'The Mystery of Angelina Frood' by R. Austin Freeman

R. Austin Freeman’s The Mystery of Angelina Frood, (1924), which celebrates its centenary this month, is a playful homage to one of the greatest mysteries of English literature as well as an atmospheric and ingenious thriller.

As I have suggested before, Freeman has a good claim to be the perennial vice-captain to Conan Doyle in the Victorian and Edwardian detective story. His main investigator, Dr John Thorndyke, is both a doctor and a barrister, useful attributes in the crime field. He is assisted by his own Watson, Jervis, and by a factotum, Mr Polton, who is a dab hand in the laboratory with forensic experiments.

Like Arthur Machen, Freeman seems to have known the byways and backwaters of London well and these often feature in his fiction. And like Conan Doyle, he sometimes seems to be enjoying stretching the reader’s credulity with high-spirited plots, which, however, may be enjoyed for their audacity and verve.

I have discussed in a note on the ‘Strange Case of JohnJasper’ the numerous attempts to solve Charles Dickens’ famously unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), including both literary discussion and fictional continuations, and at least one example of a conclusion said to have been received from Dickens’ spirit: alas, the great writer’s faculties appear to have deteriorated somewhat on the astral plane.

M. R. James was also a keen Droodian and was part of an informal group, The Drood Syndicate, who went on an excursion to the scene of the story, the Kent cathedral city of Rochester, where Freeman’s story is also mostly set. Freeman also has scenes in the neighbouring coastal town of Chatham, evoking its many dim narrow passages down to the wharves.

Freeman evidently enjoyed the Drood Game, and in The Mystery of Angelina Frood,  he devised a lively and mischievous pastiche. The names Drood and Frood no doubt derive from Strood, a a town adjacent to the cathedral city. There are many sly allusions throughout to the Dickens novel. One of the plot elements in Dickens’ book involves the action of quicklime upon an interred body, where the science has in fact moved on since his time. Thorndike, of course, who is well-informed about the latest forensic advances, and also adept at methodical experiments, is able to demonstrate that the results cannot quite be as they are often assumed to be in speculations about Dickens’ book.

Freeman’s tribute is an excellent if somewhat far-fetched tale of a night-time summons to the doctor, a shifty-looking stranger, a missing person and a concealed identity, told with the brazen gusto often found in this author – as I’ve remarked before, I sometimes think he concocted some of his more bizarre plots for a bet, if only with himself.

Among the theories explored by Drood savants are some involving shadowy figures, apparent conspiracies, impersonation, and cross-dressing, and it would be fair to say, without giving too much away, that Freeman makes use of all of these possibilities. And although in this case he is evidently relishing recasting Dickens’ Drood, playing with its themes, refashioning some of its characters in a more modern dress, nevertheless this is still his tale, with his own inventiveness, and I think the book still works on its own account, even for any reader unfamiliar with the Drood aspects.

My copy is an October 1936 reprint: five earlier reprints are listed after the first printing. It contains the remains of a Sunday School presentation sticker to a recipient whose name is scribbled out ‘For regular attendance during the year 194[?]’. I must say this was a more imaginative, and unusual, gift than the pious and improving tales usually offered.

Freeman’s tale also led me, incidentally, to an interesting byway. There is a reference in the book to ‘sermon paper’: the protagonist buys it at a stationer to write a long report to Dr Thorndyke. I wondered what exactly it was.  I found someone else had asked the same question because of an allusion to it by George Orwell in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The answer, from the British Association of Paper Historians, was: ‘Sermon paper is actually Foolscap Quarto, nominally 8 x 6 1/2 inches (but there were slight variations between batches). The paper was sold 'ruled feint', i.e. lined with the thinnest line a nib could produce. In the 19th century these were produced by lining machines with adjustable nibs. During the 20th century the lines were printed using lithography.’

An old advertisement of Partridge and Cooper, Manufacturing Stationers, of 192 Fleet Street (Corner of Chancery Lane) offers it plain 4s a ream, ruled 4s 6d. One can imagine Victorian churchgoers groaning inwardly as the parson flourished in the pulpit a closely-written sheaf of the ecclesiastical foolscap. Does anyone produce—or use— sermon paper today?

(Mark Valentine)

'Wraiths' and 'The Tattered Shadows'

Zagava have announced pre-orders for Wraiths, a paperback reprint of my two Eighteen Nineties essays, ‘Wraiths’ and ‘What Became of Dr Ludovicus’ in a limited edition of 199 copies. The first of these discusses five Nineties poets so elusive that very little if any of their verse has survived: just a few lines in one case, rumours in another, or no more than a memory of an apocalyptic incantation.

The second concerns a lost ‘shocker’ co-written by Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore, where the plot can be reconstructed to a certain extent from the letters between them as they discussed the collaboration. The essay reveals that the two were at work on a supernatural thriller in the style of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Great God Pan.

Zagava have also announced that the letterpress edition of a new story, ‘Vestige’, has been delayed but it will now be accompanied by a facsimile of a Voynich book catalogue. Voynich specialised in books thought lost or even not to exist, and ‘Vestige’ explores similar terrain. The story concerns the ghostly residue of Arthur Malyon, an author invented by Aubrey Beardsley in a letter to Leonard Smithers, the publisher of The Savoy. But was that reference really the last of this shadowy figure? Is it possible that a fabled slim volume of his work exists? 

Meanwhile, Raphus Press in Brazil have announced pre-orders for a new hard cover edition of the short story The Tattered Shadows, co-written by John Howard and me. The story, set in Nineteen Thirties Chile and Lisbon, concerns the quest for an unknown language used by mysterious strangers, with 'a haunting filmic atmosphere of a Casablanca or a Third Man, with wartime dangers and intrigues' (Des Lewis).

It was originally issued in a small print run in 2020, and now appears with Restos de sombras, a new translation into Portuguese, and an afterword by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel. It will be in a limited edition of 50 numbered copies. 

(Mark Valentine)

Get Your Handheld Press Titles While They Last

Kate Macdonald founded Handheld Press in October 2017, and 48 books later, this summer, they ceased publishing new titles, and the press will shut down completely in June 2025. From now until then I suggest anyone interested buy, direct from the publisher, what they want of the Handheld list, which includes notable fantasy and science fiction titles, as well as ten volumes of "weird"--anthologies as well as single author collections. Eighteen titles fall under the F&SF category (see the list here), though there are many other titles of interest among the 48 volumes. I'm sorry to see this venture end. I have supported it along the way. Here is a photo of twelve titles I just fished out of my shelves--this includes all ten "weird" books, chronologically left to right, plus at the end a collection of stray writings by Sylvia Townsend Warner titled Of Cats and Elfins, and her biography of T.H. White.

'Cold Harbour' by Francis Brett Young: A Guest Post by John Howard

Perhaps the 1920s was the golden age of leisure travel. That was when the covers of Ordnance Survey maps began to feature drawings of sturdy hikers and cyclists poring over maps working out the route which would see them safely to their destination, or car passengers sitting in comfort while their chauffeur intently studies another signpost. But away from cities and the widened and straightened arterial routes and new bypasses, the ‘open road’ could still be a trial for the motorist: clouds of dust in summer, rivers of the flood at any time. And the potholes… There are probably many who would say that British roads have scarcely improved in the hundred years since the publication in November 1924 of Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young.

Born in Halesowen, a Worcestershire town on the edge of the Black Country, Francis Brett Young (1884-1954) trained as a doctor but sold his practice and settled down to writing novels. Many were set in the English West Midlands and the border country of the Welsh Marches; through the consistent use of recurring place names and landscape features – for example, Birmingham became ‘North Bromwich’ and Halesowen ‘Halesby’ – Brett Young created his own ‘West Midlands Mythos’. The endpapers of the Severn Edition featured an attractive stylised map by Geoffrey Eyles which serves as an entrancing portal to Brett Young country – but all is not as serene as it appears. Several of the earlier novels, such as The Dark Tower (1915) and Cold Harbour itself, possess a gothic atmosphere of dark, sharp, urgent sensibility: driven people with brooding secrets in a troubled landscape which is not only the long result of human intervention but an ominous character in its own right.

Cold Harbour begins with an urbane ‘Prelude’ set far away from England, on Capri, and narrated by the nameless host, a former doctor and now expatriate author, entertaining his guests. Sitting out on the moonlit terrace after dinner is Ronald Wake, an old friend who still practiced medicine, and his wife Evelyn. Making up the foursome is Harley, the island’s new Anglican chaplain. To the host’s practised eye, it seems that all three of his guests are tasting freedom. The clergyman, invalided out of the army, has been given a cure in more than one sense; the Wakes are enjoying their first holiday in Italy since the end of the war. Although the Wakes had escaped an autumnal London, they were still ‘haunted by the tinkle of a phantasmal night bell’ (2). Also haunting the warm night is the calling of the island owls. A little more conversation makes it clear that the Wakes have a story clamouring for release, and the four decide to remain out on the terrace while Evelyn begins to tell it: ‘I feel as if this sweet house might be . . . how can one put it? . . . contaminated by a story like this. Under the open sky it’s different: safer, somehow’ (7).

Earlier in the autumn the Wakes had been driving home from a short break in Wales. Foul weather and repeated punctures on the main road to North Bromwich forced them to turn off near Halesby and take refuge in a small inn. The story that develops is a complex interwoven one, a series of oral recollections that not only strike off each other but open dialogues between past and present. Harley listens as the three discuss and piece together their accounts, which all centre on one man: Humphrey Furnival, whom the Wakes encountered at the inn. Furnival is now owner of an old house close by – Cold Harbour.

Humphrey Furnival is perhaps the most memorable character in Brett Young’s work. Discussing Cold Harbour in Supernatural Horror in Literature H.P. Lovecraft accurately summarised Furnival as a ‘mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend . . . [who] is redeemed from triteness by many clever individualities.’ Furnival had quickly become obsessed with his purchase and its history, which he reconstructed from Celtic times. Bloody violence, death, scandal: have they perhaps permeated the house itself? Furnival explains – even as he seems to stand apart from it: ‘I only offer you the material, the turnip and the candle out of which to build your bogey, if you want one, as most people do’ (169). In the meantime, Jane Furnival describes the dreadful and spiritually polluting effect of Cold Harbour as she assures Evelyn Wake that Furnival is in danger from the evil forces in and around the house – if not already possessed by them. The Wakes are glad to leave and continue their journey to London. After meeting the Furnivals it seemed to them that it was ‘as though the whole course of our lives had been changed, as if they’d been thrust out of their normal, peaceful orbit by a blow from something dark and invisible whirling out of space’ (186).

In the chapter ‘Symposium’ the host and his guests piece together the interlocking narratives and consider what they have found. Humphrey Furnival ‘has made himself king of a desert island. Napoleon on Elba’ (208); the Furnivals seem trapped by their house, seemingly unable to escape. Or have they somehow become willing collaborators and co-creators? There would seem to be only one way that Furnival’s reign could be ended and the couple gain release.

Writing in his Preface to the Severn Edition, Brett Young stated: ‘I can always feel “in my bones” whether a house is “good” or “evil,” and it seemed to me well worth while attempting to convey that sort of sensation or impression in words.’ Time has proved him right. After a century Cold Harbour remains, with its meticulous construction and attention to detail and character portraits, not only the chilling account of a haunted house and its inhabitants, but a truly regional horror story which encompasses an entire landscape and history. 

(John Howard)