A Thirties Grail Thriller: 'Secret Sceptre' by Francis Gerard

  

Francis Gerard was the author of about twenty-two thrillers in the period 1936-52, many featuring his series detective Sir John Meredith. He also wrote continuations of Edgar Wallace’s ‘Sanders of the River’ stories. He published first with Rich & Cowan, then later with Macdonald. His books are vivid, extravagant, rather headlong, and favour pace over atmosphere.

The work in some ways belongs to the trend in interwar fiction for tumultuous novels deploying aspects of ritual magic, folklore and the uncanny, such as those by Charles Williams, Gladys Mitchell and Dion Fortune, though he is probably closest in plot and politics to the occult thrillers of Dennis Wheatley, such as The Devil Rides Out (1934).

His publisher noted that though Gerard wrote in the Edgar Wallace tradition, ‘he also had a romantic imagination, a deep interest in history and legend.’ This is well-illustrated by his seventh novel, Secret Sceptre (1937), which has already been the subject of an appreciation at the excellent Pretty Sinister blog in August, 2019. There is an opening scene in the Black Mountains of Wales at a ruined abbey clearly modelled on remote Llanthony. In his dedication, Gerard thanks the Cowans (presumably of the publishing firm) for accompanying him to a vantage in the Black Mountains while researching the book. This landscape has attracted other writers, including Leslie Reid in his timeslip fantasy Cauldron Bubble (1934), L.T.C. Rolt in his story ‘Cwm Garon’ (Sleep No More, 1948), and P.M. Hubbard in his macabre thriller The Dancing Man (1971). 

In Gerard’s opening, a tramp making himself scarce after a burglary takes shelter from the rain at the ruined abbey and sees to his dismay two monks conferring in the ruins. He soon flees. The scene switches to a more conventional detective story, when Meredith is called to investigate a jewel robbery from a junior government minister’s house. There follows a most remarkable scene involving knights in armour. The trick in both cases is soon revealed: what appear to be medieval spectres are in fact contemporary figures dressed in historic costume. But what do the two incidents mean?

The ‘history and legend’ at the centre of the novel is that of the Holy Grail, and specifically the legend that the sacred cup was brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea, what the author calls ‘the Glastonbury story’. The legends of the Somerset town had been revived by the composer Rutland Boughton in his Glastonbury festivals using Arthurian themes, and visionaries and artists had been drawn to settle there or to celebrate it in their work. 

There had been several earlier novels using the Grail as a key symbol, including Arthur Machen’s The Great Return (1915) and The Secret Glory (1922), Mary Butts’ Armed With Madness (1928), Sherard Vines’ Return, Belphegor! (1932) and John Cowper Powys’ A Glastonbury Romance (1933), not to mention those using the tradition of a Luck or ancestral cup such as E.F. Benson’s The Luck of the Vails (1928) and Margery Allingham’s Look to the Lady (1931). The context was the revived interest in Arthurian symbols which emerged from the Celtic Twilight of the Eighteen Nineties and, from the same period onwards, the celebration of the Western Mystery Tradition by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its successors. Unlike most of these other Grail novels, however, Gerard’s work does not include a strong mystical element. It is implicit, but not evoked: his drive is action and violence. Of course, the medieval Arthurian romances are full of combat too.

Gerard’s plot supposes that a secret chivalric order has preserved and defended the Grail throughout British history and used their power and its supernatural influence to guide the country, particularly in times of peril. The order includes aristocrats and leading figures of state, and is utterly ruthless in its perpetuation of its stewardship. Now, however, it is faced with an enemy driven by implacable hatred. As with the thrillers of John Buchan, Sapper and Sax Rohmer, the enemy is foreign, and described in distinctly unflattering terms. 

Francis Edward Marie Gérard (1906-1966), who sometimes used the accent in his surname, and sometimes not, was the son of a French father but was born in Chiswick. His biographical notice in Secret Sceptre says he first dealt in gemstones, then took to writing. He served as a Major in the Essex Regiment in the Second World War. He and his family moved to South Africa in the early Nineteen Forties, not liking the new post-war Britain, and eventually he largely ceased novel-writing in favour of politics. His trajectory is in some ways similar to that of another interwar thriller writer, Dornford Yates.  

Secret Sceptre was reprinted by Tom Stacey in 1971 as part of their series of “old favourites”, which also included such titles as Brood of the Witch-Queen by Sax Rohmer, The Rising of the Moon by Gladys Mitchell and Enter Sir John by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson. However, his work has otherwise been rather lost to view in recent years, and it has not been revived yet in the various series of Golden Age crime fiction reprints. Quite a few of his other novels seem to have fantastical themes. It is still possible to chance upon a few of his books in those second-hand bookshops with a decent stock of vintage hardback fiction.

(Mark Valentine)

Mary Durham, author of 'Castle Mandragora'

  

In a post in November, 2020, I wrote about Castle Mandragora, a thriller with uncanny elements by Mary Durham, and I noted that nothing seemed to be known about the author, who published eleven novels in the Nineteen Forties and Fifties.

Now, however,  crime fiction expert Jamie Sturgeon has uncovered important biographical details about her and reveals these at the Mystery*File blog. This establishes that the name is not a pseudonym, as might have been supposed, and that the author had a Suffolk background, which helps account for the atmospheric setting of Castle Mandragora in the lonely Breckland heaths of that county. His researches provide a very useful framework to understanding the context of her work. 

Mary Durham lived until 1972, but her last known book appeared in 1952. We don't know why nothing further was published in those last twenty years: whether she wrote no more, or did but could not get it published.  But, as Jamie Sturgeon comments, "if you want to try a new author who wrote in the Golden Age of Detection tradition Mary Durham is well worth seeking out." 

(Mark Valentine) 

The Centenary of 'The World of William Clissold' by H.G. Wells: A Guest Post by John Howard

H.G. Wells’ novel The World of William Clissold opens with precision set in time: ‘Yesterday I was fifty-nine, and in a year I shall be sixty.’ First published one hundred years ago, appearing in three volumes over three months from August 1926, both author and his protagonist-author celebrated their sixtieth birthdays that year. It was an appropriate time for Wells to make his most determined – and certainly longest – attempt through fiction to create and portray – to embrace – a world.

During his long career Wells was many things – and certainly a ‘novelist of ideas’. Colin Wilson – who was another – discussed some of them in the long preface to his novel Man Without a Shadow (1963). He made the case that Wells was the ‘finest – and most underestimated’ novelist of ideas. This was because of the ‘characteristic that distinguished all his later work: a desire to write with urgency about real problems – the problems he felt at the time of writing – as well as telling a story. Sometimes the result was superb […] Sometimes it was indifferent […] In The World of William Clissold he tries to make the novel as big as life, and fails.’ This was not due to Wells’ want of ambition or willingness to experiment: ‘As a novelist, Wells lacked what [Henry] James possessed – the desire to give his books reality, even if it took a thousand fine brush strokes. He can write well only about his own life and experiences, but not about other people’s. Still, what he wanted to do to the novel was in no way as old-fashioned as the followers of Joyce and Eliot pretended.’

Wells felt the need to justify ‘what he wanted to do to the novel’. In ‘A Note Before the Title Page’ (five pages in my edition) he asserted: ‘Novels with prefaces are like pictures with inscriptions below them; there is a confession that something was left over and had to be expressed by an addendum. This book […] is claimed to be a complete dress-novel, that and nothing more. William Clissold is a fictitious character, and his thoughts and ideas throughout are the thoughts and ideas natural to his mental and social type. He is (to the best of the author’s ability) his own self and not his author’s self, in his emotional reactions, in his hard wilfulness, in his faith, in his political ideas, in his judgements. He is a specimen of modern liberalism, using liberalism in its broadest sense. He is a study of a modern type seeking modes of self-realisation. […] If you are the sort of person who will not accept it as a novel, then please leave it alone. You are not getting sly peeps at something more than the reality of art, and your attempts to squint through will only make you squint very unbecomingly.’

When we get there, squinting or not, it is William Clissold who must justify himself: ‘It is not exactly an autobiography I want to write, and not exactly a book of confessions. […] I should say that a description of my world best expresses what I have in view; my world and my will. I want it to be a picture of everything as it is reflected in my brain. I want it to be a comprehensive picture.’ Clissold describes how he sees the world and human life, including the loss of his religious faith. He goes on to recount his early life and that of his brother Richard (usually referred to as Dickon). Dickon marries, raises a family and becomes successful in advertising, and is awarded a knighthood. William puts his scientific training to good use as a researcher and inventor, so that his employers ‘came to realise that they had to pay fairly for the science and initiative I could give them’. He runs a profitable subsidiary, the Clissold Mineral Paint Company. Unlike his brother’s, Clissold’s love-life is intense and fraught. But after a failed marriage and several affairs, he meets Clementina. Their relationship, while not conventional, is loving and provides the stability both desire.

Much space in the later part of the novel is devoted to the ‘Open Conspiracy’. (Wells went on to publish an entire book on his scheme, The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution, in 1928.) Clissold describes it as the belief that humanity is on the brink of ‘complete metamorphosis’ and those who are able perceive it must work to ensure it succeeds. Otherwise it could only proceed ‘against such increasing resistances that it may even fail to achieve itself, and end in the failure and death of the species.’ Clissold declares that ‘we can build up the monetary and economic world republic in full daylight under the noses of those who represent the old system. For the most part I believe that to understand us will be to be with us… It is not a project to overthrow existing governments by insurrectionary attacks, but to supersede them by disregard.’

Clissold also writes about his personal plans – but his intentions are to be unrealised. An epilogue by Dickon explains that his brother and Clementina were killed in a car accident, and his work left unfinished. Dickon closes the book with the Greek phrase: ‘Panta rhei [Everything flows]. He has passed. These words, and they are wonderful words and come like a refrain throughout his book, shall be put as his sole epitaph upon his grave.’

Having informed the reader about his intentions with an introductory note, Wells also gave a hint through the subtitle: ‘A Novel at a New Angle’. As Adam Roberts stated in H.G. Wells: A Literary Life (2019): the ‘“new angle” is more than simply the fitting together of equal parts narrative and disquisition to form one complete novel. It’s also that this novel includes among its fictional characters a great many real 1920s people, most of them friends of Wells’s… It is the admixture of the two modes, one fictional and one non-fictional, that had characterised Wells’s entire career, here worked more closely than ever before into a lamination.’

Wells bonded his layers so well and firmly that they cannot easily be prised apart – but had Colin Wilson still been right to believe that The World of William Clissold failed in its objective? Perhaps it could never have been otherwise. Yet: ‘Where William Clissold is good, it is […] electric with feeling, with personal intensity.’ That is where Wells truly succeeded – and still does. Wells made Clissold share the gifts he had. Everything flows. If Wells had been the one to die in 1926, his book completed by another hand, its last words would have still been accurate.

(John Howard)

Image: H.G. Wells by Walter Stoneman 1925

 © National Portrait Gallery, London

'The Case of the Angels' Trumpets' by Michael Burt

In my recent essay collection Tea and Gargoyles, I include an essay on ‘The Witchery of Gladys Mitchell’, exploring the noted crime novelist’s strong interest in folklore, paganism and witchcraft, which pervade several of her books. She was by no means alone in this: in the same essay, I discuss a novel by Ngaoi Marsh which also uses these themes, as did Agatha Christie and several other Golden Age authors in the field. Usually, the conventions of the crime novel require that any supernatural dimension is eventually ruled out, though sometimes a slight ambiguity may be left.

Recently, however, I came across two intriguing titles from the Nineteen Forties by Michael Burt, The Case of the Angels’ Trumpets (1947) and The Case of the Laughing Jesuit (1948). These were the second and third of three published books in the series, the first being The Case of the Fast Young Lady (1942). A fourth title, The Case of the Groaning Bishop, was announced, but does not seem to have been issued. These are also crime novels with strong witchcraft and ritual magic themes. However, as the author points out in a Note to the second title in the series, although ‘This is, in essence, a detective novel . . .  Certain elements of the fantastic pervade the plot and militate against an academic solution of the problem on strictly orthodox lines.’

He thus also follows in the occult thriller form of the Nineteen Thirties, such as those by Charles Williams and Dion Fortune. Also, Burt writes from within the Roman Catholic faith, and is to an extent following the rumbustious proselytising novels of R.H. Benson, and indeed has a similarly vivid imagination.

The narrator and main protagonist in these thrillers is a crime novelist, Roger Poynings, who, in the best tradition of this sort of yarn, also helps out Scotland Yard and has a particular compadre there. There is some playful metafiction in that the first novel is referenced in the second as fiction, while the second is presented as fact. Poynings is a man of trenchant opinions, which the author points out he does not necessarily share.

The Case of the Angels’ Trumpets is set in the South Downs, Sussex, in the spring of 1939, with rumours of war in the air. The daughter of the local parson confides in Poynings that she has several times seen witches soaring above the village on broomsticks at night. She realises she cannot hope to be believed, but is adamant she was not dreaming, nor were these an optical illusion. Her testimony is soon backed up by sightings from others, and then a crime scene which might be seen as connected. This brings down the Scotland Yard man. As in the Williams supernatural thrillers, Burt also brings in leading public figures: Poynings’ uncles, one a Roman Catholic Archbishop, another a Field Marshall, are visiting and join in the investigation.

The tone is rather jaunty, often flippant, including bantering addresses to the reader. The risk is that this vitiates the atmosphere of the uncanny. Charles Williams and Gladys Mitchell both often deploy an extravagant ‘caper’ or ‘romp’ element in their occult thrillers, so there are precedents for this approach. Burt is perhaps a bit too fond of it. On the other hand, the novel also includes a methodical dissertation of several pages by the Archbishop on the theological perspective on magic and witchcraft, not unlike the abstruse passages of mystic formulations in Williams’ novels, and a learned briefing on the angels of the apocrypha. There is also a detailed reference to, and quotations from,  a ritual said to be derived from Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templis Orientis, discovered in the rectory library, which makes the reader curious about how Burt encountered this. Suspicion focuses on a figure in a remote hamlet, with a possible link also to Fifth Column activity. Burt draws all this together in a stormy riproaring finale. 

‘Michael Burt’ was the pen-name of Captain George Mattock Brookman Burt (1900-1967). He was born in Worthing, Sussex, on 22 August 1900, and died at Storrington, Sussex, on 15 January 1967. He married Elsie Mary Day (1899-1985). He is described in the West Sussex Records Office archive of his papers as ‘Author, dramatist and soldier’, and evidently he was in the Indian Army as a young officer.

He was the author of seven other novels in addition to the Poynings series, all under the Burt pseudonym, some with fantastical or folkloric elements. These comprise: Hill Quest (1937), The Road to Roundabout (1937), Catch ‘em-Alive-O! (1938: revised edition, 1944); Secret Orchards: A Traveller’s Tale (1938); Lean Brown Men (1940); We’ll Soldier No More (1943); and The House of Sleep (1945). They divide into books based on his Indian experiences and those based in Sussex. Hill Quest has a Himalayan setting, as does Secret Orchards, which is set in and around Tibet and seems to have a Shangri-La dimension.

Burt had other accomplishments. He also wrote radio plays for the BBC. ‘Pink Gin’, the story of a jewel thief, was  broadcast on 30 March 1942 on the BBC Home Service, and ‘The Table Napkin’ was broadcast on 14 August 1952 on the Light Programme. On 21 October 1952 he gave a talk based on an experience in India. 

He was also a composer. A folder of manuscript music by Burt is held by the Records Office, including a hymn, ‘Te Lucis’. As these are dated from specific places, we can trace something of Burt’s movements. In April and May 1927, he was at Meereut, in Uttar Pradesh, India; in August 1927 he was in Kashmir; and in May 1930 at Ranikhet, in the Himalayan foothills. At Christmas 1931 he was at Yatton, Somerset, and also in 1931, and in 1933, he was at Whitton Park, a new housing estate in Twickenham. In January 1940 he was at Storrington, in the South Downs, where he seems to have settled. His papers were donated to the Records Office in April 1986. It would be interesting to discover if these include the missing Groaning Bishop, or indeed any further books in the series. 

(Mark Valentine)