Castle Murders

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Ordinarily an introduction or prolegomenon is expected to shed some light on the material it prefaces or introduces, enough so that the reader may find his way through an unfamiliar literary landscape. In the present case, however, this prefatory note to the work now known as The Eidolons of the King: Tales of Castle Perilous can serve only to delimit areas of shadow that shroud the work in mystery.

Particularly obscure is the question of its origin and authorship. To say that its provenance is mysterious is to put it mildly. To put the matter simply: the original paperbound volumes of the books of The Eidolons ― cheap pulp paper, hastily glued bindings, garish covers and all ― were found one day in the castle library, having been shelved among finely wrought leatherbound tomes of bardic sagas and epic poetry. No one knows who put them there.

Would that this were the only mystery! The deeper and more fundamental question, of course, is: Who wrote these books and how did their author come by his intimate knowledge of Castle Perilous? to say nothing of his apparent clairvoyance in producing these accounts of the storm of recent events that have raged round it.

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