Hachette India

Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk

MP Shiel

Step into the realm of supernatural detectives!

A collection of supernatural detective short stories by the author M.P. Shiel.

Prince Zaleski the mysterious exiled Russian, spends his time in his ruined abbey, surrounded by strange artefacts, including a partially unwrapped mummy. He solves cases mostly without even having to leave the abbey when he "might sometimes be induced to take an absorbing interest in questions that had proved themselves too profound, or too intricate, for ordinary solution".

"Zaleski is Sherlock demented" HG Wells

Cumming's King Monk Shiel's The Pale Ape and Other Pulses collection presented a second extraordinary figure, Cummings King Monk who has a longer section with three component short stories that have been called Shiel's "subversive take on the crime story genre".

MP Shiel

M. P. Shiel Matthew Phipps Shiell (21 July 1865 17 February 1947), was a British writer. His legal surname remained "Shiell" though he adopted the shorter version as a de facto pen name.

He is remembered mainly for supernatural horror and scientific romances. His work was published as serials, novels, and as short stories.

Matthew Phipps Shiell was born on the island of Montserrat in the West Indies and moved to England in 1885, eventually adopting Shiel as his pen name. After working as a teacher and translator, a series of his short stories began to be published in The Strand Magazine and other periodicals. His early literary reputation was based on two collections of short stories influenced by Poe published in the Keynote series by John Lane Prince Zaleski (1895) and Shapes in the Fire (1896) considered by some critics to be the most flamboyant works of the English decadent movement.

Shiel published over 30 books, including 25 novels and various collections of short stories, essays and poems. Arkham House issued two posthumous collections, Xelucha and Others (1975) and Prince Zaleski and Cummings King Monk (1977). The Purple Cloud remains his best known and most reprinted novel.