My next few weeks are going to going to be quite busy, so I don't want anything terribly long for the fortnightly book. I will be doing Dorothy Sayers's Striding Folly. This is a Lord Peter Wimsey book made well after Sayers's death, a collection of short stories first published posthumously in 1972; it contains two stories that were published in 1939 and one story that had not ever been published. (It's one of those collections that's clearly meant to gather stories that otherwise were tending to fall between cracks in other collections.)The short stories are: "Striding Folly", a chess-themed mystery; "The Haunted Policeman", in which Lord Peter has to help a policeman who, because he has been dealing with strange and inexplicable happenings, is in danger of being dismissed on the accusation of being a drunk; and "Talboys", the one that had not been published in Sayers's lifetime, when Lord Peter has to deal with a mystery close to home, as the family deals with an unwanted houseguest and his six-year-old son Bredon is accused of theft. The edition also has a long introduction by Janet Hitchman.
