S02E30 His Beautiful Hands by Oscar Cook

His Beautiful Hands by Oscar CookThis will be the second of Oscar Cook's stories we have read, the first being Boomerang.  Boomerang is https://player.captivate.fm/episode/f7098556-f342-4667-b9f2-65424796b616 (here) It was danged hard to find a copy of His Beautiful Hands, but I succeeded. HBH is rated as one of the best horror stories in those inevitable lists that pop up on the Internet, almost certainly compiled by people who never read it because print copies of the anthologies it was in are either out of print or cost hundreds of cash units (dollars, pounds, euros, roubles, take your pick).  Cook's work, I realise now, is characterised by graphic body horror rather than the supernatural so it is a horror story rather than a ghost story.  He deliberately sets out to shock us, but shocks modern listeners most probably by accident. What I mean is that we have become inured to graphic horror, after all we have had The Saw and The Human Caterpillar (neither of which I've seen) and the horrid bit in Midsommer when the old folks jump off the cliff and are then finished off... but let's not go into that.  Then he throws in a bit of incest. That's never nice and I think even modern listeners find that shocking. As an aside, I actually deplore the race for shock that you see in detective series on TV. Once theft was enough (if you go back far enough), then murder became a staple, then we had serial killers, serial rapists and now we have a regrettably frequent addition of paedophilia sometimes with incest thrown in. I prefer Miss Marple personally, and I'd say to the TV companies: don't pander after these most base shock-jock tactics, you're better than that. I saw the Dig on Netflix recently with Ralph Fiennes. How brilliant that was. And I like the Detectorists also. But back to Oscar Cook. Oscar Cook BiographyRichard Martin Oscar Cook was born in London in 1888 and died also in London in 1952. His father owned an athletic goods company and they were fairly well-off. He seems to