A young Englishman seeking hedonistic adventure in Paris finds himself on a winning streak in a disreputable gambling house. But is his good luck quite all it seems?
A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.
If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, you may like to consider supporting me on Patreon:
/ bitesizedaudio
Or for occasional one-off contributions, you can Buy Me a Coffee here: www.buymeacoffee.com/bitesize...
William Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English novelist and playwright, best remembered for his Victorian gothic suspense novels and short stories, which can now be seen as the precursors to the modern genres of crime fiction and thrillers. The son of a painter (William Collins), he was born in London but grew up in France and Italy, becoming fluent in both languages. He worked as clerk to a tea merchant before turning to writing in the late 1840s. He achieved international popularity in the 1860s, but suffered from ill-health in later life: he became addicted to the laudanum he took to manage the pain of gout. His best known novels are 'The Woman in White' (1860), 'No Name' (1862), 'Armadale' (1866) and 'The Moonstone' (1868), famously described by T. S. Eliot as "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe".
'A Terribly Strange Bed' dates from the very early period of Collins' writing career. It was originally published in 1852, the first of many contributions he made to 'Household Words', the magazine established and edited by Charles Dickens, who subsequently became a friend and mentor to Collins. The text was subsequently revised by Collins (quite significantly in places) and the story was re-published in 1856 as one of a collection of stories titled 'After Dark', with a framing narrative added to link the stories together. The narration here is from the 1856 version of the text, but does not include the frame story.
Recording © Bitesized Audio 2020.