"Dolly" and THE VAMPIRE NEMESIS

It was in The Dark Shadows Book of Vampires and Werewolves (Paperback Library, 1970) that I first encountered the short story "The Vampire Nemesis" signed as by "Dolly."  It is one of the eclectic selections in that anthology, similar in kind to the stories found in another anthology, The Dark Dominion (Paperback Library, 1970), both anonymously edited by Bernhardt J. Hurwood.  I wrote about these two compilations at my "Tolkien and Fantasy" blog here. 

The story itself tells of two college chums, the narrator, Ward, and his friend Fergusson, the latter of whose increasingly roguish behavior wears on their friendship.  Fergusson has taken over for himself the young wife of his half-caste servant, and terrorized the man into opium use and, after an assault on Fergusson, to suicide. Fergusson comes to believe that the former servant has come back to haunt him in the form of a vampiric bat, that first kills the abused young-wife, and then attacks Fergusson. Ward sees it attack his friend, hearing first the "insistent flapping of wings" and seeing "the dark shadow of some huge 'Thing' that was fluttering slowly round the room" (p. 23).

Hurwood found the story in a pocket-sized collection from 1905 entitled The Vampire Nemesis and Other Weird Stories of the China Coast, co-published in Bristol by J.W. Arrowsmith and in London by Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Company. It contains four tales, "The Vampire Nemesis" (pp. 7-33); "Death-Grips" (37-127); "Cerberus" (131-168); and "The 'Leonid'" (171-190). The first is described above, while the second, "Death-Grips," which takes up almost half of the volume, is a confession by Henry Keith, of Shanghai, who is about to be executed for the murder of his wife's ex-boyfriend, a dentist, Arnold Rawdon, who had learned hypnotism and mind-control from a mysterious sect while practicing in India. According to Keith, Rawdon forced him to abuse his wife, and thus he believed that the only way to break the spell and save his wife would be to kill the dentist. "Cerberus" gives a madman's story, from a manuscript written years earlier in an asylum, of his use of a strange drug and of the cat-like beast whom he and his wife had adopted, and who he named Cerberus after the hound of hell. The man's abuse of the drug, coupled with the menace of Cerberus, put his young children in extreme peril. "The 'Leonid'" is a gruesome story told by the sole survivor of the ship Leonid, near which a meteor fell into the sea, with catastrophic results.

"Dolly" is often described as the pen-name of one Leonard D'Oliver, from the entry in Who's Who in the Far East 1906-7 (Hongkong: China Mail, 1906), but even this is a simplification.  He was born Leonard D'Oliveyra (sometimes spelt D'Olivegia in early records) on 12 September 1875 in British Guiana, the son of Elias D'Oliveyra (1834-1904) and his wife, Josephine Elizabeth Kaufman (c. 1842-1937), who were married in London on 7 December 1867. Leonard had one older brother.

He was educated at the Roan School in Blackheath, and at Concordia College, Zurich. He became an indentured apprentice in the Merchant Navy in October 1891. He was apparently based around Hongkong for most of the next decade and a half, though he also listed an address in Thornton Heath, Surrey. He published many contributions to the China Mail, and the Hongkong Telegraph. Some of these stories were reprinted in two collections published in Hongkong, Tales of Hongkong in Verse and Story (1902) and China Coasters (1903). A final book, Paul the Pretender: A Romance of Hongkong (Shanghai: Shanghai Times, 1912), is a complicated romance novel set in Hongkong.

Steven Ralph Hardy, in his 2003 dissertation, Expatriate Writers, Expatriate Readers: English-language Fiction Published along the China Coast in the Late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, noted that Dolly's writings published in China were for expatriate audiences, "assuring that their lives abroad were really normal and not exotic" (p. 327), while the stories in The Vampire Nemesis, the only volume Dolly published in England, "emphasized for the home audience how exotic life abroad can be" (ibid). Still, the stories in The Vampire Nemesis are pulpish, and at times lurid, while remaining quite readable. In recommending the book, Punch noted that it "will hold you enthralled for just about an hour before going to bed" (25 October 1905), while the Westminster Review found "Death-Grips" and "Cerberus" the most convincing tales in the collection, noting that "Dolly is a writer of great originality and power" (November 1905).

D'Oliveyra apparently settled in Cornwall after leaving Hongkong, and he married Edith Mary Lyne (b. 1887) in Helston, Cornwall, in the summer of 1908. (A son, Roland Lyne D'Oliveyra, was born in Helston in the summer of 1909.) In 1939 he and his wife were living at Matson, Swanpool, in Falmouth. He died in Cornwall on 18 February 1954 (according to probate records, though Falmouth grave records say 22 February), leaving £5,000 to his widow.  

 *Thanks to Dimitra Fimi for helping me to research this author.