The "Evening News" Collection v. 1

A selection of fiction drawn from the pages of the Evening News was assembled in Mark Williams' two-volume anthology The Evening News Collection, published by Chapmans in 1991. The first volume includes an introduction by the author Leslie Thomas, who contributed a number of stories to the newspaper and was once a staff writer on the Evening News. Monica Dickens, another famous contributor to the newspaper, wrote the introduction to the second volume of Williams' anthology.

Among the authors whose stories are included in the collection are Rosemary Timperley, Herbert Harris, Margaret Webb, Denys Val Baker, Louis Allegri, Cardew Robinson, Dillon McCarthy and Robert Quigley. Most of the stories that Mark Williams reprinted in The Evening News Collection were drawn from issues of the newspaper in the 1970s. Sadly, there were no stories included by regular contributors such as Paul Feakes, Jane Locke, C. T. Stoneham, W. P. Speechley and Howard Jones.

Another more serious flaw of the collection is the unfortunate fact that at least one story in the anthology has had its ending inexplicably removed. In the case of Herbert Harris' "The Promise of Four Vital Blue Notes," several paragraphs at the end of the original story are missing from the version that appears in The Evening News Collection, thus making the conclusion of the story incomprehensible. It was only after checking the original story, as it appeared in the newspaper, that I realised the mistake in the Williams anthology. Furthermore, the final line in Rosemary Timperley's story "An Old Lady Sings the Blues" is missing from the version that appears in the book. One cannot be sure where exactly these errors originated, but it is a pity that Williams' book contains these mistakes. As far as I know there were no later editions of the collection printed where such flaws may have been corrected. I have not yet had the chance to compare any of the other stories in the collection to the originals to see if any further mistakes were made.

Despite the problems mentioned above, The Evening News Collection is still a worthy anthology which aptly showcases the remarkable diversity of stories that were published in the newspaper. Each handsome volume contains an informative and entertaining introduction, providing valuable insights into the history of the newspaper. Many of the stories featured in the collection are quite excellent, and serve as a decent taster of the kind of short fiction that appeared in the Evening News. A full list of contents for each volume in this collection can be found below.