Jack Ramsden, Cabinetmaker for Stage Magicians, died whilst preparing his annual presentation for his wife's birthday. It was meant to be an ingenious demonstration of Magic and Illusion until it all went wrong. Jack was killed by a shot from a rifle on a stand. The puzzle was - he was alone in a locked room. Accident or suicide? Fourteen years later a cryptic letter from Laura, the daughter of the dead man, urges Giles Dawson, a historian of Magic and the Great Illusionists, to return to the family home in Scotland where he'd spent much of his boyhood, to help prove her father's death was Murder. The attempt to solve the Locked Room Mystery puts Giles in Danger with Fear and Dread constant companions. Will a death-defying Houdini-type illusion in the United States, just months before Jack's death, explain "how a bottle-opener can open more than bottles"? Can an introduction to a bronze statue open his mind on the truth before death has again taken a cold hand in the proceedings?

Lawrence Gordon Clark directs this double bill of horror dramas adaptated by the BBC from two of M.R. James's classic ghost stories. In 'A Warning to the Curious' (1972) Mr Paxton (Peter Vaughan) travels to English seaside town Seaburg hoping to find the last of three Anglo Saxon crowns belonging to the Agers family whose last descendant has recently died. When he uncovers the crown, however, he finds himself haunted by a ghostly figure. In 'The Stalls of Barchester' (1971) Dr. Black (Clive Swift) is cataloguing the Barchester Cathedral Library when he comes across an old diary belonging to Archdeacon Haynes (Robert Hardy) who died mysteriously. Whilst reading the entries Black soon discovers that Haynes may have been cursed upon the death of his predecessor after which he was tormented by supernatural goings-on.

David Cargill was one of the first Christian missionaries in Fiji. Though published as a Memoir to his late wife, this is in effect a report of his seven years of mission work in Tonga and Fiji from 1833 to 1840, with interesting accounts of learning local languages and establishing an orthography for Fijian.