"My name will be Karolina Falconer," the fashionably dressed young woman answered, shimmering green flowing skirts with darker green accents, her large brimmed black hat worn with the swagger of a cavalier, the egret plumes fluttering at each move of her head.
The Chevalier Stuart Cumberland is a real stage magician who entertained in many countries, astonishing audiences and royals with his ability to seemingly read thoughts. Barry H. Wiley has created a fictional biography that combines David Copperfield, The Amazing Kreskin, and James Bond into a rollicking journey through the past, Tales of a Thought Reader.
Nine Black Dragons was a Chinese restaurant that resembled an old Charlie Chan movie, even to being smudged black and white. According to the gaudy paper placemat describing the Chinese zodiac, this was the Year of the Dog. The white plastic chopsticks, antiseptically wrapped tightly in thin paper marked "Made in Hong Kong" in smeared purple ink, were placed near and exactly parallel to its right edge.
The rustling well-dressed crowd of Parisian lace and titles applauded with some spirit as, still blindfolded, I placed my hand gently on the shoulder of the mistress of the house, the Countess Cladissa D’Dadario, identifying her as the bloody assassin. As I removed the blindfold, tossing it aside, she, in turn, a gracious lady of perhaps mid-fifties, with many rumored affairs, began to laugh.
The well-dressed capacity audience was wedged into every chair in the main lecture room of the Royal Geographical Society to learn more of the enigmatic land of Tibet: “The Land of the Snows” and “The Land of the Hooded Lamas.” The lecture was the first appearance at the RGS by the recently acclaimed young explorer, Hamil Stewart, who was a dark-haired, clean-shaven man of medium build with a resonant tenor.
Take Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and Harry Houdini, put them in petticoats, and make them too young to drink (in our day), roll them into one, and you’d have Kyame Piddington in The Revelations of the Impossible Piddingtons: Adventures in Second Sight by Barry H. Wiley.
Friday is said to be an unlucky day, Kyame Piddington read. It is hangman’s day. Some star having special gravity struck with sporadic force yesterday and illuminated some of the social phases in the zodiac of Dodge City. There was a gambling sport who was chaired by a pugilistic concubine.
Bermuda is an island paradise, but a seventeenth-century shipwreck there was the inspiration for William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Quotes from the Bard’s play are sprinkled through Barry Wiley’s Beyond the Tempest: a sorcerous tale of Bermuda, but his book tells of a different kind of storm – a storm in the mind.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, Wednesday, December 15, 1892
Sitting on a cushion on a board across two saw-horses on the stage, Kyame Piddington looked down the sides of her nose under the blindfold, being careful, as always, not to tilt her head back to gain a wider view. Tilting her head, Papa had constantly instructed, could give everything away.
by Barry H. Wiley
The Writer pressed up against his writing table, its edge digging into his stomach just above his belt – if he had been wearing one. He used a knotted rope around his waist. His left elbow braced on the table, his head forward, cradled in his left hand as his right held a pencil hovering above the yellow foolscap pad of blue-lined paper.
Hovered ... and hovered.
