An Evening at The Larches

I believe I first cued in on the name J.C. Trewin for his June 1956 review in The Listener of the radio adaptation on the BBC Third Programme of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, wherein after declaring himself "having been for years President, Honorary Secretary, and the entire membership of my own Arcturus Club," he goes on to note some of the omissions and alterations in the BBC script yet still praising the radio adaptation overall.  Clearly J.C. Trewin (1908-1990), who was mostly known as a journalist and drama critic, was a byline to watch out for. 

More recently, I read a number of his short stories published in William Kimber ghost and weird anthologies of the 1970s and 1980s--in particular those edited by Denys Val Baker, or Amy Myers (the "After Midnight" series). Having enjoyed them, I looked for any novels by Trewin, and only found one: An Evening at The Larches, co-written with Harry Hearson. 

An Evening at The Larches was published in 1951, with illustrations by Ronald Searle. It is a slim book of some fourteen chapters covering eighty-some pages, and most chapters have a full-page Searle illustrations (a couple of very short chapters have no illustration, but other chapters have two, and including  the frontispiece and endpage, make for a total of sixteen delightfully macabre drawings).  All of Searle's drawings can be seen at Perpetua, a Ronald Searle Tribute site.

The set-up and plot is fairly simple. The Ghastlys, headed by Lord Jasper and Lady Lucrezia, live in a castle called The Larches (so-called because no larches grow within ten miles of it) in the Swampshire town of Blackwater, which has a reputation for the design and manufacture of hearses. Family members include a "revolting" little daughter named Paranoia, who is known for her knife-throwing skills and her staged executions of her platinum blonde dolls, and the elderly Dowager Countess of Endor, and cousin Sir John Ghoul, as well as the inventive (in ways of murder) butler Beetle. The plot centers on a dinner party hosted by the Ghastlys through which they plan to maintain The Larches by doing away with wealthy friends and relatives. The other guests include Count Dracula, and two mundanes, the local bank manager and his wife. The dinner party does not go as planned, and the result is told in a darkly humorous manner. 

If all this sounds like a take-off on the Addams family comics by Charles Addams (many of which appeared in The New Yorker), or the 1964-66 tv series, or the later movies, this might not be the case chronologically, for though the first comic by Addams appeared in 1938, the characters went unnamed until around the time of the tv show, when they coalesced into the family as we know it today. An Evening at The Larches appeared in print in October 1951, long before the Addams family came together on the other side of the Atlantic. 

And anyone who enjoys the Addams family in its various incarnations --Paranoia and Wednesday are very much cut from the same cloth-- will enjoy An Evening at The Larches, with Searle's illustrations providing sinister atmosphere in much the same way that Addams's drawings do. And Hearson and Trewin keep the story short enough that the idea is not overdone. 

The first Addams family comic, 1938