Gothic Archives - Black Mask

FFB: Benighted – J. B. Priestley

First Books, Friday's Forgotten Books, Gothic, J. B. Priestley, Valancourt Books Comments Off

Apr 262013

A torrential rainstorm, roads impassable due to flooding and mudslides, a temperamental car and three terrified travellers trapped by the storm. Reminds you of news headlines of the awful weather destroying the Midwest and the East Coast, doesn't it? It's also the opening of Benighted (1928), J. B. Priestley's second novel and the basis for the classic film The Old Dark House. But there's more to this story than just a group of stranded strangers forced to stay in a spooky house assailed by the elements and lorded over by creepy occupants. The bulk of the novel is devoted to existential and philosophical conversations, something most readers will not be prepared for. By the end the entire novel seems to be a kind of strange and eerie allegory about facing one's fears and finding purpose in life.

Philip and Margaret Waverton, along with their ne'er-do-well friend Roger Penderel are on their way to Shrewsbury when they are forced to seek shelter due to a storm of apocalyptic proportions. Huge chinks of the hillside come tumbling into the roadway, the earth literally trembles and shakes, torrents of water are flooding the roads and nearly wash their car off a cliffside. The opening scene is every bit of what classic film fans may recall of James Whale's screen version of the book. But after meeting the brutish and mute manservant Morgan and the eccentric Femm family the travellers settle in for a long night by discussing the meaning of a life and sharing stories from their past. The bickering Wavertons and cynical Penderal are later joined by Sir William Porterhouse and his companion Gladys Du Cane, an ex-showgirl.

Oddly, for three quarters of the story it seems as if nothing really happens but bad weather and lots of talk. The dialogue is a mix of Gothic intimations and highbrow philosophizing. Horace and Rebecca Femm, a very creepy couple of siblings, drop hints about their invalid brother confined to an upstairs bedroom and refer to another area off limits in the house. They warn the guests to steer clear of Morgan, keep him away from the alcohol lest he get into one of his frequent drunken rages. With these comforting thoughts they exit and allow their guests to settle in until the storm abates. It's no wonder Penderel starts a conversation game along the lines of "Truth or Dare "to keep everyone distracted and their minds off the possible dangers that lie in wait in the house. With the storm so relentless in its onslaught, it's as if they are waiting for the end of the world. Why not talk, smoke and drink if the end is nigh anyway?

Then the electricity fails and the guests are plunged into a darkness that is both literal and figurative. Simple tasks take on extraordinary dimension. The importance of keeping candles lit and rationing out matches are like acts of survival. A scene in which characters must decide who will make a dreaded journey to the top of a staircase to retrieve a lantern becomes an arduous and frightful odyssey:

He crept up,slowly, shakily, his shadow leaping and sprawling before him. There were little noises everywhere now, not a stair in the house without its creak. All that part of the house that yawned above him seemed tense, expectant. The little patch of darkness at the top was thick and crawling with unrevealed terrors. A step or two more and out of that blackness would spring a white gibbering face. He had a dream like that once -- it all came back to him, raw and palpitating...

When Philip and Margaret finally penetrate the bed chamber of the elderly Sir Roderick they learn of a secret within the house that threatens them all with destruction. It is at this point that the novel suddenly reaches a fever pitch of fearfulness and utter doom. The guests having been plunged into a world of darkness and dread now must literally fight for their lives. The mood is intense, surreal and often terrifying. The search for light, the obsession of locked rooms and keeping track of who has which key, the repeated talk of the dark are not just used as tropes of the Gothic genre but rather become transcendent metaphors. The climax delivers a few unexpected shocks and moments of true terror fairly free of excessive melodrama or histrionics. After all the anticipation of hidden danger and potential violence Priestley unleashes the beasts and gets his desired effect.

Benighted is one of the many reprint editions offered from Valancourt Books and is available from the usual online bookselling sites. Dare to spend an evening in the Femm house with this motley crew. I guarantee a frisson or two during your stay.

Valiant Valancourt Books

Claude Houghton, Frank Baker, Gothic, horror, J. B. Priestley, John Blackburn, obscure writers, Oliver Onions, supernatural, Valancourt Books Comments Off

Mar 272013

I'm always ready to help publicize the work of any small press that dares to reissue my favorite writers languishing in the Limbo of Out-of-Printdom. Valancourt Books, who have reissued some of the earliest Gothic novels from the 18th and 19th century, has now turned their attention to 20th century weird and supernatural fiction. They are in the process of reissuing many of the books of John Blackburn.

Regular readers with good memories may know that I have reviewed three of Blackburn's wholly original thrillers which blend crime and the supernatural into thrillers with a hip 1960s vibe. Not since Dennis Wheatley gave up writing had anyone really done such an exceptional job as Blackburn at incorporating the supernatural into a modern setting.

I was so excited I sent a letter of thanks to the publisher James Jenkins and learned in his reply that my rave review of Broken Boy "helped persuade" him to reprint that book. What an honor for this humble little blog. I helped bring a forgotten book back into print!

Not only has Valancourt chosen to reprint John Blackburn they have a long list of books they plan to reissue, many of them out of print for decades, that will be of interest to readers of weird, supernatural and fantasy fiction. Some of the titles I am anticipating are Benighted by J. B. Priestley, The Hand of Kornelius Voyt by Oliver Onions, the books of Claude Houghton and The Burnaby Experiment by Stephen Gilbert, best known as the author of Ratman's Notebooks, AKA Willard in its movie adaptation. Valancourt Books' forthcoming list also includes crime novels like He Arrived at Dusk by R. C. Ashby (read my review at Mystery*File), Ritual in the Dark by Colin Wilson and The Killer and the Slain by Hugh Walpole. Perhaps the most astonishing planned release will be The Birds by Frank Baker (author of Miss Hargreaves), an exceptionally scarce title I've wanted to read for years now. This is just a sample of the genre fiction. Valancourt also has an interest in early 20th century literary fiction and early fiction with gay themes. There is plenty that will appeal to a variety of reader tastes. All of it exceptional in quality and wisely chosen, I think.

Three John Blackburn books are available for purchase via amazon.com where Valancourt Books has chosen to market their titles. Below is a list of links. According to a blog post back in December 2012 Valancourt Books plans to reprint at least five other John Blackburn books including extremely scarce titles like The Beastly Business and The Household Traitors.

All current titles published by Valancourt Books are available in either trade paperback or digital format.

Start saving your pennies, gang. I know I am!

John Blackburn's work at Valancourt Books
Broken Boy
Nothing But the Night
Bury Him Darkly

The Forbidden Street (1949) AKA Britannia Mews

Anne Butchart, Dana Andrews, Georges Périnal, Gothic, Jean Negulesco, Maureen O'Hara, Twentieth Century-Fox Comments Off

Feb 032013

The Forbidden Street (1949), recently released on DVD from the 20th Century Fox archives, makes the British noir list, and with its gothic overtones this is certainly a film with a very definite set of peculiarities. Some of the film’s notable points are to be found in the fact that the director, Jean Negulesco, and the two main stars, Dana Andrews and Maureen O’Hara, unilaterally rejected the film, and so it remains that The Forbidden Street aka Britannia Mews, based on a novel by Margery Sharp, goes down in film history as a title the major players involved with the project would rather forget. In his autobiography, Things I Did … and Things I Think I Did Director Jean Negulesco called the film “a disaster. Insane casting. The critics murdered us.” Maureen O’Hara wasn’t much more generous. In her autobiography , Tis Herself, she called The Forbidden Street, the “least memorable” film of her career. Britannia Mews was cut by Richard Best in England and The Forbidden Street was cut in Hollywood by Robert L. Simpson, and as a result the two versions are apparently quite different. Maureen O’Hara argued that the only reason anyone would watch the film would be to see Dana Andrews in a dual role and Dame Sybil Thorndyke as a gin-addicted blackmailing old hag. As for Dana Andrews, author James McKay, author of Dana Andrews: The Face of Noir, calls The Forbidden Street, the “most unusual film” of this iconic actor’s career.

The Forbidden Street begins with a voice over from Maureen O’Hara who plays the adult Adelaide Culver. She explains her lifelong obsession with a slum area called Britannia Mews which is an alley located behind her family’s home on Albion Place. There’s a short snippet depicting Adelaide as a charming tiny tot who accepts her cousin Alice’s dare to enter the Mews. The scene establishes Adelaide’s willfulness--a character trait that comes into full force in adulthood.

Then we see Adelaide (Maureen O’Hara) in adulthood and her cousin Alice (Anne Butchart) as the two young women take art lessons from an impoverished Henry Lambert (Dana Andrews) who lives in the Mews and occupies the family’s former coach-house—now empty as the family ‘gave up’ their carriage. There’s a little unseemly man hungriness about Adelaide’s fixation on the drawing master, and for his part, Mr. Lambert engages in no small amount of flattery towards the young, talentless ladies he teaches.

Problems begin when Lambert shows up to teach Adelaide and Alice even though he’s received a note cancelling the lesson. Alice is ill, and so he’s there alone with Adelaide who somewhat incongruously answers the door herself in the unexplained absence of any servants. Lambert has chosen to ignore the note, and pretends he didn’t receive it. He’s there because he needs the money, and a conversation with Adelaide regarding her lack of talent leads her to threaten to tell her father to cancel the drawing lessons. An excellent camera shot of Lambert’s face allows the viewer to register his note of panic at the prospect of the loss of income, and then he smoothly resorts to his old flattery. Adelaide concludes that Lambert purposely came to see her knowing that she would be alone, and Lambert fuels this error. Adelaide, taking charge, rapidly stampedes Lambert into marriage against her parents’ wishes, and Lambert, who’s already exhibited his drunkenness, weakly goes along with Adelaide’s plans after she reveals that she has a hundred pounds a year to live on.

Then we see the newlyweds living in the Mews, a foul, fetid and sordid slum, and Adelaide who views Lambert as a “great artist,” is busy scrubbing floors in the couple’s two rooms above the coachhouse. Lambert’s studio is directly below in the coachhouse itself, and it’s here that he’s supposed to create a masterpiece--a painting fit for submission to The Royal Academy of Arts. In the meantime, he’s stopped teaching, and he spends his adulterous days, surrounded by bottles, in a drunken stupor. Rousted by a nagging, bitter Adelaide, he seeks refuge, and sympathy, from the Red Lion, located oh-so-conveniently right across the street.

An accident places Adelaide into the grasping hands of the poxy, squinty-eyed, rag-and-bone collector, Mrs Munsey, also known as “the sow,” played with delicious esprit by Dame Sybil Thorndyke. Blackmailed into remaining in the Mews and unable to join her family in the glories of the Surrey countryside, Adelaide sinks into coarseness and finds oblivion in cheap gin. She’s hitting the skids, sporting dark rings around her eyes, and stumblingly drunk when a new man enters her life. Enter Gilbert Lauderdale (also played by Dana Andrews)—a married, one-time barrister, actor now homeless clerk turned drunken bum, a “nasty little sponger” who stumbles out of the Red Lion and into Adelaide’s life….

The entrance of Lauderdale marks a bizarre turn in the plot with a 180 degree turn away from the film’s dark tones and noir elements. Here’s Adelaide, morphed into a crude vicious fishwife who falls for the second drunken bum in her life who happens to look identical to her first husband. The woman doesn’t miss a beat and invites Lauderdale to move in. It’s impossible not to predict doom--especially when we see Lauderdale brutishly bitch slap poor old Mrs. Munsey back and forth across the face.

The casting of Dana Andrews in both roles as Henry Lambert and Gilbert Lauderdale, was apparently, a mere cost-cutting measure of the part of 20th century Fox. But given that both men are drunken losers with a shady past, this casting serves to highlight and accentuate Adelaide’s poor judgment. Dana Andrews as Henry Lambert is dubbed and given a British accent, and it also looks as though his face has been darkened with rather severe make-up. The implausibility of the two men in Adelaide’s life looking identical is smooched over by the one-liner given glibly by Gilbert Lauderdale after he’s thrown out of the Red Lion and lands—more or less—on Adelaide’s doorstep:

“I’m always reminding people of someone else.”

On the subject of accents, there’s no explanation given why the child Adelaide is British while the adult Adelaide is Irish or why her Cambridge-bound brother, obviously brought up in the same household sounds like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Then why does Gilbert Lauderdale sound British (dubbed) and exactly like Henry Lambert in his initial scenes before shifting into his own voice without any explanation? But these are just some of the details rather untidily thrown out there by the film for the viewer to deal with. There are also plot gaps thrown out with no explanation: what deep dark secret does Lambert hide from his days in Paris? Why does he look panicked and shifty-eyed when Adelaide mentions Paris or those puppets he’s fussing eternally in the coachhouse? What is an artist doing with puppets anyway? Why are Adelaide’s bustles so exaggerated when compared to the other costumes in the film? Madness, madness, I say.

These questions are never answered, and in his memoir, I’ll Hate Myself in the Morning, scriptwriter Ring Lardner Jr. mentions that he finished the screenplay while in Washington to attend the HUAC hearings, and that upon his return he gave the script to the producer who was in a “hurry” to finish the picture. Perhaps this explains the huge inconsistencies in the details--such as accents, and the vast gaps in plot. The Forbidden Street, incidentally, was the last script Lardner, one of the Hollywood Ten, finished before being fired from his 2,000 dollar a week job at Fox.

By the time the film concludes, we realize that the mysterious puppets that Henry Lambert obsesses about are central to the plot. The film’s very first scene gives a nice slice of foreshadowing as a Punch and Judy booth is carried into Britannia Mews. Later, we see this same, decidedly the worse for wear, booth re-enter the Mews and it’s also parked there in the open at one point. The subject of Punch and Judy even enters an argument between Adelaide and her husband. Since Punch and Judy shows are frequently centered on violent domestic squabbles, it’s easy to extrapolate that Adelaide and Henry’s married life is a living, tawdry embodiment of the violent and now terribly politically incorrect puppet show.

In spite of The Forbidden Street’s many flaws, the splendid cinematography by Georges Périnal is both the film’s defining genius and its most cohesive element. The opening scene which depicts Adelaide as a small child watching the activities of the Mews mirrors a child watching a puppet show with the window framing the Mews distinctly apart and making the squalid alley seems unreal and disconnected from Adelaide’s affluent and cosseted life. There’s also a scene of tiny tot Adelaide facing down her nursemaid as she exits the Mews. Note a handful of immobile, obedient Victorian children who resemble puppets. Also Adelaide’s two room dwelling with its slanted roof forces Henry/Gilbert to stoop, and the cinematography and camera angles of these scenes emphasize that Adelaide and Henry/Gilbert appear to be oversized and living in a miniaturized dollhouse. This amplifies the thought that Adelaide is trapped and her fairy-tale marriage has morphed into a hideous reality, and that these tortured characters are at the mercy of societal elements—mere puppets with no freedom of their own.

Written by Guy Savage

Comment below or at The Back Alley

FFB: Curse of the Island Pool – Virginia Coffman

Friday's Forgotten Books, Gothic, supernatural, Virginia Coffman, voodoo Comments Off

Sep 212012

I wonder if Coffman read any Anne Radcliffe. She seems to have taken the formula of the late 18th century Gothic thriller and given it the modern update that everyone is now familiar with. In her third novel Curse of the Island Pool (1965) she gives us a textbook example of what would become the template for all Gothic suspense books in the craze that developed in the mid 60s and lasted well into the early 80s. Young American heiress travels to an exotic country where she meets a modern day Byronic hero, several superstitious and secretive servants, a puzzling mysterious death and most important of all a house and estate with a terrible secret. It's a good one, my friends.

First introduced to us in her San Francisco home as Cathy Blake, our heroine quickly learns that she is the long lost heir to the Amber fortune and is now the new owner of the plantation formerly owned by her dead cousin Ellen Amber. Cathy flies to a little island in the Antilles (called St. Cloud in the book but in reality St. Vincent) where she meets her other cousin Michael Amber, our dark and mysterious Byronic hero. Almost immediately Cathy's head is filled with colorful anecdotes about Ellen's unusual death in the island pool of the title. Slightly sinister Soochi, a young maid in the Amber household, frequently talks of Ellen's ghost haunting the grounds and Miss Nell, the elderly housekeeper and Ellen's only friend, warns Cathy to beware of all the Ambers. They are up to no good and she is convinced one of them caused Ellen's death. If all this whispered gossip and chattering superstition were not enough Cathy is woken almost every night by the sound of drums in the forest. There are hints that the locals use the area around the lagoon for voodoo rituals and God knows what else.

JMW Turner's painting of La Soufrière erupting in 1812.

Usually the house is the star in any true Gothic. Donald E. Westlake has joked that a Gothic is a book where the girl gets a house. A lampooning reduction of the often complex and involving plots but true nonetheless. However, in Curse of the Island Pool it is the surrounding grounds that become the foreboding presence in a role usually given to the house. The pool is the scene of Ellen's mysterious death a site Cathy finds herself drawn to repeatedly finding clue after clue all of which point to the possibility of not an accident but murder. Ominously, the island also has an active volcano La Soufrière -- literally "the sulfur one" -- smoking and belching and threatening to erupt in a violent display of ash and lava any day.

This is the grand stuff I expect from a Gothic. Far from the tawdry trash most people think of when Gothic novels are mentioned Coffmans' books are plot driven with unusually drawn characters. It should be larger than life, with a creepy setting that dominates the atmosphere and nearly controls the characters' lives. Coffman scores big with her setting. She found ways to invigorate the Gothic genre by choosing exotic settings rather than the usual damp castles in Germany and England.

Coffman is also a subtle stylist with a gift for language. We know this genre is based on well worn archetypes, but in Coffman's hands the Gothic gets a well-deserved facelift. Sure, Cathy takes her first step outdoors at night wearing the requisite nightgown (or, because she's in the French Antilles, her peignoir) but each time Coffman visits one of these now cliche scenes she makes it come alive with her storytelling skill, her vibrant descriptions and, occasionally, a remarkable gift for creating the perfect frisson. What more can you ask for?

Secret Beyond the Door (1947)

Fritz Lang, Gothic, Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave, Universal International Pictures Comments Off

Aug 122012

Fritz Lang's Secret Beyond the Door takes the perennially popular Gothic theme, "Someone is trying to kill me, and I think it may be my husband," throws in a liberal dose of psychological melodrama à la Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), and caps it off with a fiery finale that tips its hat to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

The first hour or so of the film is firmly in the mold of earlier Gothic "my husband might be a murderer" thrillers like Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), George Cukor's Gaslight (1944), Vincente Minnelli's Undercurrent (1946), and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Dragonwyck (1946). The last couple of reels veer off into such loony, faux-Freudian territory that I honestly didn't know quite what to make of them.

But Lang is a consummate professional, no matter how weird or silly his material, and Secret Beyond the Door is always intriguing and occasionally a little spine-tingling.

The film stars Joan Bennett as Celia, a fashionable, bored young woman with a trust fund who meets a mysterious British architect while she's on vacation in Mexico. His name is Mark Lamphere (played by Michael Redgrave), and he tells Celia that she is a "Twentieth-century sleeping beauty. Wealthy, American girl who's lived her life wrapped in cotton wool, but she wants to wake. Maybe she can."

They're married after a whirlwind romance, despite Celia's terrified feelings of apprehension as she walks toward the altar.

Unsurprisingly, her trepidation is well-founded. After they move into Mark's sprawling home in Levender Falls, NY, she finds out that not only was Mark previously married, but he also has a teenage son and a creepy housekeeper named Miss Robey (Barbara O'Neil) who covers the burn scars on the side of her face with a flowing headscarf.

Most frightening of all, Mark's first wife died under mysterious circumstances, and Celia learns at one of Mark's fancy parties that he doesn't have a sou to his name. His beautiful home is mortgaged to the hilt, and the architectural magazine he's peddling around New York seems to be going nowhere fast. Celia is worth a lot ... would she be worth more to Mark dead than alive?

Wait, did I say "most frightening of all"? Actually, the most frightening thing about Mark might be his bizarre hobby of recreating, piece by piece, rooms in which murders occurred, sort of like Frances Glessner Lee's dollhouses, only at a 1:1 scale.

Six of his seven rooms are showcases that he's happy to show off to his tony friends, but the seventh must always remain hidden. Even from his dear wife Celia.

As I said, Secret Beyond the Door gets into some pretty loony territory during its last two reels. While much of it is silly amateur psychology, it's at least visually arresting. Joan Bennett runs for her life through the same dark forest sets on the Universal sound stages that Lon Chaney Jr. stalked in 1941 as The Wolf Man, and her journeys down dimly lit corridors are the stuff of beautiful nightmares.

Written by Adam Lounsbery

ALTERNATIVE HORROR: The Craghold Creatures – Edwina Noone

alternative classics, Gothic, horror, Michael Avallone Comments Off

Jul 182012

A well read private eye fan won't even have to open this book to know that it's one of the many pseudonyms of Michael Avallone. His private, after all, was Ed Noon. Avallone was a big prankster when it came to pen names. So much of a prankster that he includes one of his own alter egos as a character in this book. And I could only think as I was reading this loopy book that a whole lot of women readers who used to snap up Gothic suspense books by the bucketful back in the 60s and 70s must've thought the "woman" who wrote this book had smoked a little too much weed or dropped a bit too much acid. It's not at all like any Gothic suspense novel you will ever read.

Anyone familiar with Avallone's work would recognize his tell-tale style in an instant. Forget that giveaway pen name. Forget that the book is all about a movie production company and is peppered with numerous references to old movies and movie stars. How could anyone overlook the prose style of the samples below?

She tried to scream--and couldn't. The tendons, cords and nerve centers of her throat were locked into one spasmodic, cramped complex that refused to respond to the telegraphed messages of terror from her mental batteries.

"Oh, Soldier...what was it? How can there be such a thing...it isn't possible...it couldn't be. Not even a Z movie ever had anything like that in it..."

His blood ran cold, the mercury dropping like a shot in a thermometer.

Moria Shearer! -- that was it. Cornelia was pretty much a ringer for that English doll from the Red Shoes.

Craghold House. He had been right the first time. A Grade A, certified Zombie Depot. You'd better believe it!

There is only one person who writes like that. Michael Avallone.

I loved this book. I only wish there were more over-the-top Gothic novels like this one. It dares to combine an obsessive movie fan's love of title allusions and movie star name dropping with weird horror set pieces that aspire to a Lovecraftian pastiche.

Movie mogul Max Wendel sends his right hand lady Cornelia to scout locations for their upcoming blockbuster-to-be movie adaptation of a best selling horror novel called The Six Sidneys. Cornelia and her helicopter pilot assistant (nicknamed Soldier) find the perfect spot in Kragmoor, Pennsylvania. Little do they know that Craghold House, now a converted hotel, has a rich and gruesome history of hauntings, murders and unexplained supernatural events. Of course it would make the ideal setting for the movie --the house itself is a horror show. As the cover blurb proclaims "She searched for perfection and found a house that was perfectly evil..."

The house has unspeakably chilly rooms, hidden crypts, a monstrous occupant in the basement -- name your favorite Gothic motif and it's sure to be somewhere in Craghold. Even the current proprietor of the hotel looks like something that escaped from a zombie movie. Rest assured that Cornelia, Soldier, and the mysterious Dr. N. Waldo Ow, a guest at the hotel who is researching the occult properties of herbs, will all encounter more than their fair share of ghoulies and ghosties and things that go slurp, slop, squish in the night.

As for in-jokes and Avallone trivia the book is busting to the seams with his pranks. The heroine is named Cornelia Rich. Ring any bells crime fiction fans? It's a feminization of Cornell Woolrich. In case you missed that Edwina literally spells it out for you later in the book. Zombie Depot (mentioned above) is the title of a book Avallone wrote for the Satan Sleuth series but due to poor sales the series was dropped and that manuscript never made it to a published book. One of the other characters is Mark Dane. See if he reminds you of anyone.

Dane wasn't interested in magical healing herbs. Nor in any drugs of any kind, Mark Dane did not need any artificial stimulants to stay alive. He had a burning opiate of his own, one that never allowed him to rest or stay down too long or up high forever. He was a writer in the truest sense of the title. [...] He was drunk with the magic of the English language and it had remained his mistress for a greater length of time than any woman he had ever known.

This page long paragraph goes on to cite Dane's "over a hundred" novels consisting of "spy yarns, private eye capers, police procedurals, Gothic romances, armchair detective puzzles." And he had used "five masculine and three feminine pen names." Can this be any more of a celebration of Avallone himself? Mark Dane just happens to be one of the many pen names Avallone used. A quick look through Hubin's Bibliography of Crime Fiction show a few movie script novelizations by Avallone as "Mark Dane."

I need to read the rest of the books in this Craghold series to see if they live up to the awesome outrageousness that can only by Michael Avallone. Can the other three books make me smile as much as this one? I certainly hope so.

Edwina Noone's very special brand of Gothic Novels
Dark Cypress (1965)
Corridor of Whispers (1965)
Heirloom of Tragedy (1965)
Daughter of Darkness (1966)
The Second Secret (1966)
The Victorian Crown (1966)
Seacliffe (1968)
The Cloisonne Vase (1972)
Tender Loving Fear (1984)

The Craghold Series
The Craghold Legacy (1971)
The Craghold Curse (1972)
The Craghold Creatures (1972)
The Craghold Crypt (1973)

Old Bones – Herman Petersen

A.B. Cunningham, country noir, Gothic, Herman Petersen Comments Off

Jun 162012

Herman Petersen I gather was a postman in upstate New York for most of his life based on what he has written in Country Chronicle, a combination autobiography and history of his homestate. He also contributed several stories in a variety of genres to fiction magazines during the 1940s. Based solely on his last mystery novel Old Bones (1943) I think he is deserving of our attention. He knew how to construct a gripping story, create unusual settings, populate those settings with distinctly original characters and wrap it all around an engrossing and puzzling mystery. Not bad for a letter carrier, right?

Old Bones is the last of three detective novels featuring a sharp witted coroner Dr. Thaddeus Miller. In the short series of books Doc Miller is often assisted by Ben Wayne, a farmer, and Paul Burns, the local D.A. The setting is central New York (the reader can infer somewhere in Madison County fairly close to Utica since a train to that city is mentioned frequently) where pea farming seems to be one of the big agricultural industries. The opening scene take place on such a farm with a fight breaking out between a volatile supervisor and a crooked farmhand who is fired for cheating the farm in his bushel counts. Already we get the sense that hidden tempers will lead to sudden violence.

The scarce UK edition (Gerald Swan, 1950)

Ben's wife, Marian, goes off in search of old wood for a project of hers. She visits an abandoned grist mill and quite by accident discovers human skeletal remains in the mill's standpipe. But when Ben and Doc Miller return with Marian to retrieve the bones they have seemingly vanished. Someone who had no doubt been watching Marian got to the bones first.

Some clever detective work, mostly on the part of Doc Miller, leads them to a bundle tied up and stashed in a dark area of the large mill. Miller studies the bones and notices that there is a large break in the skull leading him to believe that the person died a violent death. Furthermore, some of the ribs show a break and set that Miller recalls can only have been performed by himself on Nate Wight, one of the many members of a wealthy local farming family, who supposedly left town five years ago. When a thorough search of the mill following even more clever detective work uncovers a bundle of clothes and a watch that belonged to Nate, Miller is more than convinced they are faced with a murder and a cover-up. The story then becomes a twisting and involved, almost Southern Gothic, tale of family secrets and gruesome revenge.

This is an excellent example of the rural detective novel. There is a lot of examining of footprints and movement in dust as is usual in Golden Age detective novels. But the identification of the body by examining the bone breaks, the subtleties in the dead body's personal effects are some of the more imaginative touches that set it apart from other books of the period. It may be one of the first forensic pathology mysteries long before such a branch of criminology was formerly accepted. And Doc Miller achieves his results without once using a microscope or looking at DNA patterns. That's real detective work. Even better are details like the bundle of bones that has been tied with the unusual "miller's knot" that helps to identify some of the parties involved in the murder and cover-up. Additionally, the behavior of horses, how they are tied up, what the grass looks like where the horses were grazing, all make this the kind of unique mystery that can only take place in the countryside.

Bill Pronzini has said in his 1001 Midnights review of Old Bones that the book "drips with atmosphere." It certainly does. Like A.B. Cunningham one of the preeminent writers of rural mysteries during the 40s and 50s Petersen has a real love for the Gothic. The grist mill is one of the creepiest murder scenes I've come across in my reading this year. The forbidding mill at one time had several windows, now all boarded up requiring the use of flashlights even in the daytime. There is a hidden entrance and a hole cut out for a cat to enter and leave at will. Surrounding the mill is a treacherous swamp in which several foot chases will lead to dangers and perils for the team of sleuths. Later in the book they come across an old tramp's camp site in a forest that reeks of the corpses of dead animals he has captured and slaughtered for food. Several of the carcasses are seen hanging from the trees making for a grisly and olfactory offensive visit. One of the female characters is often referred to as a witch and the appearance and disappearance of the appropriately black cat that visits the mill only adds to the superstitious belief that she is a supernatural being with transformative powers. How's that for dripping atmosphere?

Herman Petersen wrote only four mysteries, the first three featuring Doc Miller and his two partners Ben Wayne and Paul Burns. His final book is set in New England with a completely different set of characters. Old Bones is probably the best of the lot. It's cleverly structured, suspenseful in all the right places, and holds your attention from it shockingly violent start to the surprising finish. As an early example of what I like to call country noir it ranks among the absolute best from the 1940s.

The Mysteries of Herman Petersen
Murder in the Making (1940
Murder R.F.D. (1942)
Old Bones (1943)
The D.A.'s Daughter (1943)

The Bornless Keeper – P. B. Yuill

August Derleth, Gothic, horror, obscure writers, police procedural Comments Off

Apr 262012

1st UK edition, artwork by Chris Yates

This was one of those books I came across because of a comment on one of the many blogs I read. I noted the title, went looking for a copy and when they all proved to be in horrid condition set aside my search. Then a very cheap 1st UK edition came up for sale on eBay so I bought it and eagerly read the book hoping that it would prove to be as advertised by the commenter who called it the best by author P.B. Yuill, "a horror/whodunit on the lines of [T]he Wicker Man." The paperback edition plastered on its cover a blurb from a review that appeared in The Observer: "The most haunting novel of terror since The Hound of the Baskervilles." Typical P.R. hyperbole as far as I'm concerned.

Peacock Island is home to the eccentric recluse Lady Bennett. She allows no one to set foot on her land. The only boat allowed to dock brings her monthly groceries that are left beneath a bench. One day a crew member on the delivery boat notices that the bag usually left empty in full view on top of the bench has not been touched. He suspects something is wrong and daringly sets out to the Lady Bennett's home, an old country house with a Gothic facade and other tasteless Victorian crenelations that make it appear to be a castle. When he doesn't return his brother goes in search of him and finds some gruesome surprises inside the castle. The police are called and a murder investigation begins. There is a parallel story of a TV documentary crew who get word of the murder and set off to illegally make a movie about the crimes. Any reader can guess that these characters exist as only the characters in a slasher movie exist - as future victims.

While the book does a good job of creating an atmosphere of creepy Gothic chills with a killer dressed in a weird outfit of feathers and man-made claws who roams the island in search of victims I found the book overall to be extremely familiar. Granted it was published in 1974 prior to the onslaught of slasher movies and similar "they're all doomed" thrillers about people trapped on an island at the mercy of a mad killer, but it just didn't do it for me. From the very start I got too many echoes of August Derleth's love of Gothic family secrets, Hammer Horror films, and the entire 1980s slasher movie craze that have used plot ideas and situations found in The Bornless Keeper. I'm usually quick to place books like this in the evolution of crime and modern horror fiction, and I ought to give the writer some credit for perhaps being something of a groundbreaker. This novel could easily be seen as a forerunner to much more terrifying and suspenseful books in the same vein as The Silence of the Lambs and The Running of Beasts, but because it does it less skillfully I am reluctant to give it that place of honor.

UK paperback edition

Prior to the halfway mark when the entire book devolves into something akin to a sequel in the Friday the 13th franchise there were some interesting allusions to the ecological decay of the island, commentary of industrial pollution, and jabs at the thoughtlessness of tourists who use lakes and rivers as their dumping ground. I was hoping that the writer would expand upon this and that the mad killer would turn out to be some kind of monstrous thing along the lines of the creature in the very weird, unintentionally campy, 1979 horror movie Prophecy. No such luck. All of the eerie, supernatural qualities quickly dissipate along with the sideline ecological commentary and we are left with nothing more than another psycho killer tale. We get ersatz Gothic secrets, a dash of Blochian necrophilia, hidden tombs, and a very disturbing rape scene.

The strength of the book is really not in the very familiar horror elements but rather in the depiction of the policeman characters. Inspector Victor Daniels is at war with his superior Supt. Groves. What keeps the book alive is the caustic relationship between these two very different policemen. Groves is an insulting boss with little tolerance for creativity in crime solving and Daniels endures his bullying with restrained anger. While Daniels takes phone calls from the local historian who links a local legend with past crimes and does research on Lady Bennett's family tree, Groves scoffs at him and does yeoman police work delegating his men to look for stolen boats and local thugs who might have been interrupted on a trespassing adventure. I liked the police business here and thought the contrast between the ex-city dwelling Daniels and the gruff, bullheaded Groves was handled well. Daniels is a sympathetic character and you root for him to show up his narrow-minded boss. He does some decent detective work even if most of it happens through telephone calls.

The characters making up the TV crew on the other hand are the stuff of B movies. Tiresome, flat portrayals of a driven bitchy woman producer, her handsome Lothario assistant producer, the sad sack married cameraman who desires her, and a cipher character who you know will be the killer's first victim. None of the drivelly soap opera subplots between this quartet was interesting. I skimmed over these pages just waiting for someone to get knocked off or "disappear" only to "reappear" in the violent finale that is telegraphed amateurishly in previous chapters.

FFB: Murder in the Moor – Thomas Kindon

comic crime, Friday's Forgotten Books, Gothic, obscure writers Comments Off

Apr 202012

The policeman on holiday has been done to death in the detective fiction genre, but Thomas Kindon's engaging and lively Murder in the Moor (1929) may be the quintessential example. You probably know the drill here – a policeman goes on vacation intending to be as far away from crime as he can manage yet invariably stumbles upon a corpse that is almost always a puzzling murder and he cannot resist uncovering the who, why, and how of the crime. What Kindon does with this well worn territory is very different and highly original on all levels. Best of all the book is wittily told and often hilarious when Kindon lets loose with his obvious fondness for outrageous humor and bizarre characters. Most appealing of all is his unusual detective Peregrine Clement -- aka Pithecanthropus -- Smith.

"Pithecanthropus? You mean like the Java Man?" I hear you cry.

Yes, indeed. For Smith is described in the third paragraph of the first page as "over six feet tall, and broad in proportion – and, moreover, very ugly…, for his face was astonishingly like a chimpanzee's." The illustration of Smith on the paperback edition shown on this page provides him with a much handsomer countenance than I would imagine Kindon intended. It is his apelike features that inspired a wiseacre copper who had recently attended a lecture entitled "What Evolution Means to YOU!" to bestow upon Smith the anthropological nickname which has stuck ever since. Even the crooks have learned to call him Pithy Smithy.

The very involved plot is far too complex to reduce to a summary of a few sentences or even a few paragraphs. And it's so enjoyable I would be tempted to describe all my favorite characters and go into great detail about the funniest moments and most ingenious plot devices. I better not do that! Suffice it to say that Smith is on a walking holiday in rural English countryside that resembles Dartmoor though the area is completely renamed with fictional towns and landmarks. Over the course of the story rich in incident and adventure he encounters not only a puzzling brutal murder, but an escaped convict, industrial espionage, counterfeiting, revenge, and a crazed inventor of bizarre clockwork devices.

More beautiful map endpapers from E. P. Dutton (click to enlarge)
Map artist: Frank Adams

From the opening pages when Smith meets up with the Scottish engineer Angus MacFee, in love with his prismatic compass and fond of calculating the proper hiking routes using his ordnance survey in combination with the compass, to the final thrilling pages in which Smith saves the convict Jimmy Toggle from a fiendish deathtrap created by the mad murderer the story is gripping, engaging, literate and witty. The detection is fascinating and also adheres to the fair play rules. We even get a bit of Oppenheimesque spy stuff and a pulp magazine bit of gruesome bizarreness in the final chapters that would be the envy of Edgar Allan Poe.

The cast of characters are far from the types of cliches you would expect from this era. Who could resist the kooky authoress, Cynthia Trebogle, who revisits the murder scene with Smith pontificating on her nutty theory that the murder was committed by "a priest of neolithic or druidical tribe" using a stone axe. Or the irascible Joshua Hubblesby who rhapsodizes on his idea of a real holiday being nothing more than riding his favorite train lines and sleeping. Even the police provide entertainment. Captain Hector Madan, Smith's superior, is a blustery impatient straight man providing many Margaret Dumont moments to Smith's insolent Groucho style quips. The officious younger inspector put in charge of the case is shown up many a time when he doggedly sets his eyes on MacFee as suspect number one while Smith points out he couldn't possibly be the killer due to the timing involved in MacFee's alternate route he took near the murder scene and suggests the inspector do the hike himself as proof.

But now the bad news. Thomas Kindon's 1929 detective novel is yet another of those books you will be hard pressed to find. I stumbled across my copy in the Chicago Public Library then wondered if any used copies are out there. My dutiful internet search turned up exactly ten copies in various editions for sale ranging from $35 to $158, plus one dealer in Germany who wants $197 for his copy (a US edition from 1929) that is just plain greedy. The book was reissued in Jacques Barzun's "Top 50 Classics of Crime" series published by Garland that was intended solely for libraries. I suggest you check your local library first. Chances are it may be there.

FFB: The Hollow Skin – Virginia Swain

333, Friday's Forgotten Books, Gothic, obscure writers, supernatural, witchcraft Comments Off

Mar 022012

Have I ever talked about a fascinating bibliographic work that has been a reading guide of mine for several years? It's called 333 and it was published back in the 1950s. As the title suggests it is a catalog of three hundred and thirty-three books all of which fall into one of three categories: science fiction, weird or adventure. Within those three broad categories the genres are further categorized as Gothic Romance, unknown worlds, fantastic adventure, lost race, and Oriental. Of course there are some which combine one or more of these categories; it's always hard to pigeonhole this kind of fiction. For years I pored over the plot summaries of these books and slowly but surely managed to acquire or borrow from libraries nearly all of those that interested me. Now that I've pretty much exhausted the weird, fantastic adventure and lost race novels I'm working my way thorough some of the science fiction and fantasy works. Virginia Swain's only novel of the weird, The Hollow Skin (1938), is one of the first books I read that is included in 333. And it's one of the strangest books I've encountered in weird and supernatural fiction, primarily because of its shocking ending that seems to come out of nowhere.

Lex Drummond, a young doctor, travels to the Bahamas as a rest cure for his bothersome bronchitis. There he meets another physician who has been caring for some of the wealthier inhabitants of the island of St. Catherine’s. The elder doctor introduces the younger to Lady Mary, the resident “witch,” a wealthy woman who is obsessed with moving into a mansion located in an isolated part of the island. She is doing her best to coerce the current resident Mr. Percy Isher to leave and apparently is not adverse to tinkering with the occult in order to get her way. Isher is, however, adamant on staying.

The story eventually involves the young doctor’s pursuit of Valentine, a beautiful young girl and her mysterious older female caretaker both of whom he later discovers are staying in the mansion with Isher. The young woman is Isher’s ward and the caretaker her governess who may or may not be Isher’s wife. When Isher’s Bahamian manservant dies after a mysterious accidental fall the young doctor is convinced that something strange is going on in the mansion. Lady Mary hints to the doctor that the death is perhaps related to obeah – a superstition laden local religion not unlike Voodoo of Haiti. Lady Mary seems to know a terrible secret about Isher but is devilishly teasing to the doctors. She will divulge nothing hoping that Isher will reveal himself and thereby allow her to come into possession of the mansion.

The first half of book is thoroughly engaging, but a middle section bogs down with an unnecessary subplot involving Freddie, an English playboy, who is intent on leaving the island even if he has to stowaway on a freight ship. Freddie apparently knew Isher and was his neighbor when he was a small child and gives some interesting background on the odd man and his ward, but ultimately this portion of the story is a bit annoying and intrusive as it takes away from the more interesting characters of Lady Mary, Isher and his daughter.

The book begins as a neo-Gothic with much supernatural content, and excellent handling of setting which enhances the mood in a Radcliffe manner. One expects the main story to be a battle of wills between Lady Mary and Isher. But since Swain insists on telling the story through the viewpoint of the least interesting character – Drummond – we mostly get a sappy love story involving the narrator and Valentine. Only when characters begin to die mysteriously does the book once again become action oriented as it transforms into a detective novel. The plot is complicated by evidence of snake bites on the victims and the book morphs once again into a pulp thriller. The final third of the book ends in an utterly unexpected bizarre twist. And if you intend to go looking for an affordable copy of this book from the usual online third party sites I suggest you avoid reading the plot blurbs in some of those book descriptions. A certain dealer who shall remain nameless (but he's the one who has a photo next to his copy) has a habit of giving away the ending of books like this and ruins the big surprise in The Hollow Skin.

I asked for some help on Virginia Swain's biography and literary life because I had little luck in digging up anything about her. I was curious if she had written anything else in the weird or supernatural fiction genre. I reached out to Douglas Anderson who has two fascinating blogs: Lesser Known Writers primarily devoted to obscure weird fiction writers and Wormwoodiana, the blog offshoot of the journal Wormwood, described as a tribute to "literature of the fantastic, supernatural and decadent." His knowledge of writers' lives and works is vast and impressive and he has a lot more resources than I do. He graciously obliged by finding this information about Swain who, it turns out, did indeed dabble in weird fiction in short story form:

Virginia Swain (1899-1968) was a journalist in the 1920s after getting a degree at the University of Missouri in 1921. In 1925 she married Philip Duffield Stong (1899-1957), who became a better-known and more prolific writer than Virginia; his best-known novel is probably STATE FAIR (1932). He did edit an fantasy anthology OTHER WORLDS (1941), containing a lot of familiar writers for WEIRD TALES (including Lovecraft), but it also has a story, "Aunt Cassie", by his wife.

One final interesting tidbit I dug up about The Hollow Skin. Apparently there was a contest to name this book. It was released without a title and readers were asked to contribute their own titles. The winner would win a $25 prize plus the honor of seeing their title emblazoned on the hardcover and its dust jacket. There is one dealer offering for sale a copy of the untitled review copy with the contest advertised on the book. It'll cost you an additional $50 plus the promised prize money to own that rare and unusual edition of this book. Several copies of the hardcover with and without the attractive dust jacket are also offered throughout the internet, all (I think) at affordable prices.