The Centenary of "The Smoking Leg and Other Stories" by John Metcalfe

 The 1925 Jarrolds dust-wrapper

John Metcalfe (1891-1965) is remembered primarily as a writer of “strange stories”—a precursor to Robert Aickman in terms of subtlety and ambiguity. Metcalfe’s first book, The Smoking Leg and Other Stories (Jarrolds), reached its centenary on September 18th. It came out when Metcalfe was a few weeks shy of his 34th birthday. He would go on to publish five novels (including the slow and subtle My Cousin Geoffrey), two novellas (Brenner’s Boy and The Feasting Dead, published as slim books), another short story collection (Judas and Other Stories), and a good number of uncollected tales. The Smoking Leg and Other Stories was unusual in that only five of its eighteen tales are known to have had previous periodical publication, and that as a book the volume was reprinted not once, but twice, in 1926 and 1927 respectively.

The earliest story was “The Bad Lands” published in Land and Water, 15 April 1920. The other four previously published stories all date to March-May of 1925, the most significant being the title story itself, published in The London Mercury for May. A US edition, with a striking dust-wrapper, was published by Doubleday, Page & Company on 14 November 1926.

In England, The Guardian noted:

To make an improbable story plausible is often the most difficult problem of the historian of the psychic or the macabre, and it is even more often an insoluble problem. Mr. Metcalfe has discovered a most paradoxical solution: in this volume of mysterious adventure he makes no attempt to account for anything; he simply poses as an impartial observer of strange happenings  who does not particularly care whether he is believed or not. And one must admit that by ignoring the difficulty he overcomes it. . . .  Mr. Metcalfe may congratulate himself that he has succeeded in keeping up a very uniform standard throughout the book. (16 October 1925)

 The 1926 US dust-wrapper

A few other contemporary reviewers made  another important point—that  “The Smoking Leg,” the lead story in the book, is not Metcalfe’s best, and it distracts from the higher quality of the bulk of the book. Frederick P. Mayer called it “a deal of rattling clap-trap and machine-made horror” (The Literary Digest International Book Review, August 1926). In the TLS, Orlo Williams noted that the story  “illustrates the chief weakness from which Mr. John Metcalfe, its author, suffers. He too obviously strains after the shocking, the horrible, the unexpected” (1 October 1925).  “The Smoking Leg” begins in Burma, and follows a lascar with a magical jewel implanted in his knee together with an amulet, the latter to restrain the jewel’s power. The other pulpish story in the volume is “Nightmare Jack,” which also deals with  a Burmese god and magical rubies. Such stories are by no means poor, but they do not show off Metcalfe’s real talents, which lie in psychological subtleties inherent in his descriptions.

Most of the collection is less exotic that the two pulpish tales, and more focused on England and London.  To me, one of the very best is his first published story, “The Bad Lands,” where a patient on his walks encounters an alternate, truly evil land.  “The Double Admiral” is a baffling tales of a quest to find a blur on the ocean horizon—the admiral ends up dead, and the others in the boat see a vision of themselves in another boat with the admiral apparently alive. “The Flying Tower” deals with the haunting at a cliffside folly. “The Grey House” shows, apparently, a house in more than one world.  The ambiguities and the borderline supernaturalisms make the collection as a whole especially intriguing.

 The 1927 Jarrolds 3rd Printing