Recently someone posted an article about the first lines of
Nabokov's "Laughter in the Dark."(1932)
While reading a collection of Agatha Christie's short-stories
("While the Light Lasts") in Portuguese, I was struck by the similarity in their
laconic beginnings or with their eery suspense, through madness
and dream-life.
Nabokov insistently mocked Agatha Christie's plots ( cf.RLSK,
or the EW/VN letters) but he must have read at least some of her
stories ( those featuring Harley Quinn, for example, with their play of
stained-glass on his common-place clothes; "The Mousetrap"
or "And then there were none"), while he lived in England.
Young Agatha's first short-story (written before WWI with the
title "House of Beauty" and signed as Agatha Miller) was later reprinted as
"Dream House" ("A Casa dos Sonhos") in January 1926 (Sovereign
Magazine). It has been compared with the ghost
stories written by E.F.Benson (*).
Laughter in The Dark (opening paragraph):
"Once upon a time
there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable,
happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress: he
loved, was not loved; and his life ended in disaster."
Dream House (opening paragraph, in a rough
translation)
"This is the story of John Segrave - his life, which was
unsatisfactory; his love, which had been insufficient; his dreams
and his death. If in the last two items he's found what has been
denied to him in the preceding two then, his life, inspite of
everything else, could be considered a success. Who
knows?"
..............
* wiki: H. P. Lovecraft spoke highly of
Benson's works in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature", most notably of his
story "The Man Who Went Too Far" . A critical essay on Benson's ghost stories
appears in S. T. Joshi's book The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004). Further
"Mapp and Lucia" books have been written by Tom Holt and Guy
Fraser-Sampson.