The railway town of Carnforth, Lancashire celebrates its association with Brief Encounter directed by David Lean (1945): key scenes were filmed at the station here, which now has a tea room of that name. During wartime, the town was thought a safer location for filming than the Home Counties, where the story is actually set. The station is on the little-known Lune Valley line from Skipton to Lancaster and beyond that to the seaside resort of Morecambe, and passes through lonely, dreaming country of green hills and woodland and old stone villages and manors.
But Carnforth also has another attraction, a large second-hand bookshop which bears the painted announcement that it has 100,000 books. I have been calling there for many years. Originally it had three rooms of vintage hardback fiction, row upon row of forgotten authors. It was here, for example, that I found the unusual World War Two novel House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair, later reprinted at my suggestion by Persephone Books: here too were a number of Ronald Fraser books, when I began collecting them. They were all very reasonably priced too. I also once found here a rare and strange slim volume, Mayvale (1915) by H.E. Clifton and James Wood, notable for a preface by Wyndham Lewis.
Alas, old hardbacks now only occupy half a room, but there are still odd finds to be made, and there are good selections in other fields. Usually I manage to turn up unexpected titles, such as on one occasion Sherard Vines’ Green to Amber. He is an interesting character known, if at all, for his fantasy Return, Belphegor!, a satire about a demon sent to stir things up on Earth in the contemporary Thirties, which incidentally involves the Holy Grail. The novel I found is not a fantasy but has satirical aspects, so I thought it might be worth a look. There was also on that visit a rather louche novel by Richard Aldington, two Bertie Wooster paperbacks, an Evangeline Walton fantasy, and a book on Rockall, the island out in the Atlantic best known for giving its name to a zone in the Shipping Forecast. In the late Fifties, the Royal Navy landed and stuck a flag on this remote outcrop to claim it for Britain, and this book recounts the expedition and the history of previous sightings of the island.
At a later visit, after some steady, thorough searching, I had three worthwhile finds here. One was a thriller, Highly Unsafe (1936), in the Buchan style by Max Saltmarsh, who was actually Marian Winifred Saltmarsh, nee Maxwell (1893-1975), the author of just four such thrillers in the Thirties, and then apparently nothing else. Another was a quite scarce vintage crime novel, The Red Dwarf (1928) by Molly Thynne, a writer who has recently been rediscovered by crime buffs, and who sometimes uses folklore and the macabre in her work. The third was a signed copy of The Mocking Star (1931) by Michael Maurice, a Cambridge author of quite strange books I had been researching.
It was on one hot summer’s day that I also found here The Serpent and the Butterfly by Sue Mallinson, a heady 1980 occult thriller that I had never heard of when I chanced upon it, but something of the sultry intensity of the weather seemed to radiate from the book too. A young woman who has been a lifestyle journalist has saved up enough to take a year off and rents a cottage in the West Country: “On her first evening, she and her gypsy dog Imp go for a walk on the moors and are drawn towards a giant Menhir, upon whose face is the ancient carving of a Serpent. The great stone gives Lisa an uneasy feeling and inexplicably she shudders. Just then a butterfly lands upon a small pebble at her feet which takes on a strange, purplish glow."
Soon she sees signs of a living pagan worship still in play and finds it disturbing and yet alluring. She befriends a young man who is a local bookseller, though he doesn’t seem to spend much time actually in his bookshop: some rueful browsers might regard this as accurately observed realism. Together they explore ancient sacred sites and stumble upon more signs of something going on.
The book is very much of its time, a curious blend of Dennis Wheatley shockery and the period’s strong interest in ancient mysteries and ancient monuments. On the face of it, the plot follows the traditional lines of many occult thrillers, now seen as ‘folk horror’, where a cosmopolitan city-dweller encounters primitive rustic rituals: however, it goes some way beyond that into wider dimensions. The author’s preface says it was inspired by Castaneda, but also by her researches in mythology, magic and mystery. The novel describes and quotes enthusiastically from a noted ancient mysteries book of the period, Atlantean Traditions in Ancient Britain (1977) by the Glastonbury mage Anthony Roberts.
According to a brief note by David Langford at the SF Encylopedia, this is Sue Mallinson’s only published novel: a sequel, Atlantis Reborn, remains unpublished. There seems to be no information whatever about her to be found, nor did Mr Langford, when I asked him, have any more to offer. Unfortunately, it seems to be quite scarce. But now that there is a revived interest in Nineteen Seventies culture, particularly in the field of the fantastic and uncanny, it seems to me that the book would be greatly enjoyed by a new readership if reprinted.
(Mark Valentine)
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