Old Novels and the Women Who Owned Them
1 day ago
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
R.I.P. E. F. Bleiler
A true titan in the field of supernatural literature has passed away. Everett Franklin Bleiler, born 30 April 1920, died Sunday evening, 13 June 2010, at the age of 90. He leaves a legacy of superlative work that ranges from The Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948, revised 1978 as The Checklist of Science-Fiction and Supernatural Fiction) on to such indispensible works as The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983), Science-Fiction: The Early Years (1990) and Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (1998), not to mention the large number of books he edited and introduced for Dover in the 1960s and 1970s. I use his works on a near-daily basis.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
A New Journal: Fastitocalon
Sunday, May 2, 2010
The Ghost That I Like Best: Famous Authors on Their Favourite Spooks Pt. 1
In the December 8, 1923 issue of T.P.’s & Cassell’s Weekly, there appeared a symposium of responses to a question along the lines of “What is your favourite ghost?”. Here are some of the responses. More will appear in a future posting.
Thomas Burke
Yes, but what sort of ghost? The author’s “ghost”? Ghosts in literature? Ghosts I have met? I have never yet met a ghost, and don’t want to. With Charles Lamb, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them. Of ghosts in literature I prefer those with plenty of clanking chains and grisly robes, ghosts that do squeak and gibber round the ivied walls at midnight. Marley’s ghost and the ghost of Hamlet’s father are most unsatisfactory; they are ghosts with moral purposes. Ghosts in fiction should have no purpose beyond that of hair-raising; and in this matter the best ghost I know is the ghost in G.W.M. Reynolds’s “Bronze Statue,” because I was twelve years old when I read it, and it was the first and only ghost that raised my hair.
Vere Hutchinson
You are quite right to think I have a favourite ghost. I frankly confess the more ghostly the story or legend the happier I am! I think there has never been anything so terrible or realistic as Kipling’s “The End of the Passage.” I do not remember anything with such horror in it. To me it is the one great classic of the uncanny. Then there is that mad, jolly yarn of Richard Middleton’s, “The Ghost Ship,” the most crazy, most enchanting fantasy; to be read on a dark night with a wild wind and driving rain. It is absurd, if you like, with its village of nice, properly conducted ghosts, but it seems to me to have a magic of its own, and after you’ve read it, if the real ghostly spirit is upon you, then open your window and you can see “The Ghost Ship” sailing through the air, with her flare of lights and her noise of singing, her great masts raking the stars—I swear you can!
Edward Shanks
My favourite ghost is chosen by pure favouritism, It is not much of a ghost, but it is my own, or, at least, I have a good long lease of it, which is nearly as good.
The house in which I live consists of two old cottages thrown into one. The little room which I use as a study was once, so far as I can judge, the kitchen and sole living-room of the smaller cottage. One day, some fifty years ago, the labourer who lived here, oppressed, I dare say, by the too close presence of his wife and children, hanged himself from a beam in this room. So says village tradition: and there is to this day a large, firm nail in the beam, from which a man might very well hang himself. He might, that is to say, if he were a dwarf or without legs; any other sort of man would find it difficult. And, for reasons which will appear, he cannot have been legless.
This tradition, once heard, vanished from my mind. But after some time it happened that I was working alone past midnight, all the others in the house being long asleep. Not quite alone, for my cat was there—a detestable cat, kept only for mousing, not at all an author’s favourite cat who shares his study and his labours with him. Something, I do not know what, made me look round.
There, directly beneath the suddenly sinister-looking nail, was the cat, walking up and down with all the motions and the pleased expression of a cat which is rubbing itself against someone’s legs. Up and down she went for several minutes, purring softly, while I sat looking over my shoulder, unable to move. Then I went to bed and left her there, and left all the lamps burning and all the doors open behind me.
And yet, strangely, in the morning the pride of possession threw out the horror of the night. It was my ghost, my very own; not a freehold ghost, to be sure, but even a leasehold ghost is more than most people have. He is my favourite ghost, now almost an “affable familiar ghost,” and I look at all others as a man who loves his own mongrel fox terrier looks at the champions assembled at Cruft’s.
W. B. Maxwell
My favourite ghost is that of Lord Strafford in the novel “John Inglesant.” “All to nothing,” he seems to me the most appropriate and majestic apparition that has ever been imagined.
As many of your readers will remember, it is two nights after Strafford’s execution (the consummation of King Charles’s betrayal of a loyal servant), and Inglesant, on duty at the palace of Whitehall, sees the dead man pass through the outer rooms and enter the King’s bedchamber, “He was falling asleep when he was startled by the ringing sound of arms and the challenge of the yeoman of the guard on the landing outside the door. The next instant a voice, calm and haughty, which sent a tremor through every nerve, gave back the word ‘Christ.’ Inglesant started up and grasped the back of his chair in terror. Gracious heaven! Who was this that knew the word? In another moment the hangings across the door were drawn sharply back, and with a quick step, as one who went straight to where he was expected and had a right to be, the intruder entered the antechamber. . . .”
If anything could make me believe in ghosts, it would be Shorthouse’s conception and handling of this dread visit.
Algernon Blackwood
My favourite ghost story is what I believe to be also the shortest:
Its authorship I do not know. It may be a chestnut too. Next to this, I place “Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James, for its majestic horror; and “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs, for it cumulative horror and its inevitableness.
W. L. George
I am very fond of supernatural stories, and am sure that the best I have ever come across exhibits the intangible couple of ghosts, those of the governess and the valet who float about the lake and establish a connexion of nameless horror and vileness with the two children who occupy the centre of the story called “The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James.
May Sinclair
If by my “Favourite Ghost” you mean the apparition that has most appealed to me in literature I should vote unhesitatingly for the ghost or ghosts in Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw.”
Thomas Burke
Yes, but what sort of ghost? The author’s “ghost”? Ghosts in literature? Ghosts I have met? I have never yet met a ghost, and don’t want to. With Charles Lamb, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them. Of ghosts in literature I prefer those with plenty of clanking chains and grisly robes, ghosts that do squeak and gibber round the ivied walls at midnight. Marley’s ghost and the ghost of Hamlet’s father are most unsatisfactory; they are ghosts with moral purposes. Ghosts in fiction should have no purpose beyond that of hair-raising; and in this matter the best ghost I know is the ghost in G.W.M. Reynolds’s “Bronze Statue,” because I was twelve years old when I read it, and it was the first and only ghost that raised my hair.
Vere Hutchinson
You are quite right to think I have a favourite ghost. I frankly confess the more ghostly the story or legend the happier I am! I think there has never been anything so terrible or realistic as Kipling’s “The End of the Passage.” I do not remember anything with such horror in it. To me it is the one great classic of the uncanny. Then there is that mad, jolly yarn of Richard Middleton’s, “The Ghost Ship,” the most crazy, most enchanting fantasy; to be read on a dark night with a wild wind and driving rain. It is absurd, if you like, with its village of nice, properly conducted ghosts, but it seems to me to have a magic of its own, and after you’ve read it, if the real ghostly spirit is upon you, then open your window and you can see “The Ghost Ship” sailing through the air, with her flare of lights and her noise of singing, her great masts raking the stars—I swear you can!
Edward Shanks
My favourite ghost is chosen by pure favouritism, It is not much of a ghost, but it is my own, or, at least, I have a good long lease of it, which is nearly as good.
The house in which I live consists of two old cottages thrown into one. The little room which I use as a study was once, so far as I can judge, the kitchen and sole living-room of the smaller cottage. One day, some fifty years ago, the labourer who lived here, oppressed, I dare say, by the too close presence of his wife and children, hanged himself from a beam in this room. So says village tradition: and there is to this day a large, firm nail in the beam, from which a man might very well hang himself. He might, that is to say, if he were a dwarf or without legs; any other sort of man would find it difficult. And, for reasons which will appear, he cannot have been legless.
This tradition, once heard, vanished from my mind. But after some time it happened that I was working alone past midnight, all the others in the house being long asleep. Not quite alone, for my cat was there—a detestable cat, kept only for mousing, not at all an author’s favourite cat who shares his study and his labours with him. Something, I do not know what, made me look round.
There, directly beneath the suddenly sinister-looking nail, was the cat, walking up and down with all the motions and the pleased expression of a cat which is rubbing itself against someone’s legs. Up and down she went for several minutes, purring softly, while I sat looking over my shoulder, unable to move. Then I went to bed and left her there, and left all the lamps burning and all the doors open behind me.
And yet, strangely, in the morning the pride of possession threw out the horror of the night. It was my ghost, my very own; not a freehold ghost, to be sure, but even a leasehold ghost is more than most people have. He is my favourite ghost, now almost an “affable familiar ghost,” and I look at all others as a man who loves his own mongrel fox terrier looks at the champions assembled at Cruft’s.
W. B. Maxwell
My favourite ghost is that of Lord Strafford in the novel “John Inglesant.” “All to nothing,” he seems to me the most appropriate and majestic apparition that has ever been imagined.
As many of your readers will remember, it is two nights after Strafford’s execution (the consummation of King Charles’s betrayal of a loyal servant), and Inglesant, on duty at the palace of Whitehall, sees the dead man pass through the outer rooms and enter the King’s bedchamber, “He was falling asleep when he was startled by the ringing sound of arms and the challenge of the yeoman of the guard on the landing outside the door. The next instant a voice, calm and haughty, which sent a tremor through every nerve, gave back the word ‘Christ.’ Inglesant started up and grasped the back of his chair in terror. Gracious heaven! Who was this that knew the word? In another moment the hangings across the door were drawn sharply back, and with a quick step, as one who went straight to where he was expected and had a right to be, the intruder entered the antechamber. . . .”
If anything could make me believe in ghosts, it would be Shorthouse’s conception and handling of this dread visit.
Algernon Blackwood
My favourite ghost story is what I believe to be also the shortest:
“Do you believe in ghosts?” said Jones.
“No,” said Smith.
“I do,” said Jones—and vanished.
Its authorship I do not know. It may be a chestnut too. Next to this, I place “Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James, for its majestic horror; and “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs, for it cumulative horror and its inevitableness.
W. L. George
I am very fond of supernatural stories, and am sure that the best I have ever come across exhibits the intangible couple of ghosts, those of the governess and the valet who float about the lake and establish a connexion of nameless horror and vileness with the two children who occupy the centre of the story called “The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James.
May Sinclair
If by my “Favourite Ghost” you mean the apparition that has most appealed to me in literature I should vote unhesitatingly for the ghost or ghosts in Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw.”
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Lucius Shepard The Taborin Scale
The Dragon Griaule, the vast immobile creature, sleeping or presumed dead, around whose bulk has grown cities, has been familiar to readers of Lucius Shepard since "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in December 1984. Shepard has returned occasionally over the last twenty-five years to regale us with more stories of Griaule's influence on the lives of the people who live on his body, or in the cities nearby. The Taborin Scale, published in an elegant edition by Subterranean Press, is the latest entry in the growing series. This novella concerns the numismatist George Taborin, who by means of a scale from Griaule finds himself and a prostitute, Sylvia, transported to what appears to be an earlier time when Griaule was young. Griaule is herding people to no apparent purpose. Taborin rescues a young girl called Peony from abuse, and with Sylvia the three form an odd kind of family. Shepard excels at depicting unusual people in even more unusual circumstances, and his prose is as elegant and shimmering as ever, casting its own spell over the reader just as Griaule's presence works its influence over Shepard's characters. The Taborin Scale is yet another example of one of the best modern fantasists at the height of his powers.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
ERNEST BRAMAH - New Kai Lung stories
Ernest Bramah's immortal Chinese storyteller Kai Lung has been a great favourite of the literary cognoscenti for over a century. The beautifully mannered prose and humorous incident has won over devotees such as Hilaire Belloc, critic Sir John Squire - and Lord Peter Wimsey, who is found quoting Kai Lung with approval in several of Dorothy L Sayers' detective books. Now four completely unknown new Kai Lung stories have been found and published in a new title, Kai Lung Raises His Voice (Durrant Publishing). Academic and enthusiast William Charlton (co-author of the first Arthur Machen biography)found them among Bramah's papers at Austin, Texas, and quickly realised what a prize they were. They date from the Edwardian period when Bramah's writing was at his best. "They confirm my belief," he says, "that Bramah is one of the really great humourists of our language". The collection also includes six other Kai Lung stories from Punch in the 1940s, previously only available in a limited edition, and one more from a 1924 anthology. Details from www.durrantpublishing.co.uk. Anyone who already admires the Kai Lung stories will be delighted by these new additions to the canon; anyone who doesn't know them has a great treat awaiting. Mark V
Monday, February 8, 2010
Australian Ghost Stories
A shameless plug for an anthology I've edited collecting rare Australian weird tales from the 1860s to the 1930s. The book forms part of Wordsworth Editions' admirable Mystery & Supernatural series that publishes rare and out-of-print volumes at budget prices.
Australian Ghost Stories collects what I believe are the best stories of their kind published in Australia or by Australians during the golden age of the supernatural tale. It includes stories by well-known Australian writers such as Henry Lawson, Edward Dyson, Marcus Clarke and Guy Boothby (of Dr Nikola fame), as well as lesser-known authors such as Roderic Quinn, Mary Fortune, Beatrice Grimshaw and Ernest Favenc amongst many others.
I'm hoping the anthology will showcase some neglected Australian writers of popular fiction.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Nikola at the Theatre
A couple of early dramatisations of Guy Boothby's Dr Nikola should be recorded:
From the Otago Witness, 25 June 1902
"A dramatisation of Mr Guy Boothby's novels, "A Bid for Fortune" and "Dr Nikola," was produced at the London Princess's on Saturday, March 29, under the title of "Dr Nikola." The work was adapted for the stage by Messrs Ben Landeck and Oswald Brand, who found plenty of sensational material in the Australian novelist's works. The first act, which deals with the beginning of Dr Nikola's quest for the charmed stick from Northern China, closes with a very powerful situation between Nikola and Dick Hatteras, the hero. Later the spectators' interest is sustained in a gambling saloon at Port Said, where Dick is entrapped, and in Sydney, where he is imprisoned in a cellar, from which he escapes in time to rescue Phyllis Weatherall, the heroine, from the hands of her persistent persecutor. Dr Nikola comes to a very terrible end. Through all the scenes there has hovered around, silently, the Chinese High Priest of Hankow, who, like Nikola, is eager to lay hands on the charmed stick. He speaks no word, but his face, appearing suddenly in unexpected places, causes an irresistible thrill. In the last act, when Dr Nikola is in his laboratory thinking that victory is within his grasp, the face appears at a window in the roof, and presently the High Priest is seen descending by a rope. There is a terrible struggle between the two desperate men, and in the end the Chinee, twisting his pigtail around the doctor's throat, contrives to choke the life out of him. Here, indeed, was a sensation for the Princess's patrons, and (says a London paper) on the first night of representation it thrilled them into an enthusiastic demonstration of approval."
In the lterary copyright records at the National Archives of Australia is a copy of Dr Nikola, a Drama in Four Acts, by Victorian actor Jefferson Tait. It was first performed by Philip Lytton's Dramatic Company at Good Templar's Hall, Stanthorpe in Queensland in March 1911. At the end of this dramatisation Nikola survives and is last seen heading towards a monastery in Tibet being met by welcoming monks.
From the Otago Witness, 25 June 1902
"A dramatisation of Mr Guy Boothby's novels, "A Bid for Fortune" and "Dr Nikola," was produced at the London Princess's on Saturday, March 29, under the title of "Dr Nikola." The work was adapted for the stage by Messrs Ben Landeck and Oswald Brand, who found plenty of sensational material in the Australian novelist's works. The first act, which deals with the beginning of Dr Nikola's quest for the charmed stick from Northern China, closes with a very powerful situation between Nikola and Dick Hatteras, the hero. Later the spectators' interest is sustained in a gambling saloon at Port Said, where Dick is entrapped, and in Sydney, where he is imprisoned in a cellar, from which he escapes in time to rescue Phyllis Weatherall, the heroine, from the hands of her persistent persecutor. Dr Nikola comes to a very terrible end. Through all the scenes there has hovered around, silently, the Chinese High Priest of Hankow, who, like Nikola, is eager to lay hands on the charmed stick. He speaks no word, but his face, appearing suddenly in unexpected places, causes an irresistible thrill. In the last act, when Dr Nikola is in his laboratory thinking that victory is within his grasp, the face appears at a window in the roof, and presently the High Priest is seen descending by a rope. There is a terrible struggle between the two desperate men, and in the end the Chinee, twisting his pigtail around the doctor's throat, contrives to choke the life out of him. Here, indeed, was a sensation for the Princess's patrons, and (says a London paper) on the first night of representation it thrilled them into an enthusiastic demonstration of approval."
In the lterary copyright records at the National Archives of Australia is a copy of Dr Nikola, a Drama in Four Acts, by Victorian actor Jefferson Tait. It was first performed by Philip Lytton's Dramatic Company at Good Templar's Hall, Stanthorpe in Queensland in March 1911. At the end of this dramatisation Nikola survives and is last seen heading towards a monastery in Tibet being met by welcoming monks.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
New R.R. Ryan website
R.R. Ryan
R.R. Ryan, author of such ominously sounding titles as Death of a Sadist, Freak Museum and The Subjugated Beast, has attained a cult status on the strength of his violent visions alone. But who was he, or she?
I had the honour of co-writing with James Doig the article 'Finding R.R. Ryan' on the identity of that mysterious British horror writer of the 1930's, R.R. Ryan in All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society issue 37, 2004. At that time it was only known that the writer's name was a penname, but for whom? James finally solved that riddle and published his research results as 'R.R. Ryan Found', in All Hallows: The Journal of the Ghost Story Society issue 44 in 2008. James and I earned a small spot in Joshi's Supernatural Literature Of The World, An Encyclopedia with our first article. The honours in having solved the riddle that had led to much speculation, belong entirely to James.
But here's the fun part: there's a new and interesting website on R.R. Ryan that certainly merits a visit.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
