Originally posted May 6, 2024. Murder tales seem nice things sometimes for a lady to sit and read all by herself by the fire. But murder isn’t a nice thing, and when a murderer’s desperate and trying to hide his tracks he isn’t even as nice as he was before. I’ll ask you to bear that in mind. Well, I’ve warned you. I had never heard of Lord Dunsany until the title story of Two Bottles of Relish: The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories was mentioned by mystery author Tom Mead in his list of best impossible crimes for Publisher’s Weekly . It seems like Dunsany wasn’t widely read in 1934, either: while some of his fantasy writings were very influential, according to the book’s foreword by Ellery Queen, he didn’t consider his previous stories to have been well-received by the public. Believing that this was because they were too anodyne (murder-obsessed culture, these days…) he set out to write a story that was as gruesome and horrifying as possible, and the res...