Trying to find a Corridor of Mirrors

Chris Massie (1880-1964) was the author of Corridor of Mirrors (1941), adapted for a gloriously bizarre film of the same title (1948) which has achieved a certain cult repute. A wealthy connoisseur, obsessed by an Italian Renaissance portrait of a beautiful woman, thinks he meets her at a London night club, The Toad's Eye, and decides they are reincarnated lovers.

He invites her to his ornate mansion, where a Venetian masquerade is to be held. At first, all is wonderfully strange and charming, but there are shadows beyond the candlelight:  tragedy is to follow. The film is notable for its particularly lush décor, the work of Terence Verity and Serge Piménoff.

Corridor of Mirrors is, however, a book that has vanished, perhaps because of the film cult. And so has an equally rare ‘book of the film’ adapted by S. Evelyn Thomas and Dennis Yates from the screenplay of Rudolph Cartier and Edana Romney, who had championed the idea of the film for seven years. There are one or two copies of a French edition of the novel, L'étrange Rendez-vous (Paris, 1948).

The author also has done a vanishing act, leaving only his dates behind. The cineastes who write with such fervour of the film have next to nothing to say about its originator or why he wrote as he did. One book review refers to his ‘mannered elaboration of style . . .  reminiscent . . . of Poe and De Quincey . . . ’ (Kirkus Reviews), while Richard Church said ‘he writes like a poet, with a music and cadence in his prose that come down upon the imagination.’

One of the few allusions to his work, tantalisingly enough, occurs in Robert Aickman’s short story 'The Insufficient Answer' from We Are for the Dark (1951), where a character pulls a copy of Corridor of Mirrors out, seemingly at random, from a library shelf.

Chris Massie appears to be the author of about twenty books altogether, from 1925 to 1959. His publisher noted that Massie’s books are never of the same type: however, the most notable are psychological thrillers involving romantic obsession. He also contributed a short story, ‘A Fragment of Fact’, to Herbert van Thal’s first Pan Book of Horror Stories (1959): it is a ‘stranded traveller seeks refuge at strange house’ story with an enigmatic quality.

He may also have been the author of a factual account of serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War, Reflections from France (1916) by a Chris Massie RAMC, with an introduction by the Labour politician George Lansbury, and of a further account, Red or Khaki, or Impressions of a Stretcher-Bearer (Manchester: Blackfriars Press, 1918). And was he the lyricist of ‘I Love My God and He Loves Me’ (1919), with music by Ernest Bullock? These may not sound quite like the work of the Chris Massie of Corridor, but clues in other books suggest they could well be.

After these, a further five books catalogued under this name were omitted from lists of his titles given in later books. Then he seems to have had an intense ‘middle period’, perhaps from circa 1937 to 1947, when he wrote a handful of uncanny shockers. They were clearly the work of a writer keenly alert to the marketplace (one film review called Corridor ‘noveletteish’), and yet they were also remarkably outré. In some ways these novels remind me of Claude Houghton’s books from around the same time, at least in the brooding atmosphere and the elliptical plots.

After Corridor, he published The Green Orb (1943), retitled The Green Circle in the USA. The publisher, Faber, said: ‘We described Mr Chris Massie’s last novel, Corridor of Mirrors, as “one of the strangest novels we have ever published” . . . but when we made that statement we were not prepared for Mr Massie to provide us with a much stranger work. The Green Orb falls into no category. It is a romance, it is a fantasy, it is a study in psycho-pathology, and at the same time an essay in literary technique of a very unusual kind.’ It concerns the interplay of truth and fiction in the life and imagination of a troubled scholar, Egan Borthwick, who has a secret in his past.

I became aware of Massie because his later novel Death Goes Hunting (1953), about the chase for human prey, was suggested to me (probably by Richard Dalby) as analogous to Sarban’s The Sound of His Horn (1952). When I was writing my study of Sarban, Time, A Falconer, I thought I should take a look at it. There are some parallels, though the two authors’ styles are quite different and there was no obvious sign that either author had heard of the other’s book.

The oddity of Massie’s oeuvre is complemented by his own almost complete obscurity. Information on semi-forgotten writers often is hard to find, but in Massie’s case it seems more than usually elusive. There are brief references to his films, a few reviews of his books, and that’s about it. After Corridor, his next novel, Pity My Simplicity (1944) was also filmed, as Love Letters (1945). His last novel, When My Ship Comes Home (1959), tells the story of a young boy growing up on the East Coast of England and appears to be at least semi-autobiographical, but even that cannot be quite certain.

But where have all those copies of Corridor of Mirrors gone? Sometimes I entertain the thought that an obsessive collector has amassed them in his library lined with looking-glasses, so that nobody else can possess the book but he, and he can see them all, multiplied to infinity, as he stalks up and down in his scarlet smoking hat and velvet coat, and gloats.

(Mark Valentine)

First Image: a waxwork dummy of Eric Portman made for the film

Second Image: Edana Romney - 'I have decided to leave your enchanted toyshop'