About Dark Tales Sleuth

This site came about as I was hunting down ghost stories for the annual Winter Tales series on my Multo (Ghost) blog. I came across an intriguing anthology called Evening Tales for the Winter, published in 1856. The stories purported to be translations from German and other languages, and the first few were interesting supernatural tales in the tradition of German Gothic.

But nothing was attributed. Not the translators, not the authors, not the original stories.

I hate that.

And so, while reading the tales and picking good candidates to share around Christmas time, I started also trying to figure out where the stories were from. Some of them were easy, and many of them were already attributed at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. But not all of them. I realized that I had figured out an attribution that the ISFDB folks hadn't. Maybe I could figure out more?

I also realized that the anthology had stories that were interesting enough to share, but maybe not as winter tales. Sharing the stories, sharing the fruits of my research, putting out calls for help from fellow literary sleuths and experts on 19th century literature -- it was all getting too complicated for Multo.

Hence, Dark Tales Sleuth. Here's where I've shared my successes and my failures, and also shared some of the stories that I like the best, in a format that's friendlier and more readable than the (rather dirty) scan of Evening Tales for the Winter that's at the Internet Archive.

Since then, I've also added the results of other literary mysteries that I've come across.

Dark Tales Sleuth was originally hosted at Wordpress.com, but since it's now less active than it was, I've moved it to a static site on Github Pages. You can still follow it via RSS, and you can drop me a note by using the email icon in the footer of the blog.