The Best Short Stories of P. C. Wren

The Best Short Stories of P. C. Wren contains thirty-six stories out of the 116 stories that were in the short story collections published in Wren’s lifetime. The only collection not represented in The Best Short Stories is The Young Stagers, which is essentially a collection of stories for and about children. Twenty-four of the thirty-six stories are about the French Foreign Legion, or at least have a framing device concerning the Legion. The other stories are set in Malaysia, Siam (Thailand), India, and England, and some feature the supernatural, psychics, and family drama. The main criterion for selecting stories was their entertainment value. Wren once wrote that 'The bulk of my readers are the cleanly-minded virile outdoor sort of people of both sexes . . .' Other selection criteria included aspects of humor, suspense, and astonishment. The texts of the stories have been taken from the British book collections in which they appeared, the John Murray editions. The 110 colored illustrations were created using AI models and, in some cases, from AI-modified black-and-white drawings found in magazines and newspapers. Quite often, the text of the stories differs in the book from that of the periodical. Usually, the book has a framework around the actual story, such as a group of legionnaires telling stories to each other, and the periodical versions, in some cases, omit the framing. At the beginning of each story is some bibliographical information and other comments.