The E.F. Benson MEGAPACK ®. E.F. Benson

      COPYRIGHT INFO

      The E.F. Benson Megapack is copyright © 2013 by Wildside Press LLC. All rights reserved.

      A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

      Over the last year, our “Megapack” series of ebook anthologies has proved to be one of our most popular endeavors. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

      The Megapacks (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt, Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!).

      A NOTE FOR KINDLE READERS

      The Kindle versions of our Megapacks employ active tables of contents for easy navigation…please look for one before writing reviews on Amazon that complain about the lack! (They are sometimes at the ends of ebooks, depending on your reader.)

      RECOMMEND A FAVORITE STORY?

      Do you know a great classic science fiction story, or have a favorite author whom you believe is perfect for the Megapack series? We’d love your suggestions! You can post them on our message board at http://movies.ning.com/forum (there is an area for Wildside Press comments).

      Note: we only consider stories that have already been professionally published. This is not a market for new works.

      TYPOS

      Unfortunately, as hard as we try, a few typos do slip through. We update our ebooks periodically, so make sure you have the current version (or download a fresh copy if it’s been sitting in your ebook reader for months.) It may have already been updated.

      If you spot a new typo, please let us know. We’ll fix it for everyone. You can email the publisher at [email protected].

      —John Betancourt

      Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidepress.com

      THE MEGAPACK SERIES

      The Adventure Megapack

      The Christmas Megapack

      The Second Christmas Megapack

      The Cowboy Megapack

      The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective Megapack

      The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack

      The Ghost Story Megapack

      The Horror Megapack

      The Macabre Megapack

      The Martian Megapack

      The Military Megapack

      The Mummy Megapack

      The Mystery Megapack

      The Science Fiction Megapack

      The Second Science Fiction Megapack

      The Third Science Fiction Megapack

      The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

      The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

      The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

      The Penny Parker Megapack

      The Pinocchio Megapack

      The Pulp Fiction Megapack

      The Rover Boys Megapack

      The Steampunk Megapack

      The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Megapack

      The Tom Swift Megapack

      The Vampire Megapack

      The Victorian Mystery Megapack

      The Werewolf Megapack

      The Western Megapack

      The Wizard of Oz Megapack

      AUTHOR MEGAPACKS

      The E.F. Benson Megapack

      The B.M. Bower Megapack

      The Wilkie Collins Megapack

      The Randall Garrett Megapack

      The Murray Leinster Megapack

      The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

      The Andre Norton Megapack

      The Rafael Sabatini Megapack

      INTRODUCTION: E.F. BENSON

      Edward Frederic Benson (24 July 1867 – 29 February 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist and short story writer, known professionally as E.F. Benson. His friends called him Fred.

      E.F. Benson was born at Wellington College in Berkshire, the fifth child of the headmaster, Edward White Benson (later Chancellor of Lincoln Cathedral, Bishop of Truro and Archbishop of Canterbury), and Mary Sidgwick Benson (“Minnie”).

      Benson was educated at Marlborough College where he wrote some of his earliest works, and upon which he based his novel David Blaize. He was the younger brother of Arthur Christopher Benson, who wrote the words to “Land of Hope and Glory,” Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, author of several novels and Roman Catholic apologetic works, and Margaret Benson (Maggie), an amateur Egyptologist. Two other siblings died young. Benson’s parents had six children and no grandchildren. E. F. Benson never married, and is likely to have been homosexual. Certainly this reveals itself through the camp humour of his novels, the implicit homoeroticism of his university works such as David Blaize (1916), his love of the company of handsome men, and his close friendships with known homosexuals such as John Ellingham Brooks with whom he shared a villa in Capri. Prior to the First World War the island was extremely popular with wealthy gay men.

      E. F. Benson was an excellent athlete, and represented England at figure skating. He was a precocious and prolific writer, publishing his first book while still a student. Nowadays he is principally known for his Mapp and Lucia series about Emmeline “Lucia” Lucas and Elizabeth Mapp.

      Benson’s first book was Sketches from Marlborough. He started his novel writing career with the (then) fashionably controversial Dodo (1893), and he followed it with a variety of satire and romantic melodrama. He repeated the success of Dodo, which featured a portrait of composer and militant suffragette Ethel Smyth (which she “gleefully acknowledged,” according to actress Prunella Scales), with the same cast of characters a generation later: Dodo the Second (1914), “a unique chronicle of the pre-1914 Bright Young Things” and Dodo Wonders (1921), “a first-hand social history of the Great War in Mayfair and the Shires.”The Mapp and Lucia series, written relatively late in his career, consists of six novels and two short stories. The novels are: Queen Lucia, Lucia in London, Miss Mapp, Mapp and Lucia, Lucia’s Progress (published as The Worshipful Lucia in the U.S.) and Trouble for Lucia. The short stories are “The Male Impersonator” and “Desirable Residences.” Both appear in anthologies of Benson’s short stories, and the former is also often appended to the end of the novel Miss Mapp.

      The last three novels were serialized by London Weekend Television for the fledgling Channel 4 in 1985–6 under the series title Mapp and Lucia and starring Prunella Scales, Geraldine McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne; the first four have been adapted for BBC Radio 4 by both Aubrey Woods and (most recently) Ned Sherrin; the fifth, Lucia’s Progress, was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2008 by John Peacock. During 2007, the television series was rerun on the British digital channel ITV3.

      Benson was also known as a writer of (atmospheric, oblique, at times humorous or satirical) ghost stories, which frequently appear in collections. His 1906 short story, “The Bus-Conductor,” a fatal-crash premonition tale about a person haunted by a hearse driver, has been adapted several times, notably in 1944 (in the film Dead of Night and as an anecdote in Bennett Cerf’s Ghost Stories anthology published the same year) and in a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone. The catchphrase from the story, “Room for one more,” which even spawned