McGee series.

Featuring ‘Dear Old Friend’, ‘The Annex’, Quarrel’, ‘Double Hannenframis’, ‘The Random Noise of Love’, The Willow Pool and ‘Woodchuck’, this collection displays MacDonald at his classic best. Starring a cast of immoral broads, hedonistic thrill-seekers, naïve victims and profligate playboys, these seven short stories showcase the writing that propelled John D MacDonald to success.

Lydia Grey, an American returning to London after many years, is woken by footsteps in the night. There is someone in her room – of that she is sure. But that is also impossible. There is only one door and it is bolted shut. The windows are eight floors up, and are locked against the winter night.

As the noise recedes she switches on her bedside lamp. No one is there. Was it a dream? An illusion of a half-awakened state? Or is someone out to get her?

When Uncle Felix dies of a suspected overdose of digitalis, his niece Alison accepts the offer of a remote mountain lodge for the summer to get away from the tragedy.

But there are strange noises in the night and sinister visitors – and she discovers that the previous tenant was driven insane. What also transpires is that Uncle Felix had devised what he claimed to be an unbreakable cypher. The Pentagon is interested in this claim, and Alison has a fragment of a clue found beside her uncle’s bed. In the mountains she wrestles with the puzzle. But solving it will put her life in grave danger …

Kainui is one of a pair of double planets circling a pair of binary stars. Mike Hoani has come there to study the languarge of the colonists. But Kainui is an ocean planet, covered in water 1700 miles deep, with no solid ground anywhere. The population is scattered in cities on floating artificial islands with no fixed locations. The atmosphere isn’t breathable, and lightning, water-spouts, and tsunamis are constant. Out on the great planetary ocean, self-sufficiency is crucial, and far from any floating city, on a small working-family ship, anything can happen. Mike’s academic research turns into an exotic nautical adventure unlike anything he could have imagined.

A collection of John Sladek’s hilarious SF satires, including:
The Last of the Whaleburgers
Great Mysteries Explained!Red Noise
Guesting
Absent Friends
After Flaubert
The Brass Monkey
White Hat
The Island of Dr Circe
Answers
Breakfast with the Murgatroyds
The Next Dwarf
An Explanation for the Disappearance of the Moon
How to Make Major Scientific Discoveries at Home in Your Spare Time
The Kindly Ones
Fables
Ursa Minor
Calling All Gumdrops!

Rodro’s men were pushing past, were blundering with reeking weapons into the room to kill and take the princess away.



Lai half stretched up from the princess’s restraining arms. The room was empty of other life apart from Sir Fezius and the two knights now lifting their swords, ready to cut down Lai.



A popping noise sounded like a drum bursting.



A man appeared in the middle of the room.



One moment he was not there; the next he stood there, holding a bulky stick in his arm, peering about with a white face. He said something that sounded like “Skeet.”



The next instant the room resounded with an avalanche roar and a hellfire blast of scorching flame.

This volume includes Vance’s first published story (“The World-Thinker”) and a selection of other stories including the novella “Telek”.
Contents: The World-Thinker, Dream Castle (“I’ll Build Your Dream Castle”), Seven Exits from Bocz, The God and the Temple Robber (“The Temple of Han”), Telek, Men of The Ten Books, D.P., Noise (“Music of the Spheres”), The Absent Minded Professor (“First Star I See Tonight”; “Murder Observed”), The Devil On Salvation Bluff, Where Hesperus Falls, The Phantom Milkman, A Practical Man’s Guide, The House Lords, The Secret

All Jack Vance titles in the SFGateway use the author’s preferred texts, as restored for the Vance Integral Edition (VIE), an extensive project masterminded by an international online community of Vance’s admirers. In general, we also use the VIE titles, and have adopted the arrangement of short story collections to eliminate overlaps.

A stardropper got its name from the belief that the user was eavesdropping on the stars. But that was only a guess . . . nobody really knew what the instrument did.

The instrument itself made no sense scientifically. A conventional earpiece, an amplifier, a power source – all attached to a small vacuum box, an alnico magnet, and a calibrated ‘tuner’. What you got from all this was some very extraordinary noises and the conviction that you were listening to beings from space and could almost understand what you were hearing.

What brought Special Agent Dan Cross into the stardropper problem was the carefully censored news that users of the instrument had begun to disappear. They popped out of existence suddenly – and the world’s leaders began to suspect that somehow the fad had lit the fuse on a bomb that would either destroy the world or change it forever.



(First published 1972)