'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)

The Centenary of 'Flower Phantoms' by Ronald Fraser: A Guest Post by Fogus

The August 14, 1926 issue of The Spectator spared a scant blurb on a book released the previous month:

FLOWER PHANTOMS. By Ronald Fraser. (Cape. 5s.)— A curious tale of the hysterical imaginings and experiences of a young girl to whom the vegetable kingdom has a peculiar significance. She is a botanical student at Kew Gardens, where she entertains curious fantasies and sees strange visions. The book is exquisitely written.

This review undersells the matter, and “exquisitely written” is doing heroic work. There is a wonderful treatment of the story from the Sherds Podcast, but a brief summary will suffice. It’s cliché to call a book ahead of its time, but Flower Phantoms feels refreshing in its preoccupations. Filtered through contemporary sensibilities, the book’s "hysterical imaginings" begin to look less like period eccentricity than an eclectic field of fixations by the knighted British civil servant Fraser: Buddhist philosophy, femininity, fantastical whimsy, eroticism, and a slight sadomasochistic charge that feels startlingly current.

The tale follows the wayward Judy, a student at Kew Gardens, who is caught between the paternal control of her brother Hubert and the importunate ardor of her lover Roland. Since the livelier business is the weird juxtaposition of human and botanical romance, I’ll focus mainly on Judy and Roland, who’re physical but badly mismatched in desire. Roland burns for her, but his needy, ham-handed advances leave her unmoved and a tension grows from Judy’s inability to name what would move her instead. Judy’s dissatisfaction finds solace among the plants whose hidden lives she longs to understand. As her uncertainty intensifies, the flowers in her care begin to manifest as physical beings with their own personalities and desires. Among them are a water-lily of dubious intent, a fig tree that can only be described as Buddhist, and an orchid with whom she begins a psychosexual affair. Through this affair, Judy learns the shape of her desire, and her human entanglements loosen enough for that knowledge to find artistic expression.

Judy is fascinating because while her experiences belong to the fantastical, her motivating forces are all too human. Judy keeps her eyes open when kissing Roland, signaling a foreboding display of ennui. The more Judy refuses to answer him, Roland’s longing festers into melodrama. Judy may not understand her desires at first, others feel their effects readily enough. Indeed, Fraser imbues Judy with an almost vampiric erotic force: beauty not merely admired, but spiritually wounding. A late episode gives her beauty a victim:

Still triumphant with the splendor of her experience, she would have liked everybody to be happy. She put her hand in his, therefore, and lightly kissed his cheek. In a year, poor man, he had pined and died, and she regretted what she had done. But the mackintosh was most useful to her.

Judy’s power over this man and her brisk remorse haunt me, as a compelling character should.

The orchid answers Judy’s force with force of its own, its regal presence decisively flips the erotic dynamic on her, showing her that adoration alone will not do. Instead, she wants a love that can meet, resist, and even overmatch her without reducing her to a mere possession. When she returns to Roland, she wins acceptance of the part of her that requires more than reverence and instead desires a love tempered by fierceness, distance, discipline, and even danger. Here the original review, for all its brevity, finally proves useful. In the orchid’s presence, the prose’s exquisiteness blooms in proportion to Judy’s enchantment:

There he was, the Orchid, with his substance of evening sunlight indwelling in frozen snow, symbol of Himalayan cold rising from tropical sunset. Gently she touched the flower with her fingers and ventured a little pinch, and threads of flame ran through her nerves from his body of white fire. Beyond him, through the glass, she saw twilight lawns and darkening tree-masses; beyond that, burning through tones of purple, a deep glory of the sun.

The ending’s ambiguity is practical as much as metaphysical. It remains unclear if the maladroit Roland can truly accept the fiercer terms of love that Judy desires.

Returning to its own moment, Flower Phantoms belongs to a curious and largely neglected British literary mode that flourished in the interwar and early WWII years. In Past Lives of Old Books, R.B. Russell calls this loose tradition “whimsical fantasy,” offering a handful of exemplars: The Brontës Go to Woolworths (1931) by Rachel Ferguson, Lady Into Fox (1922) by David Garnett, Lolly Willowes (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Miss Hargreaves (1940) by Frank Baker, His Monkey Wife (1930) by John Collier, and The Love Child (1927) by Edith Olivier. Proceeding by induction from this handful of examples, I would describe whimsical fantasies as tightly constructed narratives in which unexplained fantastical events intrude upon an otherwise realistic middle-class setting and are handled in a dry, matter-of-fact tone. Yet the whimsy is not always benign as the impossible often briefly displays an edge of menace. These stories favor intimate social and psychological interactions under pressure from the impossible over adventure or tidy resolution. Fraser’s novel fits remarkably well. As to why this mode flourished in the interwar years, I suspect the period favored fantasies that could dramatize social anxieties without outright disturbing middle-class propriety.

To expand the speculative whimsical fantasy shelf, we might include: Living Alone (1919) by Stella Benson, The Camel (1936) and Count Omega (1941) by Lord Berners, and perhaps Memoirs of a Midget (1921) by Walter de la Mare. The shelf, I suspect, will grow with more Bleiler-spelunking. As progenitor, Russell names John Kendrick Bangs’s Roger Camerden: A Strange Story (1887), giving the search a useful point of departure. These books differ in their particulars, but all share the habit of admitting the impossible into the parlor, talking desperately of the weather, and pretending not to notice a host’s knife hand trembling over the seed-cake.

(Fogus)