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The Escape of Mr. Trimm

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First published: 1913
Pages: 183

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About this book

Hobart W. Trimm, lately president of the failed Thirteenth National Bank, rides a crowded day coach under guard toward a twelve-year federal sentence, and then the train is wrecked in a collision. He walks away unrecognized, listed among the dead, and still shut inside a pair of handcuffs nobody can open. That story opens the nine Irvin S. Cobb collected here in 1913, and the rest range widely: a courtroom case, a cub reporter's scrape, a belled buzzard circling a Southern swamp county, and "Fishhead," about a man with a fish's face at an isolated lake. Lovecraft praised that last one in print, and scholars count it among the seeds of The Shadow over Innsmouth. Cobb wrote all of it as a working newspaperman, and it reads that way.

About the author

Irvin S. Cobb

Irvin S. Cobb, whose full name was Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, moved from Kentucky newspapers to national reporting, magazine work, fiction and screenwriting. Born in Paducah in 1876, he began as a local reporter and later joined Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. He also reported from Europe during the First World War.