I'm starting a new project! This one is more "literary excavation" than "literary sleuthing."
Austin Philips was a British author and the son of a postmaster, who not only became a postmaster himself, but also served in an investigative branch of the Post Office which "co-operated with the British Intelligence Services in checking suspect mail [1]." [1] Ashley, Mike (editor), Glimpses of the Unknown: Lost Ghost Stories, British Public Library (2018), p. 40. These experiences made their way into much of his writing, which included Post Office crime novels, Post Office-related short stories and even Post Office poems. He wrote a variety of other short fiction, novels, plays, and poetry as well.
I first discovered Philips in Mike Ashley's anthology Glimpses of the Unknown back in 2019. The Philips selection was indeed a Post Office ghost story, and the idea of a Post Office Investigator intrigued me. So I added Philips and his Post Office stories to my wishlist of things to read, along with other authors and series in the collection. Now I'm starting to hunt some of these stories down.
Of course, I don't have access to all the archives that Mike Ashley and other professional anthologists do; but there's still a fair bit of it online. And more of it is public domain in the U.S. than was the case in 2019. With respect to Austin Philips, I'm concentrating on Post Office stories and ghost stories, so I probably won't collect all that I find here on Dark Tales Sleuth.
The first story is a non-fiction article that Philips wrote for The Strand, entitled "Crime in the Post Office". This is one of his earliest publications, and recounts several crimes related to the Post Office and its functions. Most of these crimes (except for one horrible murder) were resolved by the Post Office's Confidential Inquiry Branch, which I suppose must be one of the places Philips worked. It's interesting reading, even today.
I'm also doing something a bit different this time. Rather than transcribing the stories to PDF, I'll transcribe them directly to the blog as HTML; this is friendlier for folks who read on mobile, and is still plenty readable on a laptop or desktop. If you'd really rather have PDF, drop me an email. If I get enough requests, I'll do both.
Please enjoy. I look forward to finding and posting more stories!