Weird Tales: Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin (Four Square, 1965 / first published 1946)

Though on the face of it this paperback looks to be yet another enticing, horror-adjacent offering from ‘60s New English Library imprint Four Square, readers familiar with Bruce Montgomery aka Edmund Crispin’s Gervase Fen novels will realise that the publishers have actually been pretty disingenuous in presenting this reprint as a straight Satanic thriller.

As the aforementioned readers will be well aware, the Fen novels are in fact broadly comedic, foregrounding an idiosyncratic campus humour pitched somewhere between P.G. Wodehouse and Bruce Robinson’s ‘Withnail & I’, leavened with cheeky, fourth wall-breaking asides and enough literary/classical in-jokes to make anyone who has not committed Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury’ and Bullfinch’s ‘Age of Fable’ to memory feel slightly inadequate as a human being.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, to be sure, but personally I’m happy to indulge Montgomery/Crispin’s whims, and find his books fairly amusing. More-so, I suspect, than the hypothetical 1965 reader who came into this one expecting some serious, Dennis Wheatley type affair, only to find our protagonist, retiring church music composer Geoffrey Vinter, blundering around causing havoc in the sporting goods section of a London department store during the first chapter, as he struggles to obtain the butterfly net which his friend, Oxford literary professor and amateur detective Gervase Fen, has ordered him to bring forthwith the the fictional Devonshire cathedral city of Tolnbridge.

Vinter, it transpires, has been summoned to Tolnbridge to stand in for the cathedral organist, who has been hospitalised after being bashed about the head by unknown assailants. Before he gets there however, we get to share at some length Geoffrey’s dismay at navigating Paddington Station during rush hour, his attempts to buy and imbibe several glasses of beer as he awaits his train, his developing friendship with the hapless shop clerk who has followed him from the department store in search of adventure, and his lengthy and tormented interactions with the other occupants of his train carriage, only a small handful of whom will go on to play any role in the unfolding mystery.

Amidst all this, the fact that several shambolic attempts are made on Geoffrey’s life during his journey thickens the plot, but otherwise scarcely seems worthy of note.

By chapter three (page 31), our man has finally arrived in Tolnbridge, which I take to be modelled to some extent on Montgomery’s adopted home of Totnes, although it differs from that fine town in a number of important details, not least the dominant presence of a cathedral, around which most of the book’s subsequent “action” (if such it may be termed) accumulates.

Significantly, Tolnbridge is also notrorious for “..a frenetic outburst of witch trials in the early seventeenth century, and the equally frenetic outburst of witchcraft and devil-worship which provoked them, and in which several clergy of the diocese were disgracefully involved”;

“‘This was the last part of the country,’ said Fen, “in which the trial and burning of witches went on. Elsewhere it had ceased fifty or sixty years earlier - and then hanging, not burning, had been the normal method of execution. The doings in Tolnbridge stank so that a Royal Commission was sent down to investigate. But when the Bishop Thurston died, the business more of less ceased. One of the last celebrated witch-trials in these islands was the Weir business in Edinburgh; that was in 1670. Tolnbrige continued for forty years after that, into the eighteenth century - the century of Johnson, and Pitt, and the French Revolution. Only a step away from our own times. A depressingly fragile barrier - and human nature doesn’t change much.’”

After arriving at the wrought-iron gates of the clergy-house, Vinter and newfound pal Fielding are introduced to the assortment of ecclesiastical hangers-on who will go on to comprise the story’s pool of suspects (if you don't know difference between a Precentor and a Canon, you’ll be pretty much at sea here). With Fen - effectively the Holmes to Geoffrey’s Watson - stubbornly failing to make an appearance however, there’s little for the pair to do but retreat to the nearest pub - which in this case is the ‘Whale & Compass’ (perhaps based on Totnes’s late lamented Kingsbridge Inn, or so I’d like to imagine).

To cut a long story  short, Gervase Fen eventually makes his appearance a few pints later, on page 58. Each of Crispin’s books seems to feature the detective adopting a new, loud and disruptive hobby, and in ‘Holy Disorders’ he is inexplicably fixated with capturing, and apparently performing unspecified experiments upon, various insects - hence both his demand for a butterfly net and his extended absence during daylight hours. The reason why Fen is residing in Tolnbridge, apparently at the expense of the church, is never sufficiently explained insofar as I recall, but be that as it may - with our sleuth finally accounted for, we can finally get on with the murder mystery component of the novel.

In addition to the fate of the aforementioned organist (who has been poisoned in his hospital bed, following the earlier assault), this comprises a ghoulish and somewhat surreal variation of the Locked Room mystery, in which the widely disliked Precentor, a Dr Butler, is inexplicably crushed beneath the colossal tombstone of ill-regarded medieval luminary St Ephraim - a tragedy which seemingly occurred when all doors to the building were locked, and no one else was inside.

Eccentric though his writing may be in most other respects, Montgomery/Crispin remained staunchly dedicated to the conventions of the old fashioned whodunnit, and as such, much of the text from hereon in is taken up with the gathering and consideration of alibis, methods and motives, all of which is unpacked at a length liable to prove excruciating to readers who are not fans of classic drawing room mysteries, including the provision of both a map of the crime scene and a lengthy suspect-by-suspect recap to help logically-minded readers reach their conclusion prior to what passes for ‘the big reveal’.

Although published in 1946, ‘Holy Disorders’ was evidently written during the war years, which lends an interesting backdrop to proceedings, reminding me somewhat of Powell & Pressburger’s bucolic wartime fantasias (particularly ‘A Canterbury Tale’ (1944)). 

There are frequent references to the war effort, to idle soldiers hanging about hither and yon awaiting orders, and to the latest news from overseas, and it is little surprise therefore that a further quirk is added to the already over-stuffed plot when it is revealed that the powers-that-be have detected illicit radio transmissions emanating from the vicinity of the cathedral, leading the discovery of a radio set hidden in an inaccessible part of the building, and the subsequent assumption that a cabal of Nazi spies must be abroad in sleepy Tolnbridge.

Amidst all this incident meanwhile, there is even room, surprisingly, for a little romance, as Geoffrey Vinter finds himself smitten with the daughter of the ill-fated Precentor - a graceful and demure young lady who, much in the manner of female characters in novels like this one, uncomplainingly acts as den mother and cook to the assorted oddballs hanging around the clergy-house. Like any good ‘Brief Encounter’ era Englishman, Geoffrey delivers his proposal of marriage whilst staring fixedly ahead at a row of radishes. (“Brutish roots,” he reflects, “what do they know of the agonies of a middle-aged bachelor proposing marriage?”)

This whole business is actually surprisingly affecting, forcing us to reflect on the fact that, whilst Edmund Crispin may have adopted the voice of a gout-addled college rector for his writing, Bruce Montgomery was actually only twenty-five years old when he completed this novel, and presumably subject to the same passions as other young men making their way in the world, and what have you.

With the novel’s rambling plotting already so loaded with under-developed tangents, it’s no surprise meanwhile to discover that the Black Mass / devil worship angle - though assuredly present - never amounts to much more than fairly half-hearted diversion. The irony here however is that the brief passages in which Crispin’s writing shifts away from comedy to explore more macabre subject matter are actually extremely effective, evoking an atmosphere worthy of the era’s horror/weird fiction greats;

“They paused by the hollow where the witches had burned. It was overgrown, neglected. Weeds and brambles straggled over it. The iron post stood gaunt against the fading light. They found rings through which the ropes and chains had passed. The air of the place was almost unbearably desolate, but in imagination Geoffrey saw the hillside thronged, above and below, with men and women whose eyes glowed with lust and fright and appalling pleasure at the spectacle to be offered them. […] A woman they had known - a next-door neighbour perhaps - a familiar face now become a mask of fear in whose presence they crossed fingers and muttered the Confiteor. Who next? And in the breast of that woman, what ecstasy of terror or vain repentance or affirmation? What crying to Apollyon and the God of Flies…? It needed little fancifulness to catch the echo of such scenes, even now. And here, they had accumulated - week after week, month after month, year after year, until even the crowds were sick and satiated with the screaming and the smell of burned flesh and hair, and only the necessary officers were present at the ending of these wretches, and the people stayed in their houses, wondering if it would not have been better to face the malignant, tangible living rather than the piled sepulchres of the malignant, intangible dead.”

I mean, you certainly don’t get that sort of thing in the middle of a Jeeves & Wooster.

Thereafter, this sense of a lurking evil underlying the city is given an atavistic twist via an extremely sinister (though underdeveloped) sub-plot which sees Fen interviewing a teenage girl who has been brain-washed through the use of drugs into participating in the Black Mass and carrying out the diabolical whims of her masters.

Sadly, the contemporary Satanic ceremony which Fen and Vinter subsequently manage to infiltrate proves both boring and rather farcical - it seems that the novel’s villains are merely using diabolism as a front for their more legitimately nefarious goals, again for reasons which remain somewhat unclear - but those ‘Witchfinder General’ / ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ vibes are really nailed down again during a section of the book in which (for reasons which appear entirely superfluous to the central narrative) our heroes are invited to read the long supressed secret diary of seventeenth century witch hunter Bishop Thurston. A section of this diary is reproduced in full, effectively comprising a short-story-within-a-novel, and once again, it is excellent stuff - a nasty little tale with a supernatural twist which could easily have found a home in any given ‘70s horror/ghost story anthology.

More representative of overall tone of the novel however are incidents such as that in which Fen and Vinter encounter a ‘Royal Professor of Mathematics’ who seems intent on reciting the entirety of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ from memory, only to lose him again a few pages later following yet another visit to the pub, or the chapter which finds the investigators extracting much merriment from a visit to a potential suspect whose home boasts a pet raven resting upon a bust of Pallas above a chamber door, and a wife named Lenore, yet who pleads complete ignorance of the work of Edgar Allan Poe. (“I haven’t much time for verse - he’s good, is he?”)

In conclusion, you might say that, if Montgomery/Crispin had taken a slightly more serious approach to is storytelling there and had engaged more thoroughly with the more macabre elements of his tale, he could have written an absolutely splendid horror novel here. But, I suspect that’s rather like saying that if Noel Coward had ditched all that camp stuff and got a bit more into the rugged outdoors, he could have written a cracking western. 

At the end of the day, the Crispin/Fen novels are what they are. They are entirely reflective of the peculiarities and obsessions of their unconventional creator, but if you can angle your antenna somewhere in the vicinity of his preferred wavelength, they remain thoroughly entertaining, and certainly a little different from anything else you’re liable to find knocking about in your local Oxfam. 

 

Weird Tales: The Evil Eye by Boileau & Narcejac (Four Square, 1961)

Before being subsumed into our dearly beloved New English Library at some point in the 1960s, paperback imprint Four Square published a wide variety of interesting stuff, including a lot of obscure and/or sought after titles (often in translation) which have rarely been reprinted since.

Four Square books also often featured bold, attention-grabbing artwork, of which this fabulous, comic book style ink & watercolour number from acclaimed SF/fantasy illustrator Josh Kirby provides a perfect example [the signature in bottom right confirms this as Kirby’s work, although it looks drastically different from his later, better known style]. As such, obscurities from the company’s long-lost back-list have done much to liven up second-hand book shopping in the UK across the decades, although collecting them can also prove a frustrating experience.

Due to their especially cheap binding (or so I’m assuming), Four Square’s paperbacks have a tendency to look reasonably well preserved on the outside, but to crack and fall to pieces, scattering dried out pages to the four winds, as soon as some poor fool tries to read them. Thankfully I just about managed to make it through ‘The Evil Eye’ without destroying it in the process, but… I’m not sure that many future readers will get a chance to enjoy the charms of this particular copy, let’s put it that way.

In the English-speaking world, Pierre Boileau (1906–1989) and Thomas Narcejac (1908 –1998) will almost certainly get more name recognition from film fans than literary types. With their names appearing ominously on the writing credits of Clouzot’s ‘Les Diaboliques’ (1955), Franju’s ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ (1960) and Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ (1958), its safe to say that the duo’s residual influence has sunk deep into the very bones of the horror and thriller genres, as well as those of auteur and arthouse cinema more generally.

Back in France of course, Boileau-Narcejac are equally remembered for their achievements in the field of putting words together on the page, but for whatever reason, translations of their work have remained extremely scarce over the years. So, naturally I was keen to take the opportunity to check out some of their prose, despite the risk of the book crumbling to dust in my hands.

It’s probably fair to assume that ‘The Evil Eye’ (‘Le Mauvais Oeil’, originally published in France in 1956) is a minor work within the duo’s oeuvre, weighing in at just over 120 pages, and sadly the horror spin that Four Square’s packaging puts on the material turns out to be almost entirely erroneous, with the protagonist’s suspicion that he is afflicted with the power of the “evil eye” merely numbering among a number of fantasies and delusions which flicker through his unsettled mind through the course of the novel.

In fact, ‘The Evil Eye’ barely even qualifies as a thriller in the conventional sense of the term. What we have here rather is kind of a downbeat, quasi-gothic character study, in the ever-popular “dysfunctional remnants of an aristocratic family bounce off each other in their decaying old house” vein which went on to become so beloved of filmmakers in the late ‘60s / early ‘70s, for whatever reason.

It's a testament however to the talents of Boileau-Narcejac (and indeed to their translator on this occasion, Geoffrey Sainsbury) that this rather morose and uneventful tale actually remains a thoroughly engrossing read, drawing me into the story far more deeply than I suspected it would once I’d got the basic gist.

Our protagonist here is Rémy, a young man who has been paralysed from the waist down since infancy, when his mother apparently died under traumatic yet mysterious circumstances. We join him on the morning when, aged eighteen, and following the ministrations of a questionable ‘healer’ hired by his emotionally distant father, he gets out of bed and walks.

Disappointingly for Rémy, this Lazarus-like recovery prompts surprisingly little jubilation from either his brash, business-minded uncle or the two female servants who have provided him with his only real human contact over the years, and so, largely left to his own devices, he sets out to undertake the long-delayed process of growing up, digging into the inevitable backlog of uncomfortable family secrets in the process.

Intelligent, self-possessed and callously confident, yet at the same time hopefully naïve and chronically lacking in the kind of practical experience which most of us have gained by the time we reach adulthood, Rémy makes for an interesting and complex viewpoint character. Though he is not necessarily an “unreliable narrator” in the usual sense of the term, a lifetime of near isolation has left him with an unhealthily introspective approach to life, and throughout the novel, we’re forced to bear witness as he twists the people and events around him into his own melodramatic, self-centred narrative, unable to understand the feelings of others or to comprehend the more prosaic motivations behind their actions.

Though ‘The Evil Eye’ offers few of the shattering narrative revelations or surprise handbrake turns that Boileau-Narcejac’s cinematic reputation may have led one to expect, its strengths lie elsewhere – in the deceptively complex exploration of character dynamics, and in the cultivation of a richly ominous yet finely tuned atmosphere.

In fact, the book is steeped in that very particular world of seedy, grey-skied decay which seems to persistently creep into French culture of this era, from the damp-stained walls, musty bedclothes and corked, half empty bottles to a persistent impression of poverty and bankruptcy dogging the heels of the purportedly wealthy characters, and of the grindingly tedious, antiquated duties still performed by their indentured servants, long after modernity should have rendered them irrelevant.

Inevitably, the duo’s writing reminded me somewhat of the precise, descriptive prose of Georges Simenon, even as they push things far further than he would have done, including a few extraordinary, opium-scented flights of poetic fancy which can't help but push the tale toward the eerie, indefinable realm of what we’re obliged in this context to call le fantastique.

For all that it’s essentially a naturalistic, psychological tale in fact, one could perhaps apply a supernatural explanation to the book’s final paragraph ‘shock’ ending. But, this is never directly implied, cleverly leaving readers to map their own beliefs and gut feelings over the plainly recounted events.

All in all then, a surprisingly rewarding few nights reading, well worth making time for if you can manage to track down a copy that’s still in one piece.

Lovecraft on Film Appendum: Two Panthers.

For reasons outlined in my previous post, I‘m unable to show off any vintage Lovecraft paperbacks which include ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’ amongst their contents, so failing that, now seems as good a time as any to share these scans of two rather battered remnants of Panther’s early ‘70s UK horror range, which I recently added to my collection.

Both are blessed with hugely evocative wraparound cover illustrations which I think capture the feel of the contents pretty well, in its own idiosyncratic fashion. The artwork for ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ (1972 printing) is unmistakably tbears the seal of the great Ian Miller (who is still working to this day, and was producing Lovecraft-inspired canvasses as recently as 2014), but an artwork credit for ‘The Tomb’ (1969 printing) sadly eludes me.

“It’s not often you get a Lovecraft for 20p,” I recall the lady behind the counter in Michael’s Bookshop in Ramsgate remarking, but a glimpse at the eldritch sigils inscribed upon the interior pages, together with their general condition, certainly helped justify this uniquely affordable price-tag.

‘Haunter of the Dark’ meanwhile is in slightly better shape, but still has a badly cracked spine, leaving pages ready to fly to the four winds as soon as some poor soul actually tries to read it. Ah well. Nonetheless, I’ve tried my best to take some scans of the full, wraparound covers, which can be enjoyed or downloaded by clicking on the images below. Apologies for the slightly blurriness on the ‘Haunter..’ scan – it was difficult to get it lined up on the scanner without further damaging the binding.

Weird Tales / October Horrors 2019 # 9: The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham (Penguin, 1971 / originally published 1908)

“Oliver Haddo ceased to play. Neither of them stirred. At last Margaret sought by an effort to regain her self-control.
‘I shall begin to think that you really are a magician,’ she said, lightly.
‘I could show you strange things if you cared to see them,’ he answered, again raising his eyes to hers.
‘I don’t think you will ever get me to believe in occult philosophy,’ she laughed.
‘Yet it reigned in Persia with the magi, it endowed India with wonderful traditions, to civilised Greece to the sound of Orpheus’s lyre.’
He stood before Margaret, towering over her in his huge bulk; and there was a singular fascination in his gaze. It seemed that he spoke only to conceal from her that he was putting forth now all the power that was in him.
His voice grew very low, and it was so seductive that Margaret’s brain reeled. The sound of it was overpowering like too sweet a fragrance.
‘I tell you that for this art nothing is impossible. It commands the elements, and knows the language of the stars, and directs the planets in their courses. The moon at its bidding falls blood red from the sky. The dead rise up and form into ominous words the night wind that moans through their skulls. Heaven and Hell are in its province; and all forms, lovely and hideous; and love and hate. With Circe’s wand it can change men into beasts of the field, and to them it can give a monstrous humanity. Life and death are in the right hand and in the left of him who knows its secrets. It confers wealth by the transmutation of metals and immortality by its quintessence.’
Margaret could not hear what he said. A gradual lethargy seized her under his baleful glance, and she had not even the strength to wish to free herself. She seemed bound to him already by hidden chains.
‘If you have powers, show them,’ she whispered, hardly conscious that she spoke.”
- pp. 90-91

W. Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) is not usually a name that springs to mind when one thinks of the great horror writers early 20th century. Indeed, the best-selling author of ‘Of Human Bondage’ and ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ goes entirely unmentioned in H.P. Lovecraft’s wide-ranging survey Supernatural Horror in Literature (although, far further down the line, I gather Stephen King has expressed a fondness for his work).

Given Maugham’s reputation for florid Victoriana and good, old-fashioned story-telling, I approached his 1908 novel ‘The Magician’ - a tale inspired by the (broadly negative) impression Maugham formed of Aleister Crowley whilst both men were living in Paris in around 1902 - expecting something reasonably down to earth.

I picked the book up recently partly just out of sheer curiosity, and partly to soak up some fin de siècle Parisian atmosphere. I suppose I was anticipating some kind of slightly bohemian society melodrama with a few sinister overtones, framing a thinly veiled, industrial strength character assassination of a legendary blaggard – and whilst the book certainly delivers on this score, as it went on, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself reading a full-blooded supernatural horror story that wouldn’t have been out of place in Bram Stoker’s canon, further enlivened by some wildly excessive, hallucinogenic excursions into realms of depraved occult phantasmagoria. So, yeah - that’s certainly a recommendation that fans of this era’s literary fantastique can take to the bank.

Central to the story of course is Maugham’s Crowley analogue, Oliver Haddo - an exaggerated and titanic caricature of The Great Beast who bestrides ‘The Magician’ with a force of will that makes it feel as if the prose itself is cowering in his presence.

Clearly unconcerned about the prospect of upsetting his character’s real life model, Maugham’s descriptions of Haddo dwell obsessively upon his physical girth; we are constantly reminded that he grotesquely, unnaturally fat, as well as sweaty, pale and morbidly unhealthy in all manner of other respects. (Curiously, this characterisation feels slightly prophetic, given that, by my calculations, Crowley was a mere 27 years old and in fairly gaunt physical shape, having recently returned from one of his debilitating mountain-climbing exploits, when Maugham met him in Paris.)

Haddo’s conversation meanwhile echoes his physical appearance, in that is obscenely verbose and self-regarding. After making his entrance to the British ex-pats dining club where are heroine Margaret, her fiancé Arthur and their party are enjoying their supper, Haddo immediately sets about bullying and haranguing the assembled artists and dilettantes until, stung by his barbs or disquieted by the bad atmosphere he has introduced, they all make their excuses and call it a night, leaving Haddo to regale our protagonists with tales of his unparalleled bravery and skill in the field of big game hunting (a clear analogue for Crowley’s mountaineering), alongside darker hints of his sinister occult beliefs.

Although Haddo is a grotesque and cartoonish figure, Maugham does an excellent job here of capturing the aspect of Crowley’s character which has allowed him to remain such a fascinating figure within our culture – and, in the context of this novel, a frightening one too. Namely, the fact that whilst he may have been a liar, egomaniac, wastrel, blowhard, confidence trickster, sexual predator, drug addict, bully, spendthrift, really crappy poet and wanton abuser of men, women, children and animals alike, at the same time, he could never be entirely written off as a fake.

That’s not to say that Crowley possessed the kind of supernatural powers which are attributed here to Oliver Haddo, but for all his myriad failings as a human being, his work in the field of ceremonial magic, and the philosophy which accompanied it, have proved sufficiently revelatory to have entirely redefined the discourse surrounding his chosen subject area across the span of an entire century, whilst his dedication to his craft, and his associated feats of endurance, stamina, memory and persuasion, remain remarkable.

These latter qualities are carried over wholesale to the fictional Haddo, the legitimacy of whose powers is first indicated by his forceful gaze, which, in an identical manner to that which can be observed in the most famous photographs of Crowley, has the uncanny quality of seeming to look through, rather than at, the object of his gaze.

As we will gradually learn, Haddo’s learning and intellect also appear to be vast (he can quote entire tracts of books on a wide variety of subjects from memory), he plays the piano like a veritable demon, and, according to a letter helpfully provided by a former university colleague whom our hero contacts to learn more about this troublesome rascal, his achievements in the fields of hunting and sports are genuine and widely acknowledged.

During the book’s first real horror set-piece, we find Haddo – who has accompanied his new ‘friends’ to the fairground, largely against their wishes – intimidating an Egyptian snake-charmer with a tirade of terrible and forbidden incantations in his own language, before coaxing the deadly cobra into biting him on the arm, apparently suffering no ill effect from the fatal venom, and promptly snapping the creature’s neck.

Clearly Haddo – like the notoriously spiteful and litigious Crowley – is not a man you’d care to get on the wrong side of, in spite of his boorish public persona. But, of course, that is exactly what happens here, as the upstanding Arthur (it’s difficult not to picture him as being played by the aptly named David Manners from Browning’s ‘Dracula’ and Ulmer’s ‘The Black Cat’) subjects Haddo to “a sound thrashing” after the ill-mannered brute kicks his fiancée’s pet dog in a fit of pique.

Thereafter, the gargantuan magus instigates his elaborate scheme of vengeance, bending the impressionable Margaret to his indomitable will and eventually coaxing her into marriage, after which ‘The Magician’ falls into a similar formula to Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, as Arthur, Margaret’s best friend Susie and Dr Porhoët - a genial French surgeon with a special interest in Alchemy who acts as the novel’s Van Helsing character – become a close-knit unit, united by their determination to free their mutual friend from Haddo’s malign influence.

One area in which Maugham’s creation departs significantly from the real life Crowley is that of the precise nature of his magic(k)al work. The author seems to have been either unfamiliar with, or uninterested in, the ‘Western esoteric’ tradition of ceremonial magic from which Crowley’s practice originated, with the enactment of rituals and spiritual communion with supernatural intelligences mentioned only fleetingly in the text (and then only in the vague context of unspeakable, implicitly orgiastic, bacchanal rites and so forth).

Instead, Oliver Haddo is portrayed as a kind of modern day alchemist, working toward his abominable goals through chemical experiments which, for the modern reader, seem to veer closer to the realm of mad science than black magic, digging deep into that fascinating, pre-20th century hinterland of weirdness in which cutting edge chemistry seems to exist side-by-side with the blackest of ancient diabolism.

To his credit, Maugham seems to have conducted an absolute ton of research in this area, and ‘The Magician’ verily overflows with esoteric lore, as the works of figures such as Paracelsus, Éliphas Lévi and Hermes Trismegistus are discussed at length, whilst Dr Porhoët bangs off lists of (genuine) priceless Latin grimoires which could have given Lovecraft himself palpitations.

Combined with the novel’s parallel interest in exploring the more romantic and macabre aspects of both classical and comparatively recent visual art, which repeatedly had me pausing my reading to google up images of the works the characters are discussing (both Margaret and Susie are in Paris as aspiring painters, so there’s a lot of art chat), and the overall effect is pretty intoxicating.

For my money, the most remarkable part of ‘The Magician’ is the chapter setting out Haddo’s seduction / establishment of mental control over Margaret. Written from her point of view, the sequence of events begins when Haddo gains admission to her lodgings under the pretext of being struck by some kind of medical emergency. Once ensconced, he begins to slowly lure her (and by extension, we the readers) into his trap, initial acting with great humbleness and civility, before he turns his eye to the prints of paintings pinned upon his victim’s wall and begins holding forth about them with great eloquence, before ranging freely through the canon of sensuous and decadent art, as if trying to batter his listener into submission through sheer over-powering rhetoric.

He then makes his way to the piano, were he unleashes torrents of spell-binding, demoniac music, the like of which poor old Margaret has never heard in her life. And finally, once she is thoroughly cowed by his over-bearing presence, he makes his way to the kitchen and, producing a vail of strange, blue powder, treats her to a demonstration of its startling power;

“Immediately a bright flame sprang up, and Margaret gave a cry of alarm. Oliver looked at her quickly and motioned her to remain still. She saw that the water was on fire. It was burning as brilliantly, as hotly, as if it were common gas; and it burned with the same dry, hoarse roar. Suddenly it was extinguished. She looked forward and saw that the bowl was empty.
The water had been consumed, as though it were straw, and not a drop remained. She passed her hand absently across her forehead.
‘But water cannot burn,’ she muttered to herself.
It seemed that Haddo knew what she thought, for he smiled strangely.
‘Do you know that nothing more destructive can be invented than this blue powder, and I have enough to burn up all the water in Paris? Who dreamt that water might burn like chaff?’
[…]
‘He took a long breath, and his eyes glittered with a devilish ardour. His voice was hoarse with overwhelming emotion.
‘Sometimes I am haunted by the wild desire to have witnessed the great and final scene when the irrevocable flames poured down the river, hurrying along the streams of the earth, searching out the moisture in all growing things, tearing it even from the eternal rocks; when the flames poured down like the rushing of the wind, and all that lived fled before them until the came to the sea; and the sea itself was consumed with vehement fire.’”

Haddo then urges Margaret, who by this point is thoroughly under his control, to breathe deeply of the fumes produced by the blue powder…. and after that, we’re off to the races, basically;

Another point of differentiation between Haddo and Crowley is that Maugham’s character is the vastly wealthy skein of an ancient, aristocratic family (rather than merely pretending to be), and, following Margaret’s elopement with the blighter, we are treated to some delightfully coy ‘intimations’ of their misbegotten life together, as they mix with the highest of high-rollers in Monaco.

It’s amusing here to contemplate an era when a lady’s chronic moral degradation is shudderingly revealed in the fact that she tells a dirty joke during dinner and dares to tip her hat to “a woman known to be of low virtue”, but on the other hand, the implications of after-hours debauchery in the pleasure palaces of the Riviera in this section of the book also carry a pungent whiff of brimstone, suggestive of a debased, morally bankrupt European aristocracy drifting rudderless into the jaws of the First World War.

The final act of ‘The Magician’ however is where things get really wild, cementing the novel’s horror credentials. As our heroes converge upon Haddo’s blighted family seat in Staffordshire (in the tradition of Poe and, later, Lovecraft, vegetation fails to grow upon the blasted landscape surrounding his night-haunted abode), we’re treated in quick succession to a series of set pieces that could have come straight from a 1930s issue of ‘Weird Tales’, leaving us in no doubt as to the novel’s supernatural worldview.

A necromantic séance on a moonless night, a life-or-death battle with Haddo’s spectrally projected avatar, and, finally, the terrible, sanity-shaking sights which await our protagonists when they eventually batter their way into the furnace-like interior of the locked attic laboratory atop the magus’s decrepit stately home – dark secrets which, needless to say, will remain unrevealed here.

Considered with over a century’s hindsight, ‘The Magician’ feels like one of those fascinating works which seems to gather and reflect influence in all kind of unexpected directions. As well of potentially drawing from Stoker alongside the legends surrounding the real life Crowley, Maugham also seems to have drawn here from the success of George du Maurier’s 1894 novel ‘Trilby’ (which introduced the world to the character of Svengali), whilst the book’s take on contemporary alchemy may also have found an echo in the unheimlich imaginings of Hanns Heinz Ewers’ influential but deeply questionable ‘Alarune’, published a few years later in 1911.

Thereafter, the influence of Maugham’s book can arguably be felt to some extent in all of the mesmeric Satanic demagogues who would soon be romping all over the shadier reaches of popular culture, perhaps even playing into the creation of some of the greatest works of early American horror cinema, with both Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig in the aforementioned ‘The Black Cat’ (1934) and the twisted homunculi sealed in bell jars by Ernest Thesiger’s Dr Pretorius in Whale’s ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ (1935) embodying elements which could potentially have been pulled from the lurking shadow of Oliver Haddo. (1)

Meanwhile, ‘The Magician’ also seems noteworthy as one of the only fictional works I can recall in which an author has had the cast-iron balls necessary to present a thinly veiled portrait of a still-living individual, portraying them as a diabolical, murderous villain.

In view of Aleister Crowley’s tendency to let rip against his ‘enemies’ with curses, magickal battles and wildly extravagant lawsuits, I think he must have either had a soft spot for Maugham, or else secretly enjoyed the attention which ‘The Magician’ brought his way, because his public response to the book’s publication seems to have been relatively benign.

Writing under the name “Oliver Haddo”, Crowley produced a satirical review of ‘The Magician’, which was published by ‘Vanity Fair’. With typical point-missing insouciance, Crowley seems to have focused here upon accusing Maugham of plagiarism, alleging that he ‘stole’ parts of his novel from such works as Franz Hartmann’s ‘The Life of Paracelsus’ and ‘Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie’ by Eliphas Levi - a pretty fatuous suggestion, given that it is plainly obvious Maugham did indeed consult the books Crowley cites, using them as historical sources for his broadly original fictional story. (2)

Wisely, Maugham refused to respond to Crowley’s accusations, later claiming that he had not even bothered to read the ‘Vanity Fair’ review, adding that, “I daresay it was a pretty piece of vituperation, but probably, like his poems, intolerably verbose”.

In the same ‘fragment of autobiography’, which has prefaced most latter-day editions of ‘The Magician’, Maughan also claims that, many years later, in the flush of his literary success, he received an unsolicited telegram which read as follows;

“Please send twenty-five pounds at once. Mother of God and I starving. Aleister Crowley.”

Once again, he declined to respond.

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Having generally been marketed as a “general fiction” title in paperback, covers for ‘The Magician’ have tended to be pretty dull, but I love the none-more-decadent detailing on the first edition hardback pictured above. That aside, the designs below are proabably the best of the bunch.

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(1)Funnily enough, Thesinger actually knew Maugham socially, as a result of their work in London theatre; he appeared in the cast of Maugham’s play ‘The Circle’ in 1921.

(2) Crowley also accused Maugham of ripping off H.G. Wells’ ‘The Island of Dr Moreau’, but I really can’t see much similarity between the two novels at all, to be honest.

Dennis’s Library (#40): The Curse of the Wise Woman by Lord Dunsany (Sphere, 1976)

 By this point, it seems that the Dennis Wheatley Library Of The Occult had abandoned their distinctive circular, zodiac sign cover designs; which is a blessing in this particular case, because the full cover painting (for which I cannot find a credit online) is absolutely superb.

This book has been in my possession for many years, but I confess, I’ve never got around to reading it. Though Lord Dunsany remains noteworthy to weird fiction fans as a primary influence on the early work of H.P. Lovecraft, His Lordship's brand of oneiric high fantasy has never really been my cup of tea, and though this rare departure into real world-set supernatural fiction might conceivably be worth a punt, Wheatley’s description of it as appealing primarily to “..those who love shooting, hunting and magnificent descriptions of the beauties of nature” hasn't exactly stoked my enthusiasm for giving it a try, even though the Irish political angle sounds quite interesting.

Top marks for use of the word ‘profanation’. One of my favourites.

As this is the highest number I currently own within Dennis Wheatley’s Library Of The Occult, here is a run-down of what was included within it up to this point. A pretty varied selection to say the least.

Dennis’s Library (#33): The Ghost Pirates by William Hope Hodgson (Sphere, 1975)

After searching for this book for much of my adult life (because if one of the greatest cosmic horror authors who ever lived had a yarn about Ghost Pirates, I want to read it), I actually found this copy in Japan a few years back, bizarrely enough.

I had intended to use it as the basis for one of my (long-neglected) series of Weird Tales posts, but after I actually started reading it, I soon put that idea aside.

It’s not that the book is disappointing as such, but… well let’s just say that it was clearly written as much for enthusiasts of nautical fiction as for fans of ghost stories. As such, the story’s supernatural elements are introduced extremely slowly and with great subtlety, whilst the relentless application of highly detailed seafaring jargon meanwhile leads to the book becoming quite difficult to follow for readers who grew up subsequent to the Great Age of Sail.

Much of the action concerns sailors running around different parts of the ship preparing for different weather conditions, and as such, a diagram to help us landlubbers identify the various decks, masts, sails and rigging referenced in the text would have proved extremely helpful. Characterisation meanwhile is fairly minimal, making it difficult to engage with what seems like a fairly boilerplate narrative of a band of able seamen caught between the regime of a sadistic and unreasonable First Mate and that of a distant and allegedly drunken Captain.

As is usually the case with Hodgson however, the novel’s supernatural revelation, when it does finally arrive, is actually a bit of a mind-blower. Rather than being harried by a more traditional ghost ship, it turns out that the vessel upon which the books characters are sailing has actually become trapped between dimensions, and thus is kind of ‘overlapping’ with the space occupied by an alternate universe vessel whose malignant, spectral occupants are gradually picking off our human crewmen one by one.

Pretty freaking far out, especially when you consider that Erwin Schrödinger first introduced the theory of parallel universes into popular thought in 1952, over forty years after ‘The Ghost Pirates’ was first published.

Here’s what Dennis had to say on the matter:

Dennis’s Library (#5): Carnacki The Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson (Sphere, 1974)

To get us in the mood for the start of this year’s October Horrors season next week, I thought it would be a nice idea to highlight a few suitably eerie occult/horror-ish paperbacks from my shelves – which led me directly to pulling down the few volumes I own from The – ahem – Dennis Wheatley Library Of The Occult.

Now, say what you like about Wheatley (and I’ve said plenty in the past), but this line of paperback reprints, which he masterminded on behalf of Sphere books during the mid-70s, must have been an absolute god-send for fans of weird fiction at the time – and indeed it remains so for anyone seeking affordable second hand copies of the wide variety of obscure works the line helped bring back into circulation.

That said, I’m going to assume that most of my readers here will have at least a passing familiarity with William Hope Hodgson and his ‘Carnacki’ stories. Like most of Hodgson’s supernatural fiction, the adventures of his 'Electric Pentangle'-brandishing occult detective feel both wildly ahead of their time and frustratingly uneven – the latter largely a result of the author’s insistence upon reducing at least some of his hero’s cases to light-weight hoaxes and comic misunderstandings.

Though none of these stories really display the same extreme idiosyncrasies that defined Hodgson’s far-future myth cycle ‘The Night Lands’ or his masterpiece ‘The House On The Borderland’, the best of them are nonetheless superb, with ‘The Hog’ in particular standing as one of the most intense examples sustained cosmic horror ever printed.

If you’ve not read them before, I’d humbly suggest this book (long out of copyright and available in wide various of inexpensive editions) would make a great addition to your Halloween reading list – particularly if you can find it between these splendidly evocative covers, with unaccredited artwork paying blatant homage to Mario Bava’s ‘Kill Baby Kill!’ (1966), a film whose influence seems to have spread remarkably widely in view of how poorly received and sporadically distributed it was upon its initial release.

 [UPDATE, 24/10/18: It would be remiss of me not to link to this 2012 post from John Coulthart's blog, which I stumbled upon today. Coulthart traces the use of the image from ‘Kill Baby Kill!’ back to a still which appeared in Denis Gifford's unfeasibly influential ‘A Pictorial History of Horror Movies’ (1973), from whence it was subsequently repurposed by any number of illustrators and designers.]

Well, that’s what I think about it anyway. Let’s see what Dennis had to say on the matter.

Lovecraft on Film Appendum: Vintage Derleth.

It stands to reason that paperback editions of the Derleth “collaborations” are less sought after, and thus less pricey and more common, than older paperbacks of genuine Lovecraft. As such, the oldest and most aesthetically pleasing “Lovecraft” p/b in my current collection is this eerily faded US edition of ‘The Shuttered Room and Other Tales of Horror’, as issued by Beagle Books in 1971. Though the ‘hand growing out of a tree stump’ motif is pretty silly, the photo collage approach used by the (uncredited) artist is very effective, and I love the muted purple and green colour palette, the ghostly trees fading into the white background, and the lovely, oh-so-‘60s font. It’s a shame none of the stories inside are much good, but what can you do.

As a bonus, here’s a UK Panther edition of Derleth’s novel ‘The Lurker At The Threshold’ [worth ploughing through on the basis that it features a few excellent passages of Lovecraft prose buried amid the Derlethian trudge, I seem to recall] that I picked up somewhere recently. Year of publication is unknown, but cover art comes courtesy of the exceptionally awesome Gino D’Achille. Perhaps not his best effort (check the galleries in the above link for more on those), but I like it all the same. The little tentacles creeping in through the broken glass are a highlight, and trying to figure out what's going on with the second view of the tower trapped in the identically angled broken pane on the upper right proves pleasantly mind-bending.

Four Poes.

(Everyman Library, 1975 – cover photograph by Graham Tucker.)

(Panther, 1967 – “Cover illustration shows ‘Venus Asleep’ be Paul Delvaux. Reproduction by courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London.”)

(Signet, 1960 – cover illustration unaccredited.)

(Digit, year unknown – cover illustration unaccredited.)

Normal posting schedule to hopefully be resumed shortly, but in the meantime, to help get us in an appropriately Autumnal / All Hallows-ish frame of mind, please enjoy this gallery of paperback Poe editions I’ve recently acquired.

By the time my own autumn has done come, I predict I will probably own about 147 printed versions of ‘The Gold Bug’, but, such is the vividness and variety of illustration & design work assigned to Poe collections over the years, I find it hard to say no when I spy one of these on the shelves.

Also, re: the Everyman edition pictured above, let’s just say that if that is indeed a ‘photograph’ as the back cover states, I want this Graham Tucker on my hypothetical payroll, pronto.

Japan Photo Spectacular: A Visit to Edogawa Rampo’s House.

Within easy walking distance of Tokyo’s Ikebukuro transport hub, on the corner of one of the spotlessly clean boulevards surrounding the prestigious Rikkyo University campus, markings affixed a nest of stone owls beckon passersby down a side street. Follow, and you will soon find yourself outside the Edogawa Ranpo Memorial Centre for Popular Culture Studies, a small research centre affixed to the equally modest family home of its namesake, which is now preserved as a small museum and archive.

We previously touched upon the work of Tarō Hirai, aka Edogawa Rampo (1894 - 1965) in these pages when I reviewed Teruo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men back in 2013, but for the uninitiated, Rampo might best be summed up as the godfather of Japanese crime, mystery and horror fiction.(1)

As a keen scholar of English popular writing, Rampo did a great deal to familiarise the Japanese public with the history and legacy of Western mystery fiction, and was one of the first writers to find success writing such stories in Japanese. When it comes to getting a handle on his own literary endeavours however, such inherited genre tags prove woefully inadequate.

Taking inspiration both from the logical detection of Conan Doyle and the morbid preoccupations and high concept vignettes of his other primary influence (and if you’re wondering who that was, just try saying his pen-name out loud a few times in a Japanese accent and see what emerges), Rampo added a far stronger strain of eroticism to the mix, along with a perverse sense of the absurd that was entirely his own. Soaking the results in the richly decadent atmosphere of Taishō era Tokyo and the weird imagery of Edwardian pulp magazines, Rampo created a unique literary aesthetic whose essence was succinctly encapsulated by the handy genre tag of ero-guro-nansensu – ‘erotic grotesque nonsense’.(2)

Framed in the entrance-way of the Rampo house, visitors can see a roughly scribbled manuscript in which the author attempted to list and categorise his favourite Western detective stories, isolating the elements and formulas that he fed into his own work. On the opposite wall, a beguiling modern painting inspired by Rampo’s writing can also be seen. [UPDATE: this is likely the work of Masayuki Miyata - see comments.]

Although most of the house itself is off-limits to casual visitors, numerous windows are packed with displays of Rampo memorabilia, including many rare editions of his work.

The books seen in the final photo above help to remind us that, despite his fixation with weird sex and death, Rampo also enjoyed a parallel career as a highly successful children’s author, concocting numerous adventures for his Shōnen Tantei-Dan (“Boys Detective Club”) – a set of stories beloved of generations of Japanese children, and still widely read to this day.

The French windows at the rear of the Rampo house allows visitors to see directly into Rampo’s living room / study, which is preserved in exactly the manner in which he left it following his death in 1964. A finely appointed room, no doubt about it, and I got a particular kick out of seeing the dusty boxes of Japanese and Scotch whisky displayed side by side on his writing desk – a nice visual metaphor for the East-meets-West nature of his writing, not to mention it’s combination of aesthetic refinement and primitve shock.

As we were gawping at this living room, a young archivist appeared from within, clad in a light-weight kimono with slicked back hair and old fashioned glasses, looking as if he could have stepped straight out of one of Rampo’s stories. Offering us tea, he asked us whether there was any particular aspect of the master’s work we would like to discuss, or any documents we would like to consult. It was with great sadness that, due to our tight schedule of tourist-y business and my extremely minimal comprehension of spoken Japanese, we were forced to decline his offer on this occasion.

We did of course though find a few minutes to venture further into the grounds to have a look at Rampo’s purpose-built library / warehouse. Described by the author as his “illusory castle”, the walls of this unique structure are reinforced with layers of earth and, apparently, recycled Edo Period literature. According to Rampo’s Wikipedia page, the building even survived the allied firebombing that destroyed much of the surrounding area in 1945.

An obsessive bibliophile by anyone’s standards, Rampo’s library is said to comprise some 20,000 volumes in both Japanese and English, presumably including his legendary collection of homoerotic literature. Again, public access is strictly limited, but peering through the viewing window in the front door did at least give us an idea of the kind of riches housed within.

Happily, English editions of Rampo are widely available (Tuttles’s Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination and Kurodahan Press’s Black Lizard & Beast in the Shadows both look like good bets), and those seeking an easy way into the spirit of his work are also advised to check out some of many excellent and somewhat disturbing movies extrapolated from his stories (the aforementioned ‘Horrors of Malformed Men’, Kinji Kukasaku’s Black Lizard and Noboru Tanaka’s Watcher in the Attic all come highly recommended). You could also seek out Suehiro Maruo’s sumptuous manga adaptation ‘The Strange Tale of Panorama Island’ (published in translation by Last Gasp), or, for a somewhat quicker fix, try hitting play on the following cheery credits sequences for two different TV iterations of the much-loved Boys Detective Club.

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(1) As you may have noted, Edogawa’s name can be romanised either as ‘Ranpo’ or ‘Rampo’ – both are used seemingly interchangeably, but I think I’ll go for the latter, just because it sounds more fun.

(2)Officially defined as spanning the years 1912 to 1926 (the reign of the Emperor Taishō), culture during the Taishō period is often characterised in a manner that seems reminiscent of Weimar Germany, as art and literature became increasingly introspective, imaginative and transgressive, displaying an aesthetic elegance and sense of escapism that often sits uncomfortably alongside the period’s political turmoil and the rise of the fanatical nationalism that would eventually drive Japan into the Second World War.