Leroy Yerxa’s Witch of Blackfen Moor

Leroy Yerxa’s novella Witch of Blackfen Moor appeared in Fantastic Adventures in December 1943. Leroy Yerxa (1915-1946) was a reasonably prolific American pulp writer who seemed to work mostly in the science fiction genre. I have not read any of his other work and he’s a writer totally new to me.

Witch of Blackfen Moor throws lots of gothic trappings at the reader. In a castle-like old house (apparently in England) live wealthy middle-aged Walter Brewster and his beautiful very much younger wife. The wife is not at all happy in the marriage. Her husband accuses her of wanting to consort with the Devil. Which is silly. Women don’t really have sex with the Devil do they? Or do they?

There’s a mystery about the birth of their child. Neither the mother nor the child survived. The ageing family doctor, Dr Quantry, is rather cagey when discussing the incident. It’s as if he knows some secret. Twenty years later Walter Brewster is still mourning the death of his daughter (the dead child was a girl). He’s obsessed by the crazy idea that the girl still lives. Which of course she does. Her name is Frances.

Then Walter Brewster encounters a very strange very scruffy man known as Monk, on a lonely road at night. Monk claims to have the answer to Walter’s quest.

Dr Quantry discovers the nature of the mystery surrounding Frances Brewster, but is it the whole explanation? Or the correct explanation. It’s a shocking explanation which devastates the doctor. Such things are unimaginable in a logical rational world. But he has seen things for himself which make it impossible for him to deny the horrible truth.

The fact that his young assistant Philip has fallen for Frances adds a complication. Dr Quantry knows that this is one romance that cannot possibly work. Poor Philip is in for a shock.

There are some moments of fairly visceral horror (by 1943 standards). Even touches of gore.

This is a very pulpy book and it’s a bit rough around the edges. Yerxa was not exactly a great prose stylist.

On the other hand he has taken some old ideas and given them new and original twists. And quite clever twists.

This is gothic fiction with some definite folkloric touches and perhaps even dark fairy tale touches. It certainly fits into the weird fiction category.

There are some far-fetched moments but also some very effective moments. Whether you’ll find the ending satisfactory is up to you but I thought it was interesting and it worked.

There is evil afoot, but with some touches of ambiguity. Evil exists in the world, real cosmic evil, but love exists as well. Can love conquer evil? Perhaps.

Witch of Blackfen Moor has its flaws but it’s a bit offbeat and it’s rather enjoyable. It’s a bit more than a straightforward gothic horror tale. In some ways its flaws make it more interesting. Recommended.

Armchair Fiction have paired this book with Karl Tanzler von Cosel’s bizarre and disturbing The Secret of Elena’s Tomb in one of their two-novel paperback editions.

Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders

I’m continuing to explore my new-found interest in honkaku, which is more or less the Japanese equivalent of the puzzle-plot murder mysteries of the golden age of detective fiction.

Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders, published in 1946, is one of the more celebrated examples and it’s even more celebrated as an example of a locked room puzzle. Louise Heal Kawai’s English translation has been published by Pushkin Vertigo.

The Ichiyanagi family were, during the Tokugawa Shogunate, the proprietors of a honjin or inn. But a honjin was not just an inn, it was an inn for members of the nobility travelling to and from Edo (the capital, now of course known as Tokyo). Owning a honjin conferred status and even to some extent membership of the nobility. So the Ichiyanagi family are a big deal in the district and are still fiercely proud of being descended from owners of a honjin. The latest heir, Kenzo, is about to marry Katsuko. Katsuko belongs to the Kubo family, wealthy farmers but of decidedly lower social status. The wedding has aroused much opposition within the Ichiyanagi family.

The bride and groom will spend their wedding night not in the rather grand main house but in the much smaller annexe house. They will not live to see the morning. Their lives will be cut short by brutal murder. When the bodies are discovered all of the doors and windows to the annexe house are locked from the inside.

There seems to be no mystery as to how the murderer got in. He got in the night before and hid. The footprints and other clues make that fairly obvious. How he got out again is however a baffling mystery.

The obvious suspect is a very disreputable man with only three fingers on one hand. He had been hanging around for several days and there is plenty of evidence suggesting that he was the murderer. There are also sound reasons to suspect that several other people have not been at all truthful in their accounts of their own movements.

Katsuko’s uncle and guardian, Ginzo, sends for a private detective, Kosuke Kindaichi. Kosuke Kindaichi is a rather colourful detective. He is very young and very scruffy and he stammers. He is also an ex-drug addict. He became addicted to drugs in San Francisco. He would have come to a very bad end had fate not stepped in in the form of a celebrated murder case. Kosuke Kindaichi solved the case and he made a discovery - being a detective is much more fun than using drugs.

Kindaichi is content to let the police gather the evidence. He then solves cases by making sense of evidence that the police are unable to make sense of. For all his eccentric appearance and habits this young man has a brilliant mind. He has another useful asset. He is a very pleasant and likeable young man. His charm even works on policemen who are only too happy to have his assistance on a case.

This is not just a locked room mystery, it’s a novel which is very ostentatiously and consciously a locked room mystery. It’s a bit like Penn Jillette explaining how Penn and Teller do their magic tricks, drawing attention to the fact that we are being tricked.

The actual solution to the locked room puzzle is extraordinarily ingenious and there’s lots of elaborate misdirection as well. Seishi Yokomizo goes to great pains at the end to explain how he accomplished some of this misdirection whilst still technically playing fair with us.

There is a theory that golden age detective stories are fundamentally conservative. The social order is undermined by murder but at the end of the story the social order is re-established, justice is done and we feel that everything is back to normal. The social order is secure. I certainly don’t get that feeling from this book. Maybe it’s a Japanese thing but I think it has more to do with the fact that the novel was written in the immediate aftermath of the war, with a society left in ruins. Nobody in 1946 could have predicted that Japan would not only survive but recover and thrive. The mood of this book is bleak and pessimistic. There’s a kind of epilogue to the novel that is unremittingly despairing.

I almost get the feeling that maybe his love for detective fiction was the only thing that kept Yokomizo going. Life is hopeless but if you immerse yourself in detective fiction it’s survivable. It was a grim period in his own life. As it happens things were about to get a whole lot better for him and he was about to achieve great success as a writer but at the time he sat down to write this book he seems to have been deeply pessimistic.

The Honjin Murders is a masterpiece of stage magic by a man who had absorbed the lessons taught by writers like John Dickson Carr and was confident enough to believe he could take them on at their own game. To a large degree he succeeds. Highly recommended.

Tomcat gave this one a rave review and I can't disagree with his assessment of it as a classic. And I can't find anything to disagree with in JJ's equally enthusiastic review.

Dornford Yates' Blood Royal

Dornford Yates (1885-1960) was one of the thriller writers singled out by Alan Bennett as belonging to the English Snobbery with Violence school. That in itself is enough to recommend his work as far as I’m concerned. Yates (whose real name was Cecil William Mercer) was actually an odd recruit to the thriller genre - he’d made his reputation as the writer of the celebrated Berry humorous stories. His popularity as a comic writer rivalled that of P. G. Wodehouse.

In 1927 Yates suddenly changed style dramatically with the first of his eight very successful Richard Chandos thrillers, Blind Corner, although he continued to write his humorous stories. One of the curious things about Yates’ fiction is that despite the sharp differences in style there’s a considerable overlap between his comic stories and his thrillers. Jonah Mansell is a major character in both the Berry stories and the thrillers, other characters from the Berry stories pop up from time to time in the thrillers and one of the heroes of his thrillers is married to a member of the Berry circle.

The Richard Chandos thrillers can be read as standalone novels although in my opinion it’s highly advisable to read Blind Corner before attempting the later books. Blind Corner introduces the heroes who will figure in the later adventures and provides some fairly essential backstory information on them.

Blood Royal was the third of the Chandos books. Like most of the others it’s set in Austria, or in this case in a mythical principality bordering Austria. Blood Royal was published in 1929 but in many ways it seems to belong to an earlier era and in fact it has some of the flavour of Anthony Hope’s Ruritanian thrillers such as his 1894 bestseller The Prisoner of Zenda. Yates’ principality of Riechtenburg seems a bit like Hope’s Ruritania suddenly transported to the late 1920s. The book deals with the disputed succession to the principality. Given the cataclysmic changes to the European scene that had occurred in the previous decade and the even more cataclysmic changes that would soon follow this makes the book seem a little dated. It is a little dated, but not in a bad way. In fact it’s fair to surmise that his slightly anachronistic feel was quite deliberate, that Yates was consciously looking back to an an earlier and more civilised era of benevolent princes, a world that was being swept away by unscrupulous politicians. Yates was certainly no fan of politicians. Given that within a few years of the publication of this novel Austria itself would be absorbed in to the Third Reich one cannot entirely blame him.

Richard Chandos and his friend George Hanbury are now, as a result of events chronicled in the earlier Chandos books, men of wealth and leisure. They are drawn back to Austria by ties of sentiment, having conceived a great fondness for the country in the course of their earlier adventures. So fond are they of Austria that they have been spending a good deal of time learning to speak German, an accomplishment that will prove to be crucially important in this new adventure.

Caught in a rainstorm in their Rolls-Royce (a Yates hero always drives a Rolls-Royce) they  have a fateful encounter with Duke Paul of Riechtenburg, heir to the throne of that principality. Duke Paul was in the process of being kidnapped by the sinister Major Grieg of the Riechtenburg Black Hussars. Chandos and Hanbury have stumbled upon a conspiracy to instal Paul’s cousin as Prince, the reigning prince having suffered what had been assumed to be a fatal stroke. This might be none of their affair but no Englishman is going to stand by and watch someone being kidnapped.

The conspiracy proves to be rather bewildering complex, everything hingeing on if and when the reigning prince succumbs to his illness. Soon afterwards Chandos and Hanbury encounter the beautiful and high-spirited Grand Duchess Leonie, an encounter that will be very fateful indeed for Chandos.

If an Englishman cannot stand by when a kidnapping is in progress even less can he stand aloof when a lady is in distress. Chandos and Hanbury are now caught up in a deadly game for high stakes, but such adventures are just the sort of pastimes they enjoy.

In his book Clubland Heroes Richard Usborne decribes Yates’ style (in his thrillers) as being rather biblical, and he has a point. It’s a style that works surprisingly well, lending the  far-fetched but enjoyable tale an air of gravitas.

There’s less action in Blood Royal than in the previous Chandos books but there’s also more suspense. A race against time is a time-honoured technique for creating excitement and Yates handles this element with great skill. His heroes know that time is against them but they can never be sure just how much time they have.

A thriller needs a villain and Major Grieg and Duke Johann (who is trying to usurp the throne from the rightful heir) serve this purpose well enough. More interesting than the actual villains is Duke Paul. He is undeniably the rightful heir but he is weak, vacillating, self-indulgent, selfish and treacherous. He is the man whose throne the heroes are trying to save but he is a man for whom they have nothing but contempt. The struggle to ensure his succession is very much a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils. Duke Paul is a fool and a coward but he will have wise counsellors and his weakness will prove to be his greatest asset. He will rule well because he lacks the will to do active evil. Duke Johann is much more intelligent and far more competent but that’s what makes him dangerous - he does have the will to do active evil. This gives the book a complexity and a degree of political subtlety, and ambiguity, that is quite unexpected in a thriller of this period.

Yates was a man with a considerable mistrust of the modern world. He could even be described as a reactionary. But he is an intelligent and thoughtful reactionary.

The romantic subplot is equally complex. Chandos has fallen hard for the Grand Duchess and she obviously reciprocates his affections but if they succeed in their endeavours the result will be to doom their love. 

Yates was certainly a man who knew how to spin an exciting yarn and how to leaven it skillfully with romance. Blood Royal is a stylish and accomplished thriller by a writer at the top of his game. Highly recommended.

Dornford Yates, Perishable Goods

Perishable Goods, published in 1928, was a sequel to Dornford Yates’ very successful 1927 thriller Blind Corner. Once again Richard Chandos and his friends are up against master criminal “Rose” Noble.

“Rose” Noble has kidnapped Jonathan Mansell’s cousin Adele. His real agenda is to get revenge on Mansell and to get some of the fortune that Mansell, Chandos and George Hanbury stole from under his nose in Blind Corner. As an added complication, Mansell is in love with Adele, who is married to his cousin “Boy” Pleydell. This fact is known to “Rose” Noble and he makes use of this knowledge to put further pressure on Mansell.

Perishable Goods follows the formula of Blind Corner very closely, with a chase through Europe culminating in the siege of a castle in Carinthia in Austria.

While Mansell, Chandos and Hanbury are the heroes they can be pretty ruthless as well. They don’t believe in letting the police interfere - they prefer to take the law into their own hands and to deliver exemplary justice to evil-doers. Since their Rolls-Royce cars are equipped with secret compartments loaded with weapons they’re in a pretty good position to do so.

The weakness of these thrillers is perhaps the fact that Mansell is a bit too clever, and the hero-worship of him by Chandos (who narrates both novels) gets a bit tiresome.

There are plenty of narrow escapes, a considerable amount of blood-letting and extensive and quite skillful use of the castle location, with secret passageways and trapdoors. It’s exciting, but not quite up to the standard of Blind Corner.

While they don’t compare in quality to the thrillers of Sapper and of John Buchan from the era, or of Edgar Wallace’s thrillers, Dornford Yates’ novels are still good examples of the British literary thriller of the interwar years and Blind Corner is certainly worth tracking down. If you’re going to read Perishable Goods you really must read Blind Corner first.

Dornford Yates was the literary pseudonym of the prolific English author Cecil William Mercer (1885-1960). He wrote eight thrillers featuring Richard Chandos as well as a series of humorous novels that interestingly enough featured many of the same characters who appeared in his thrillers.

Blind Corner, Dornford Yates

Dornford Yates (1885-1960) was one of the most popular British authors of thrillers in the years between the two world wars. In fact Yates, Sapper and John Buchan he could be said to be the big three of the thriller genre at that period. All three authors are unjustly neglected today, Yates even more so than Sapper and Buchan.

Blind Corner, published in 1927, was the first of his thrillers featuring Richard Chandos.

A young Englishman named Richard Chando, by an accident of fate (the kind that happens so frequently in thrillers) witnesses a murder while travelling in France. The murderer and his victim had been discussing a treasure that one of them apparently had information about. Chandos promises the dying man that he will look after his dog and when he examines the dog’s collar he finds that he now possesses the key to finding the treasure.

He fails to report the matter to the police, presumably because he scents adventure in the offing. On his return to England he has another chance encounter, but this one turns out not to be accidental at all. He meets Jonathan Mansel and through him discovers that the dead man was a British intelligence officer.

This is not however going to be a spy thriller. The treasure had belonged to a nobleman in Austria who was literally a robber baron. He had hidden his loot in a well on his estate and now several centuries later Mansel intends to find it.

They are not the only ones hunting the treasure. The murderer has joined forces with a notorious criminal named Rose Noble, a particularly dangerous but extremely cunning man. The two gangs become involved in what is in effect a private war. Mansel and his friends are holed up in the dead nobleman’s castle while Rose Noble and his gang lay siege to it. In some ways there’s not much difference between the two gangs. Neither has any legal right to the treasure. But there is a crucial difference - Mansel and his friends are gentlemen who are loyal to each other while Rose Noble and his crew are lower-class thugs who would cheerfully slit each other’s throats.

Both gangs are now caught up in a race as they pursue the treasure from different directions, from within and from outside the castle.

Blind Corner is slightly different in tone from most British thrillers of that age since the heroes are in fact engaging in activities that are in fact quite illegal, even if they are decent chaps and thoroughly brave and noble. In that respect they’re closer to gentlemen thieves like Raffles than to conventional heroes such as Bulldog Drummond.

Yates wrote about three dozen novels in various genres including eight Richard Chandos thrillers.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable adventure yarn and well worth tracking down.