The Detective Story Club for Connoisseurs

The Detective Story Club was launched in 1929, with the expressed purpose of publishing the best detective and mystery novels as selected by a committee of experts. Each volume was marked with a distinctive "Man with a Gun" stamp on the cover.

In 2015, HarperCollins began reprinting the series, with new introductions.  Some of the books lean over towards the supernatural genre, even if they don't embrace it. Some of the new introductions are by noted genre authorities like Richard Dalby and Hugh Lamb.  Some of the novels are by authors well-known to genre readers, like Robert Louis Stevenson and Bernard Capes.

Here I'd like to call attention to four of the titles published so far that might be of interest to readers of Wormwoodiana.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson, contains more than just the classic story.  Introduced by Richard Dalby, there are two additional stories by Stevenson ("The Body Snatcher" and "Markheim") and two additional stories by other hands (the anonymous 1890 "Untold Sequel of the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", later attributed to one Francis H. Little, and a pastiche "Dr. Jekyl" [sic] by Robert J. McLaughlin).

Called Back, by Hugh Conway, with an introduction by Martin Edwards

The Mystery of the Skeleton Key, by Bernard Capes, with an introduction by Hugh Lamb

The Noose, by Philip Macdonald, son of Ronald Macdonald and the grandson of George Macdonald.  Introduction by H.R.F. Keating

The whole series is well worth looking into.

Patrick Carleton, Thirties Novelist

In a contribution to a mailing of the ghost story correspondence society The Everlasting Club (new members welcome), the eminent anthologist and scholar of the field Richard Dalby revealed his researches into the little-known author of a single Jamesian tale, ‘Dr Horder’s Room’. This was Patrick Carleton, whose story of the malevolent spectre of a Cambridge Master of College was published in the anthology Thrills (Philip Allan, 1935), and reprinted in Ghosts and Scholars (1987), edited by Richard with Rosemary Pardoe. As Richard noted, Carleton had also written novels for Allan, and so that must have been how he came to be included in the collection. But who was Patrick Carleton?

Richard noticed that one of Carleton’s novels was dedicated to the actor Michael Redgrave, and was able to discover more about him by consulting biographies of Redgrave. These revealed that Carleton was the slightly disguised pen-name of Patrick Railton (1907-42), known to his friends as Paddy. He is described as “a frequently heavy boozer and often wildly funny”. Richard further established that “he was invalided out of the army in 1941 and (spending his last months in a sanatorium in Ruthin, North Wales) died of tuberculosis in the summer of 1942.” As well as his novels, Carleton had written a study of ancient history, Buried Empires – The Earliest Civilisations of the Middle East (1939). As Richard noted, this had involved him in travels similar to those of Dr Horder in his story.

Doug Anderson was able to add to Richard’s work an explanation of the Carleton pseudonym, identifying that the author’s full name was Patrick Carleton Railton. He also noted that his father was Cecil Carleton Railton, who died in 1944, only two years after his son, while his mother Daisy (1879-1969) was long-lived, and renewed the copyrights on her son’s novels in the US in the 1950s and 60s.

Prompted by these revelations, I looked for Patrick Carleton’s novels. The first I tried, Desirable Young Men (1932) was very striking. The early part is about vivacious, rather precious young undergraduates at interwar Cambridge, with a distinct sense of E F Benson’s college novels, and even a tinge of the camp wit of Ronald Firbank, presumably reflecting Carleton’s own milieu. Though exuberant and witty, it might deter some readers as being a trifle too arch, but the book takes a darker turn in the final third, revealing the youthful hardships, and proud inner life, of the main dilettante figure of the earlier chapters.

Denied a Fellowship on grounds of character, he becomes a recluse in the bleak Peak District, Derbyshire, living in a village close to a thinly-disguised Buxton, and researches medieval witchcraft and paganism. This part, with its evocation of the haggard terrain, is very Machenesque - I'd be surprised if Carleton had not read him. Nothing supernatural happens, but the mood is most sinister.

His brooding scholar falls into obsession and personal neglect, though a worldly doctor befriends and seeks to ‘rescue’ him, rather as the local doctor tries to nurture Lucian Taylor in Machen’s The Hill of Dreams. But whether Machen was an influence or not, Baron Corvo evidently was: “Fr Rolfe’s Adrian VII (sic)” is evoked with approval. This second part of the book presents an interesting and abrupt change in tone, even if it makes for a slightly awkward structure. Though ultimately it doesn’t quite work, the book is exceptionally well written, bold and confident.

A second contemporary novel, The Hawk and The Tree (1934), follows a down-at-heel educated young man on a picaresque journey around England, including stints as a tramp, barman, circus hand, and in other casual jobs. It has deft and memorable portrayals of unusual minor characters he meets on the way, and gives an insight into the devil-may-care mood of subsistence England in the interwar years, again presumably based on Carleton’s own experiences.

His next, Saturday to Monday (1935), is about the intertwining lives of an impoverished but genteel young bank clerk, and an archaeologist returned from the Near East after an injury, and now director of a museum. It includes some brisk, realistic “interior monologue” in which we see into a character’s swiftly-rushing, unguarded thoughts. The technique could be trying if over-used, but Carleton keeps such passages succinct and to the point. The plot is perhaps somewhat too tentative, but once again the authorial bravado rather carries one along.

His final novel, No Stone Unturned (1939), is, on a first reading anyway, less successful: its protagonist is a young American (somewhat unsurely depicted) who has been sent to research family roots in the Peak District by a wealthy Aunt of whom he has expectations. It is notable though, especially for the period, for its sympathetic portrait of a cultured young Jewish diamond merchant.

Carleton’s remaining two novels, One Breath (1934), about a family of travelling showmen, and Under the Hog (1937), about the times of Richard III, are historical romances I have yet to read. It is clear, however, that even if none of his full length fiction is exactly fantastical, Carleton certainly ought to be better-known among aficionados of unusual literature.

Checklist of Books by Patrick Carleton

Desirable Young Men (Philip Allan, 1932)
The Hawk and The Tree; A Novel (Philip Allan, 1933)
One Breath; A Novel (Philip Allan, 1934)
Saturday to Monday: A Novel (Philip Allan, 1935)
Under the Hog; An Historical Novel (Rich and Cowan, 1937)
The Amateur Stage: A Symposium [editor] (Geoffrey Bles, 1939)
Buried Empires: the earliest civilisations of the Middle East (Arnold, 1939)
No Stone Unturned; A Comedy (Rich and Cowan, 1939)

Mark Valentine

The Original Tower of Moab?

The Original Tower of Moab?
Mark Valentine

L A Lewis’ ‘The Tower of Moab’ (from his Tales of the Grotesque, 1934) has in recent years received acclaim as one of the most original and striking supernatural tales of the 20th century. Championed by the eminent ghost story anthologist and scholar Richard Dalby, Lewis’ work has seen a revival which has included the hardback editions from The Ghost Story Press in 1994 and 2003, and now a paperback reprint (Shadow Publishing, 2014). Dalby, in his introductions, describes how he traced Lewis’ widow, and learnt from her of some of the author’s interest in the esoteric and occult, and also of the effect on him of certain hallucinations, and visions, which seem to have even led to spells in an asylum. The tower is also cited in the lyrics to ‘Lucifer Over London’ by Current 93, composed by David Tibet, who led the Ghost Story Press reprints.

The inspiration for his most praised story was, Dalby reports, “based on a real tower which was being built by an American religious sect, but never finished, at the time Lewis first saw it, supposedly somewhere in South London.” Though the location is not quite right, it is possible that the Tower Lewis had in mind was Jezreel’s Tower, founded in Gillingham, Kent, in the late 19th century, but still under construction well into the early 20th century. There are clues in the story that point to similarities with this Tower. The first is that the narrator compares it to the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. And that was how contemporaries saw Jezreel’s Tower: a report in The Strand Magazine by E.J. Dark in 1903 was headed “A Modern Tower of Babel: The Jezreel Temple, Chatham”. The second is the shape of the edifice. Lewis describes it as “a gigantic hollow pillar…that was its simple form – four walls with a base perhaps fifty yards square and forming a plain, vertical shaft”. That was precisely what the Tower of Jezreel was meant to be: a huge cube. Even the dimensions Lewis describes are similar: the Tower was to have been 144 feet square, not far off the 150 feet in his story.

But perhaps the greatest evidence for Jezreel Tower as the original of The Tower of Moab is to be found in the beliefs informing the building of the real tower and the tower in the story. As John M. Court recounts in Approaching the Apocalypse (I B Tauris, 2008), the Jezreelians, who themselves preferred to be called members of the New and Latter House of Israel, were an offshoot from the Southcottians (more properly known as The Panaceans). The Jezreelians were founded circa 1875 by a soldier, originally James Rowland White, stationed at Chatham, who joined an existing small Southcottian breakaway group and soon took it over. He adopted the name James Jershom Jezreel.

Under his influence, they became an ardently millenarian group, who believed in the imminent end of all things, the Apocalypse prophesied in the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation of St John the Divine. To hasten and welcome this, the group considered it was their duty to enact the signs of the end that the book described. Their Tower was the culmination of this duty, and was also to be the headquarters, refuge and sanctuary of true believers in preparation for the end.

The “obscure religious sect” in Lewis’ story had the idea of building until their tower “should reach heaven”. But the Tower of Moab is also inspired by Apocalypse: “The upper portion of each wall blossomed into a panel at least fifty feet high , representing some scene out of Biblical history or the Revelations…One looked like the Angel Gabriel sounding the Last Trump with an immense horn”. That image is of particular significance because James Jezreel was called by his followers ‘the Trumpeter’ and claimed that he was himself the sixth and last trumpeter of Revelation (9.13). Indeed, an excellent study of him, by P.G. Rogers, was entitled The Sixth Trumpeter: The Story of Jezreel and His Tower (Oxford University Press, 1963).

Jezreel’s teachings were gathered in a sturdy testament, The Flying Roll (roll meaning a scroll), dismissed by Church of England clergymen as a mere “Gnostic lucubration”. However, in this he proclaimed: “Blow the Trumpet in this land of England first, and say ‘England! The day of thy judgement is come: thou shalt be the first to be judged and the first to be redeemed. England!...All Israel shall be driven into this land.’” As this suggests, the Jezreelites also held an unusual form of British Israelite belief: not so much stressing that the Ten Lost Tribes had come to England (or Britain), as this belief generally involved, but that all the Saved would congregate in England at the End.

Though the foundation stone of the Tower was laid on 19 September 1885, the construction, and the funding of this, took many more years, and the actual elevation of the Tower could not begin until a vast subterranean vault was first made. This was intended to hold a printing press and depository for copies of the Flying Roll. Several upper levels were then added, but the group, never large in number, then began to falter. James Jezreel had died in March 1885, and his young wife Clarissa (“Queen Esther”), who succeeded him as head of the group, followed in 1888. Soon after, work on the Tower stopped.

In Lewis’ story too, “funds had become exhausted” and “the cult had also died out”: but the Tower remained, too expensive to demolish. His narrator learns this from a bus conductor when he asks about the unusually-named “Tower of Moab” bus stop. This is indeed interesting corroboration of the link to Jezreel’s Tower, because that too gave its name to a bus stop, even after the Tower was no more.

By 1913, the unfinished Tower was put up for auction in The Times. Over the years, the completed parts were adapted for use as factories or warehouses, and it is believed some members of the sect lived in rooms in other parts. Despite this descent from the original great plan, the Tower remained a major landmark for many years afterwards, and the final parts of it were only removed as late as 2008. Followers of the New and Latter House of Israel, not all of whom approved of the Tower, continued to be heard of long after work on it stopped, in various corners of England, but also, in several variant forms, in the USA, perhaps the origin of the recollection that it was an “American” sect that had built the tower that inspired the story. That aside, the numerous similarities between the real Jezreel’s Tower and fictional Tower of Moab do suggest that it must have been this vast apocalyptic edifice that L.A. Lewis had in mind.

The narrator in Lewis’s story notes that the scenes on the Tower of Moab are impressive because they show “a literal reading of what I had always vaguely regarded as allegorical”. A literal reading was precisely what the Jezreelites took from Revelation: even the design and dimensions of the Tower were inspired by images from the Book. The story ends powerfully with the narrator’s visions of the Tower as if it had been completed, and of the angels, demons and beasts that haunt it by day and night, echoing the trenchant eschatology of Jezreel’s teachings.

Medusa Press

For some years now Medusa Press has been quietly producing occasional volumes of weird fiction, nicely designed and of high production values. I believe their first book was Frank Chigas's The Damp Chamber and Other Bad Places (2004), and since then they have published two further collections of his work, and also branched out into reprinting older materials.


I was delighted with Left in the Dark: The Supernatural Tales of John Gordon, which came out in 2006, collecting nineteen stories from three of Gordon's earlier collections, plus ten hitherto uncollected stories and one story newly written for this volume.

Last year Medusa Press released a new edition of a 1920s novel of legendary rarity, Oliver Sherry's Mandrake (Jarrolds, 1929), with a new introduction by Richard Dalby.  Dalby tells us that "Oliver Sherry" was the pseudonym of an Irishman, George Edmund Lobo (1894-1971), a minor figure remembered primarily for his poetry.  Though published last fall, I learned of this reissue only recently, and now having a copy I observe that Medusa Press has made an especially elegant reissue, with a distinctive dust-wrapper design as well as a really cool binding underneath.  Good work like this should be noticed, so I copy the wrapper and binding below.  Order via the publisher's website.