Grey Maiden, the story of a sword through the ages by Arthur D. Howden Smith (1929)

Image courtesy of Pulpflakes

Arthur D. Howden Smith (1887-1945) was a writer and journalist, who spent a year fighting against the Ottoman Empire alongside Macedonian revolutionaries and wrote adventure stories for Pulp Magazines. He even wrote a prequel to Stevenson's Treasure Island, with the approval of his estate.

Grey Maiden is a collection of stories about the sword as it goes from owner to owner down the centuries. These stories were originally published in Adventure magazine, and they all stand indepentantly. The stories include a type of lost race story of the survival of the Sixth Legion in Britain after the end of Roman rule, the story of vengeane for the theft of rightfully inherited property in Iceland or how the sword was acquired by a warlord of Muhammad.

Oddly enough, the very first story, The Forging, was not published in the original 1929 edition which is in the public domain today. It is utterly baffling why they would omit the story, especially as the Egyptian origin of the sword is still refferenced in several of the other stories. Luckil Black Mask Magazine has posted the story online and so it can be accessed below.

http://www.blackmaskmagazine.com/adventure_01.html

There is also a 2014 paperback edition from Atlus Press called Grey Maiden: The Story of a Sword Through the Ages, The Complete Saga.

Either way I highly recommend this book, it is one of a handful of titles I would rank as exceptional.

Osru a Tale of many incarnations, the history of the soul (1910) by Justin Sterns

Once again I am at a loss what to say about the author of a book. Justin Sterns seems to have ever only published one book. There is no biographical information to be found out about him, not even his date of birth.

The book is interesting though and worthy of a mention. It chronicles certain passages of the various lives of a soul. It works more effectively as a conte cruel then a lecture about karma, as there is only one incarnation wherein the soul commits any evil, where it happens to be Nero. The rest are rather unpleasant, from throwing a drugged woman ontop of a funerary pyre against her will, to a man rotting in a dungeon to several decades, being made the brood mare of a slavery plantation, etc. It is well written stuff either way and worthy to look up.

The only piece of trivia I can find out is that there seems to have been a drama based on the book called "Every-Soul" by A.L.Pollock. That person too appears to be an enigma.

A Modern Wizard by Rodrigues Ottolengui (1894)

Rodrigues Ottolengui (1861-1937)  was a somewhat famous pioneer in the art of inflicting suffering on others and still getting paid for it, specifically being a dentist. Apart from spending his time perfecting the root cannal and shinning x-rays inside of people's mouths, and an occupation with entomology, Ottolengui wrote a few work of criminal fiction, which appeared in book form between 1892 and 1896. He published no more fiction afterwards, beyond a story in a magazine here and there, and as Anthony Boucher said he "gave up the sleuth for the tooth".

A Modern Wizard is his third book and it seems to be his most interesting work. It has a main character who likes to hypnotise people and be brutish and commanding without considering other people's feelings, always getting what he wants. The first third of the book deals with Dr. Medjora on trial for the murder of his wife, and Ottolengui grinds the plot to a halt to showcase the proceedings in numbing detail, with nearly the entire cross-examination of all witnesses and the complete closing speech of the defense and Attorney, repeating the same points over and over again.

The second part, years later after Dr. Medjora was acquited, deals with the Doctor adopting Leon, a farm boy who, it turns out, is his son with his first wife. The novel seems to be building up Leon confronting the Doctor, who tries to hypnotise him and make him assimilate information at rapid rate for his own purpose, and also forces him and a girl in the neighbourhood to fall in love through hypnotism, all while talking about how he is a direct descendant of the God Aesculapius, who was a North American native wise-man venerated as a god before the world flood, leading Leon to the pyramid built by Aesculapius which is below Medjora's house. All this seems to build up some kind of conflict but then the novel just sort of ends with Medjora intentionally driving himself insane to prevent a detective from dragging his name through court after the suspicious and largely unexplained coincidental death of his second wife. Leon, despite how much time is devoted to him, really ends up doing nothing and it seems like Ottolengui suddenly ended the novel for reasons beyond his control.

Rather disappointing considering the potential of the Lost-race element on display here, it's a shame it ends up so marginal.

Adventures in the Skin Trade by Dylan Thomas (1969)

There's a lot to the person of Dylan Thomas, to the point where I don't feel like the right person to really talk about it as others who actually like his work are bound to have done a better job of it than I ever could.

As you may guess, I am not a fan of his collection Adventures in the Skin Trade. The unfinished titular novel is the most interesting piece as, though there are times when the author inserts his barely-comprehensible symbolism into the story, overall the characters are given some actual depth, as far as can be expected given the relative shortness of the fragment. The need for things to happen seems to have kept Thomas in check.

That is not so with the other stories in this book. Some are interesting and because Thomas shows restraint, are fairly competent. These are also usually extremely bizarre, like the story of a child crucifying an idiot to a tree or of a father who seduces his daughter and burns the incestuous product of the union in a big bonfire. But very soon Thomas starts to lose himself, with stuff like The Lemon still having the same bizarre furnishings but the whole thread of narrative is lost amid a confusing jumble of perspective shifts and symbolic statements which are so odd and lacking in logic that one is left to consider how much of this is actually happening in the story and how much is symbolic word-porn.

So too a story of a man in love with his two scarecrows is drowned in so much poetic moonshine that it becomes almost impossible to follow what is even being said. This is largely the style of most of the "stories" in the middle section of this book, made worse with some stories having no paragraphs or much of a break at all, being corner-to-corner walls of text that go page after page. All until the last two or so where Thomas suddenly dials back on the sensory overload. The last story, The Followers, would seem a bit tedious in most other books but in this one it was a welcome relief because what was happening was actually comprehensible: two old farts follow a woman in the rain and spy on her through her window. Nice, simple and lawsuit-worthy !

The Devil's Christmas Box by H.C.Mason (1921)

H.C.Mason was a South African astronomer, newspaper editor and veteran of the Anglo-Boer war. Unfortunately there is no more information about him available at present outside of what was written down in his obituary.

This appears to be Mason's only pure novel, he wrote besides this a collection of essays and a book on religion and philosophy. The Devil's Christmas Box itself is somewhat of a mess, a mixture of questionable science fiction, long didactic sermons on socialism and a love story. The whole thing is introduced via confused pseudo-scientific gobbledygook about the novel proper being dictated to a medium from off planet.

The part that is rather hard to swallow is how the author of this mysterious message claims that there are countless worlds with an absolutely identical history to Earth, up to bearing the exact duplicates of every person on Earth. This theory, which appears to have had some life in science fiction circles due to it being presented in Tales of Tomorrow three decades after this book was published, is laughable if only one knows anything about probability. Nor is it helped when the author claims that even the stars as seen from these other planets are exactly identical as seen from the globe. And yet towards the end the narrator goes on about how the duplicate beings on such planets might be united in death as one and in fact function as sort of continous reincarnation of one person into the same life, to try and make a better show of it. He of course completely forgets his own statements as to the absolutely identical nature of all these mirror Earths, down to the most minute detail, where no deviation can occur without some extra planetary influence, like his own. So this seems to me a rather pointless idea of an eternal life.

When the story itself begins, it is just a romance, focusing on Ronald Sanderson, one of those main characters, extremely handsome, strong and an absolute genius, whose statements about his own cardinal importance to the world and the ability to acquire any political seat he should strive for are not, in this one instance, to be taken as vanity, because they are simply stating an absolute truth ! You know, one of those characters you hope get their asses kicked sooner or later. The first part, which deals with an alternate future where a Boer rebellion against the South African Goverment is put down successfully, includes scenes of Ronald's time in the army, terrible crash landing in enemy territory and him being cared for by his one true love while behind enemy lines. It honestly feels this is the strongest part of the book and had Mason simply stuck to this and expanded on it, it may have been a good read.

The second part, with a tyrannical League of nations that the main character tries to depose via bomb threats but ends up accidentally blowing up the world, seems incongruous to the preceding section, and though the ending scene of the world's end is sufficiently grim to at least be entertaining, it's all rather sketchy, with barely any details and is over far too quickly.

The other negatives include a part detailing Ronald's school dayss which simply drags on ad infinitum, or the incessant prattlings of Professor Selliers (who, old man though he is, is friends with Ronald's sister since she is twelve and then marries her later on, nothing at all off-putting about that) about the damnable state of capitalism and the virtues of socialism, which in his view should be based and put in operation in accordance with religion ! Clearly it seems very credible that, like Mason writes in the introduction, the book was written when there was "nothing but propaganda" out talking about Soviet Russia. Because if it was written any later, he would probably have to know how pro-religious his chosen world-view really was.

Another interesting part is how Mason tiptoes around the idea of the native population of South Africa. He never features any until the very end, and even then their emancipation seems to have come in part from the Tyrannical League being in power....though Mason doesn't say that it's a bad thing, he goes on about hurting European resettlement in Africa as if that was in any way important.

In short, a confusing and confused hodgepodge of different ideas and stories which never really comes together.

Uncle Bijah's Ghost by Jennette Lee (1922)

Jennette Lee (1860/1-1951) (also going by Jennette Perry Lee and Jennette Barbour Perry Lee) was a teacher of Philosophy, Rhetoric and Composition and later teaching courses on Criticism. She married clergyman Gerald Stanley Lee. That is the extent of the relevant information I could really find about her, not even a single photograph. I do know that her novel "Simeon Tetlow's Shadow" was adapted into the 1918 silent film Ruler of the Road, which may or may not have become lost since then.

Uncle Bijah's Ghost starts out promising: with the arrival of the late Abijah Bowen's distant relations, coming to take up the place after his death. There are strange rumours about the house and the way he died. Phoebe, the eldest daughter of Phineas Bowen, finds herself confronted with feelings and experiences that she can't explain and there is a genuine atmosphere of rising dread as we learn more about Old Bijah.

However, at about two thirds of the way through all this action grinds to a halt and we have Phoebe's father going on a lengthy diatribe about elementals and mental impressions on objects, accidental telepathy and whatnot and it effectively kills the whole atmosphere of the piece, so intriguing before, as we never have any of the previous mysterious and supernatural events recur and instead the last pages of the book are taken up with a "Treasure hunt", which amounts to digging below the one tree directly facing the house to find it. There's a momentary discovery of a large metal object and one hopes that some sort of sinister twist would be involved, but apparently all it is is something that has even more money in it.

I'm not sure why the author decided to throw the entire plot overboard, but I honestly can't say it had any positive results. The book's ending seems a tad sudden too, as Bijah's old house maid is brought into the story more then halfway through to do basically nothing, and the younger children are almost completely incidental to the proceedings.

Grinmar, A Novel by Nathan Kussy (1907)

Picture courtesy of the Kussy Family Pictures at Picasaweb

Nathan Kussy was a Jewish lawyer and member of the Board of education in the US (presumabely New Jersey but I'm not sure) whose father was born in Bohemia and who wrote two things of interest. The Abyss, a novel about beggars and outcasts which is described by the Columbia Daily Spectator thusly

"Such unbelievable practices as the maiming of a child's hand to enable him to become a better beggar are described in great detail. The incident of a deformed girl who was encased in a monkey's skin and trained to pass off as one is another of the abhorent pictures he draws. At times he is extremely sentimental. "

The other is the current work, which appears to be Kussy's first, published about nine years before Abyss. It takes place in the Fifteen hundreds and concernes the diabolical plan of bloody vengeance of one old miser against all his enemies, who keep fawning over him to win his inheritance.

The story is very well handled and when Kussy is compelled to deal with his human characters, he draws you in and writes very well indeed, his title character is a charming rogue, who takes immense pride in entertaining his guests before he leaves them to their demise. The only part worth lamenting is that Kussy added a long section concerning the changes of the weather before and after the main text. The prologue does at least do it's job of setting up the terrible snowstorm at the novel's outset, but the epilogue prattles poetically a bit too long, and honestly could have been cut except for sections of the final instalment (for both prologue and epilogue come in several parts) which directly tie into the novel's end.

Whom the Gods Destroyed by Josephine Daskam Bacon (1902)

Josephine Dodge Daskam, later Josephine Daskam Bascon, authored more then forty books, was a pioneer in the Girl's Scouts movement. She also wrote and published in 1915 a seemingly anti-war play in which Jehovah's argues with Wotan and Hercules who is God so that's deserving of a more direct examination.

Her collection of Whom the Gods Destroyed is an interesting one. A selection of the stories focus on the destruction of gifted or free thinking people by their vices or gifts. Two of the stories, "A Little Brother of the Books" and "The Twilight Guests" will probably have the reader feel a bit melancholy. "The Maid of the Mill" meanwhile is a very good ghost story of it's kind, although it is the only supernatural tale of the lot, if one excuses the symbolism in "The Twilight Guests" as nothing more and if one disregards it in "The Backsliding of Harriet Blake", a story, by no means written badly, but which does focus on a rather puzzling fact to the modern reader: namely the universal horror with which the inhabitants of a poor house respond to an old woman declaring her lack of belief in the Holy Ghost, at which point the entire house starts to heckel her and sends for ministers to give her long sermons to logically convince her to believe. That the story is written to support their point of view rather does strike a modern reader as a bit odd, but the book is well over a hundred years old and the writing in it is very fine. It reminds me somewhat of the stories in J.S.Fletcher's "God's Failures", covered on here previously but though none of the tales have a conventionally happy end, one feels somewhat uplifted by the end regardless.

Wolf, the Memoirs of a Cave-Dweller by Peter B. McCord (1908)

Peter B. McCord was a watercolourist and newspaper illustrator and a close friend of Theodore Dreiser who died shortly before Wolf, the Memoirs of a Cave-Dweller, his only published book as far as I can tell, could be released. When McCord died of pneumonia he was only thirty eight years old, right when his talent appears to have become recognised. As consequence I couldn't find a photo of his, and so I added as heading to this review one of his own illustrations he drew for the book.

I am rather inclined to almost doubt that McCord never wrote anything before Wolf, as the strength of the book, though obscure it may be nowadays, strikes me as not at all what one would expect from someone publishing for the first time. McCord's prose does not have any of the clumsiness one would expect and even forgive a first-time author to exhibit. Not only that but both halves of the book are written competently, the first part not being a mere clumsy segue into the second.

The first part deals with the family history of the fictional author/presenter of the second part which is the "meat" of the book, including the coming and settling down of his grandparents in a remote and but sparsely settled area of the rugged frontier of the United States in the late years of the first half of the 19th century. The author's grandfather meets and befriends a Jesuit priest who, after many years of their acquaitance, when death is at his door, bestows into their keeping a mysterious packet which he means to give to his nephew Honoré, and assures that that though to find Honoré the whole world would doubtless need be searched, he will come to claim his inheritance, as he "always knew" the priest "meant it all for him". After he dies, many many years pass until eventually the author's grandmother grants him the package on her deathbed, still unopened, bidding him to wait for several months until he opens it to have a taste of what it felt to keep it sealed for fifty years. Inside, the author discovers a letter from the Jesuit meant for his nephew, and a bundle of manuscript which deals with a translated account of a prehistoric tribesman, who is apparently from a tribe linking the Chinese and Native Americans.

The second part deals in an autobiographical way with the life and trials of Wolf, a member of an unnamed tribe. Now Wolf does not really know the concept of shame, and the book does shy away from romanticising life among the primitive tribes, instead showing it as sometimes a very rough, bloody business where the strong man of the tribe can do as he will and no one really cares to differ, but eventually old age claims him and when he no longer has power in the tribe he writes the record of his life, deeds and the things he had seen and learned, for the sake of the tribe.

The book is written in a very brisk way with no deep effort at moralising, though one could maybe infer a moral from the proceedings if one so wishes, and the events which are narrated are all exciting or interesting and move the plot along nicely. The only minor point to make is that based on the Jesuit's comments in the first part, you would assume he was reffering to the map to some hidden treasure by some ancient American civilisation, which may not be prefferable to what we get but it is a bit misleading. And also the mystery of what happened to Honoré and what he was hiding from for so many years that his uncle never could catch his trail is really left up in the air and it does make you wonder. Still, the book stands on it's own two legs and it is trully a shame that McCord passed away so early and we were denied any more of his fine prose.

Jadoo, a Tale by Nathaniel Newnham-Davis (1898)

Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, a soldier and food critic, may have written from his experience when he wrote Jadoo as he served in the locales described in the book. Sadly he doesn't seem to have cared to go much outside of the circle of fellow British expatriates if that was the case and is reflected in his writing.

Jadoo starts out very promisingly. With a terrible heatwave gripping the Indian country side and a mad dash, all too late for the sake of one of a pair of street urchins, to put a stop to a human sacrifice which seems to bring an end to the dry season. Unfortunately after two chapters, all interesting things largely stop happening as we descend into the purgatory that is the life and petty enjoyments of British Colonial administrative in the British Raj. The wonders and charms of mystical India are almost wholly ignored and instead the novel is an endless parade of dances, picknicks, balls, plays and the wholly uninteresting exploits of Colonial belladonnas. Dita, the main character, occasionally shows up and though we are told she is suffering from living with a cruel husband we honestly barely focus on it at all. Every seventy pages or so the Fakir who sacrficed her brother to Kali and keeps telling her to "fullfil her purpose" shows up to remind us that he still exists and then we're back to wandering around Simla.

The novel does end with the degradation and death of the main character and her rebuked, ruined lover, but this comes at the very tail end of so much claptrap that I can't honestly recommend it. The idea of the woman being stalked by the ghost of the husband she more or less let drown to be free of him is little more then hinted at and does seem to be the result of nerves and opium abuse. I can honestly not recommend it, I found myself finishing the book more out of obligation than anything.

Among the Cranks by James Greenwood (1905)

The portrait of Greenwood is taken from spartacus-educational as well

James Greenwood (b. 1832 as claimed by http://spartacus-educational.com, d. 1927) was probably one of the pioneers of investigative journalism, making a sensation in 1865 when he, nepotistically employed by his brother in the Pall Mall Gazette, spent a night dressed as a vagrant in the casual ward of a London workhouse, which fancy terminology denoted a filthy room wherein homeless people could spend the night in a shelter designated for that purpose.

His article of the lowly conditions he experienced there let to a major outcry. Greenwood would go on to investigate the conditions of Railway workers and in 1874 he claimed to have witnessed an organised fight between a dog and a dwarf, though it was later not conclusively proven in investigation by the authorites.

I cannot say much concerning Greenwood's literary career outside of journalism, aside from his first book co-authored by his brother and future employer Frederick Greendoow, called Under a Cloud (1860), him having authored two books in defense of the working class and their plight, namely  Unsentimental Journeys, or, Byways of Modern Babylon (1867) and Seven Curses of London (1869) and the fact that his last book, the subject of this review, came out in 1905. I do not know if he published anything between 1869 and 1905.

The book in question is an odd one. A collection of the stories of the inmates of an insane asylum seems a very interesting idea, and reminescent of a story I'd read years ago which I cannot remember exactly, except that it may have been one of the Gothics, or perhaps a Russian work. Either way, the issue is that the stories presented herein, while possibly accurate to real stories Greenwood may have heard, as this does seem to be the sort of thing he would be all gun-ho about, aren't the most exciting and that's just such a shame, if you can draw entertainment from the mental delusions of people long since dead. Putting that aside, the stories narrated by the inmates aren't as fantastical as you would hope for. One includes a lady obsessed with post-mortem soul migration into cats, a tale of soul exchange in dreams, or a story where a man is convinced he has seen a vision of his utter ruin inside of a pool and goes around hunting to shoot a man he "recognises" from his vision in order to "break the spell", but most of the content is rather dry, and it almost sounds like a plot of a story that someone could have made a book out of, like the story of a man who accidentally becomes a member of an anarchist group that sponges him for money, of a worker who almost gets framed by the accountant of the company for fraud, the tale of a disfigured youth whom circumstances have lead to be wrongly pronounced dead and denied his rightful inheritance by greedy relatives, all these do seem like plots that are starting to get somewhere and then the interview ends and the usually unnamed Doctor, who has the annoying habbit of summing up the patients' story before they tell it so one is forced to hear it twice, will dismiss the whole thing.

The one truly fascinating story is that of a man convinced his old uncle had turned into a bluebottle fly he keeps around in a glass bottle.

Though Greenwood would write no more fiction after this he would carry on until his death at the age of 96.

I must express thanks to John Simkin of http://spartacus-educational.com/ for providing information about Greenwood including confirmation that he authored "Among the Cranks", the only source to definitely say so.

The voice in the rice, by Gouverneur Morris (1910)

Morris on the left here, with Pola Negri, Charles Chaplin and Ruth Wightman, his wife

Gouverneur Morris (1876-1953) was once a novelist of some fame, however he seems to be solely remembered now for the great grandfather after whom he was named. He wrote books and published serials in the pulps, including the not-hard-to-research-at-all title Adventure (in print 1910-1971). The only other tidbit I could find out about Morris was that he divorced his wife, married his secretary Ruth Wightman in secret in Mexico and then married her again because of Californian divorce laws. And he apparently knew Chaplin and the Viscount Hastings.

The book in question is a short little novel from 1910. Now when I first heard the summary, about a man being found washed up on the shore after he falls off his ship, and coming across a hunchback who brings him to his secret community where they never liberated their slaves, I assumed this one would be rather interesting. And but for one point I would be disappointed. As Richard, the main character seems to care very little about the blacks in the Santee still being enslaved, nor about locals telling him should the US scatter them all they would still come back and re-enslave the blacks anyway. He only ever makes one remark about all this, and that only to piss off someone he doesn't like. The whole rest of the novel is mostly concerned with him getting along with everyone at the Santee, which presents a slave owning society which threatened to kill him rather then let him escape to tell the tale, like an ideal place for endless society visits and tennis games. The ease with which the main character slips into going about making social calls among these people is rather alarming. Worse yet, the novel is presented as a love story between him and the hunchback's niece....except she's fallen in love with him when she found him unconscious from a snake bite and he after having just heard her talking to him over growing rice, without having seen her ! In fact the novel conspires to invent ways to prolong the time until he gets to see her, which is three pages before the novel ends.

The one real saving grace the novel has is Lord Nairn, the humongously corpulent, tyrannical ruler of the Santee, who is real fun to watch. The man immunises himself to snake bites by getting himself bitten on purpose since childhood, thinks about swallowing snakes whole and looked rather too intently at a young girl, the eventual main character's sweetheart, with the remark that he is waiting for her to "ripen". There's a few more twists and turns that do showcase his villainous character, but I don't wish to spoil them. The only problem is that he doesn't figure in the book more, and that once a skirmish happens which allows for the Richard and his Mary's escape, it largely happens offscreen, with everyone on the main character's side emigrating peacefully offscreen as well just before the afterword. It seems Morris could have written more about the internal power struggle in the community but maybe he did not know how to do so and prolong the meeting between Richard and Mary for another hundred or so pages.

The Tyrants of Kool-Sim by James Maclaren Cobban (1896)

James Maclaren Cobban joins the ranks of British authors on whom I can find virtually no information beyond a list of their books and their date of birth and death.

The Tyrants of Kool-Sim seems to be the most outrageous work of Cobban's and is a sequel to a seemingly pure adventure novel with no supernatural or fantastical trimmings called "The White Kaid". It deals with a rescue operation of notorious adventurer Tom Malleson by his sister and her friends. Though the book starts out written in a rather simplistic way and focuses on a pair of schoolboys trying to mount their own, hopelessly naive expedition to save Tom Malleson, after a chapter or two the two boys mostly retreat backwards to the status of background characters and the principal focus is directed elsewhere. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or if Cobban decided to abandon his primary focus on the boys as main leads as he wrote, but one does notice an increase in the quality of writing once the attention is focused on adult characters.

The leader of these, Captain Betterton, follows the trail of Tom Malleson to Algeria and discovers him in an almost inaccessible country whose only entrance is a deadly gorge full of poisonous flowers, a land populated by pygmies, called Kool-Sim. There Tom has been relegated to playing the role of a statue of the Sun God.

All is well and good until the party meet the aristocracy and King, the jewish features of which are noted by Betterton, along with their love of counting, lacking any culture and having acquired control of the land via loans. Worse these Jews inbred with the local pygmies have blood that is so toxic it literally became lethal poison.

The implications are not in any way outweighed when Betterton says:

" They are Jews, of course ; and, like Jews everywhere, they come to trade and stay to rule."

Later still, after the local arabs and pygmies have managed to overthrow the King they replace him with Abdallah, the son of the only man to have previously escaped the land of Kool-Sim. Tom Malleson then tells Abdallah to exterminate every last one of the nobles related to the King he can find, because "however humble to begin with, they will arise again, with as much destructive  power as ever. It is the way of all their kind. Therefore spare them not, wherever thou findest them."

Oh and when they English party run into the survivors of the court who try and kill them with poison darts, they drown them in the lake like rats.

Finally, the image of the King on the title doesn't bode well in hindsight either.

It's rather a shame that Cobban had to basically marinade the text in racist overtones because as an adventure novel dealing with the fantastic, it's actually fairly well written and readable.

The Master of Silence by Irving Bacheller, 1892

Irving Bacheller appears to be one of that type of novelist that is somewhat popular in his day and then fades from public memory. While not a complete enigma like some of the authors presented on here prior, Bacheller's life seems oddly lacking in interesting episodes. A WWI war corespondent and founder of the first modern Newspaper Syndicate who brought Kipling, Doyle and Conrad to the US reading public, his one major goof seems to have been sending writer Stephen Crane as a war correspondent to Cuba where the poor bloke got himself stranded on a dinghy for two days when his ship went under.

The Master of Silence appears to be Bacheller's first novel. It deals with a young man named Kendric who is visited one night by a strange mute person handing him a card from his mysterious, long unseen uncle Revis Lane (this family has a bit of an aversion to common names it would seem), urging the recipient (the boy's father, unknowingly to the writer long since departed) to come, citing "Consequences of vast importance to me and to mandkind" as incentive. Before the boy can get an answer to his questions, the mute servant suddenly up and dies, leaving the thing a mystery.

A few years later Mr. Earl, a man whose connection to the Lane family is never properly dwelled upon, ships off Kendric to look for his uncle in America. Then we skip two years and Kendric's already at his witts end. He finally discovers his uncle in a weird lake-side house shut up from all sides, only discovered via the medium of convenient newspaper article and here he comes to meet his cousin Rayel, who was intentionally raised by Revis Lane in complete isolation without ever having been taught how to speak because of Revis' idea that speech clouds the minds and distances us from the truth of things. Of course you have to have only a cursory understanding of feral children to know this is anything but the truth.

Of course the novel doesn't dwell on the sadism of the man deciding that since his wife died in childbirth he might literally make his own son into a living science experiment, dammaging him beyond repair in god knows how many ways but it's okay because he brings up God a few times.

Once Revis Lane dies Rayel is taken to the outside world and you'd think this would now be a novel about him trying to fit in with humanity after having spent his entire life with his father and two mutes inside of one house. But not really. Well it sort of is like that for a few pages, but it's mostly about Rayel's ability to somehow see through people's lies and the subsequent societal embarassment caused thereby. And then he and Kendric run into Kendric's old sweetheart, by complete accident again, who is now a famous actress. Now you'd think this would lead to some romantic entanglement involving both the cousins and the lady in question and it does for about two pages but then Rayel basically says he'll walk it off and you're left wondering what the point even was.

Around this same time Kendric gets beaten up by the accomplices of a sinister count whom Rayel accused of bank robbery while at a dinner table, and then after they move back to England there's some refference to a plot by Kendric's foster mother and her new husband to try and kill him except it's not really dwelt on at all, and then there's a confused scene of Kendric starting a fire and Rayel being horribly burned carying him out.....and if you're wondering if that's the end then pretty much yeah.

Despite the fact that barely anything happened.

This is a strange book. The first chapter draws you in with the sudden appearance of a mute bearing a cryptic note and even the search for Revis Lane leaves you with some hope but then it switches between taking potshots at high society, romance and adventure all within the span of a few pages and it barely dwells on any of it long enough to leave an impression.

The Sign of the Spider by Bertram Mitford (1896)

Courtesy of southafricabooks.com

Bertram Mitford (1855-1914) is a tought nut to crack. There isn't much information on him to be had online accept for the fact that he was born in the UK and visited South Africa several times, which is also where he got the inspiration for the setting of most of his novels. The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction claims he was a member of the Royal Geographical Society. His father Edward Ledwich Osbaldeston Mitford (1811-1912) lived to be 100 years old, for which he received a congratulation by the King, and according to The Times from London served for 25 years in the Ceylon Civil Service and in fact his first three children were born on Ceylon/Sri Lanka but Bertram was born back in England.

The Sign of the Spider is a book which I've looked forward to for many years on the title alone, before I found out Mitford was compared to H.Rider Haggard.

The problem is the tone of the book is all over the place. On the one hand you have a main character, Laurence Stanninghame, who is very pessimistic in all he does, to a lovable decree. But on the other, you have him participate in human slave trade in Africa and he goes through all sorts of mental gymnastics to justify how it's actually good that's he's enslaving these people. Mitford has all the people he enslaves be "savages", bloodthirsty cannibals, and so he tries very very hard to not have the issue seem at all moraly dubious. That is still very hard to accomplish, especially when the main character actually compares his own perpetual and hereditary enslavement of whole generations of people to his own future of, gasp, having to do odd jobs for not that much money ! Because willing paid employment and forced unpaid lifelong servitude and objectification are basically the same.

The main character doesn't set out to South Africa to deal in slaves, but circumstances force him into it. Only later on in the book when he gets captured by the People of the Spider, descended from the Zulus, the reader is hard pressed to feel genuine sympathy for him because he always has to remember this man was making money out of enslaving people. One of his companions actually continually protests the bloody business at first, and I could not shake the feeling it would not have been better for the book if that was the main character who had these objections. And not because I favour clearly defined black and white morality in characters, but more because the entire rest of the novel is set up like a traditional adventure novel where the story is designed to have you sympathise with the main characters and his plight and that always comes up as a sore spot.

The title of the book is derived from a box given the main character by a potential love interest before he sets off for his expedition and just so happens to resemble the national symbol of the spider worshipping Ba-gcatya and thus saves his skin. He gets carted off to their land, but his stay there doesn't take up much of the book and isn't as in depth as one would like.

Then finally, the moment we've all been waiting for. He gets himself thrown down into a pit with a huge man eating spider and it's.....not that great. It only lasts a few pages and then he runs off thanks to his Ba-gcatya sweetheart Lindela. On the way back to Cape Town Mitford, in order to avoid having to deal with race issues, does a copout by having Lindela die of a snake bite along the way. Laurence finds his other sweetheart in Cape Town, the owner of the titular Sign of the Spider, her monogram on the box which saved Laurence's life before, is now married to her rude, obsessive cousin, because he'd probably off himself otherwise.

Laurence then goes back to England with a few diamonds he found in the spider cave and apparently his slaving companions are still in the business and getting rich off of it by the end of the novel.

While the Ba-gcatya are portrayed with dignity, one does have to wonder about Mitford's morality when dealing with some of these issues.

Overall, the horror element in this book is far too minimal to really warrant it being a classic of the Weird and the adventure element isn't as extensive as one would hope. I hope Mitford's Induna's Wife and The Weird of Deadly Hollow will fare better.

THE GOLDEN DWARF: A SENSATIONAL ROMANCE OF TO-DAY by R. Norman Silver (1903)

Courtesy of L.W.Currey

There is nothing at all I could find about the author of this book, apart from his real name apparently being "George Knight", Given no other information including date of birth or death, it seems rather difficult to find anything with certainty on such a common name.

The book itself is really a melodrama, taking place in Wyresdale, England. It originally appeared serialised in Weekly Mail in 1902 before it was published as # 105 of M.A.Donohue's Flashlight Detective Series. An odd choice to be sure, as overall the detective elements of the novel are somewhat incidental.

It is the story of a pair of lovers whom circumstances contrive to tear apart, but unlike most stories this one has two different sets of antagonists opposing the main characters, who intertwine and subsequently frustrate each other's attempts at revenge. There are about fifteen characters one has to take note of and memorise their particular mutual sympathies and antipathies, including two romantic couples at once, because the more the merrier I assume. Of course there is a fantastically rich, villainous dwarf who wishes to obtain the hand of the female lead, by any means necessary, as well as vile german scientists at his beck and call. The main character's uncle gets murdered and the village inspector constantly makes wrong assumptions and never even comes close to identifying the killer himself, though that may be because he has the hots for the local Chemist's pretty daughter, so much so he reveals classified information to her, pretty much without provocation. His romantic rival, the chemist's assistant, becomes more usefull then the policeman or the main character, by revealing the sinister plottings of the Golden Dwarf, the fantastically rich diminutive person already mentioned.

This discovery, coming in a little too late in the novel, is also the most intriguing part of the whole book. The Golden Dwarf is apparently conducting inhuman experiments to turn children into giants and dwarfs...and yet this utterly horifying aspect of the story gets ignored for three quarters of it's running time in favour of conspiracies relating to paid false testimony and secret messages engraved on riding whips, and even then it takes up only a few pages at most until we're forced into a dramatic climax involving landmines. It's a pity because that was why I read it in the first place.

The main characters are also not much horrified by the inhuman abominations they find, and even the inspector himself has, apparently, no idea with what to charge those responsible. Now, I know Britain in 1902 wasn't paradise on Earth but even I think child abduction and inhuman experimentation on children would probably have landed you in the brig even back then.

Of course the inspector would also probably land behind bars as he let the disfigured children stay locked in their cells and him never thinking to move them results in all of them dying when the laboratory blows up.

The only interesting part of the novel, aside from the aforementioned ungodly experimentation, is that not only do two people who abducted the main character's cousin get away scott free, but so does one of the Germans who was directly involved with the child experiments, as well as being an accessory to the murder of poor Sir Christopher Derring, who never even shows up in the book alive, and whose murder the inspector pinned on half the people in the village.

Overall, not even close to what I was hoping it to be.

Born of Flame: A Rosicrucian Story by Margaret Bloodgood Peeke (1892)

The legacy of Margaret Bloodgood Peeke (1838-1908), if it survives at all, is through her contribution to Hermetic philosophy. She appears to have been quite active in the field, and even taught courses with titles like "Breath-Prana and Kingdoms of Consciousness" and "Eight lectures on the Yod, He Vau He, the Secret of the Kabalah". There is precious little I could find regarding her personal life, apart from being married to Rev. George Hewson Peeke and that she left all her real estate property not to her husband, but to her son E Cornelius Peeke, while her husband only received 100 $ to, quoting her will "to show my good intention toward him".

Of her sons the only one on whom some information exists is Hewson L. Peek, a lawyer in Sandusky, Ohio, who wrote two historical accounts of Erie County and also penned the 1917 history of American drunkenness in "Americana Ebrietatis: The Favorite Tipple of Our Forefathers and the Laws and Customs Relating Thereto".

As to the fiction work of Miss Peeke, she appears to have penned two fiction titles, today's subject and her Zenia the Vestal. The novel, Born of Flame, first came to my attention in the early months of 2014 when I found it listed on L.W.Currey's website. The description intrigued me and I went to seek it out but alas it was not yet digitised. It was one of the works which drove me to create this project in the first place, in fact to start compiling my list long before I decided to set it up as a blog. Now recently I have found that Born of Flame had been made available online and so with amazing eagerness I raced to acquire it and start reading it as soon as possible.

Unfortunately I was found rather disappointed. In fact this case shows many similarities with that of Charles W. Leadbeater's Perfume of Egypt, the first proper review on this website in that people of spiritualist leanings will often produce the most inefective works of supernatural fiction, a statement I have heard before from another author whom I cannot identify at present but I assume it may have been Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

The sadder part is while Leadbeater's work was flawed it was at least presented as a series of stories, with varying degrees of competence and racism. But Mrs. Peeke's book is barely a novel at all. There is some plot but a majority of the book is taken up with characters having lengthy discussions on spiritualism, hermeticism, and trying to link these together with Biblical dogma and geological evidence. And then the author will practically drop all pretenses at narrative fiction and sometimes will fill up three quarters of a page with extensive notes and quotations from spiritualist texts, sometimes seemingly with little or no segue between what is being (volumniously) explained on the page and the word or phrase of the novel which lead to said diatribe via an asterisk. In an amusing gaf, the author forgets the novel is supposed to take place in 1857 and has characters quote Hargrave Jennings's "The Rosicrucians" which was first published in 1870, and even have it reffered to as an old book ! Incidentally, those who unjustly rag on Bulwer-Lytton for supposedly writing incredibly bad prose (see "It was a dark and stormy night" etc.) never read Jenning's line "Note the goings of the Fire, as he creepeth, serpentineth, riseth, slinketh, broadeneth.", a line which Peeke actually quotes in the novel !

If it seems like I'm stalling that's because I am. There is almost nothing here. A doctor by the name of Grotius at an asylum falls in love with one of his patients who becomes violent whenever he's not near her. She dies and leaves him a bundle of papers inscribed by her father. Now after reading this Dr. Grotius becomes melancholy and gives it to his friend, the skeptic mineralogist Dana to read over.

The inscribed tree bark details the life story of the father of Dr. Grotius's great love, a certain Van Guilder. He relates how he met a woman from far India during a shipwreck and how they married and then travelled to a rough, untamed part of America to build a house in the hills. But Van Guilder's house becomes a store house for smugglers who bribe him with precious minerals. Then after some time his wife, who constantly talks about some grand mystical enterprise she's been chosen to conduct, passes away and he is stricken with grief but is consoled by her spirit. Dr, Grotius decides to find the House, along with Dana, to take a load off his mind and there runs into a group of people lead, as it turns out, by Elfreeda, the cousin of Grotius' Clothilde, who is a great female mystic and constantly talks about concluding her aunt's work. Dana falls for her and nearly gets himself killed because Mrs. Van Guilder's ghost takes umbridge at people touching the books in her old room, even if it's just regular volumes of verse, to the point of routinely killing people who do so.

The rest of the novel describes how Elfreeda, her brother, friend (the latter two of whom pair off in a sort of blink-and-you-miss-it way which never really comes much into play) and Dana travel to a town of Black people where Peeke can wax lyrical about Southern hospitality, have a white lawyer be sort of racist towards black people by implying slavery made them lazy, and falling for Elfreeda as well....and this also literally leads to nothing except him and his senator friend going on about what an absolutely flawless Goddess she is. I would almost think this was a self-insert of the writer, given her deep and lengthy musings on Rosicrucianism and Hermeticism. While in the town they find bones of pygmy people who are said to be the first human species to have possessed a spirit, as opposed to the so called Mound Builders who didn't because something about them being brainless, and who chased and hunted the pygmies violently.

Then after they find a tomb with a bunch of pygmies and a sacred inscribed moon rock to match one they found at the house and one Elfreeda saw in India, they return back to the Van Guilder house where, out of nowhere, Grotius decides to take some of the preserved Pygmy brains and have it inserted into the neck of an infant so that....it will regress in evolution and or develop regressive degenerations or defects to.....prove something about evolution.....I guess ? This is such an out-of-nowhere moment and it's over in a sentence or two so you have no idea what just happened.

The Novel ends with a fire Tree planted by a mystic in the back of the house exploding, Dr. Grotius willingly dying to join his beloved Clothilde and the entire house sinking into a sink hole in the ground. Mixed between all of this are statements about how humanity was basically designed to evolve into modern man by some type of Moon spirits called Pitris, how Darwin is a stupid-face because he believes we evolved from Apes as opposed from Pygmies, or how the Seven Planets of our solar system and seven sections of a human heart are all connected to the mystical number seven because mystical mysticism. Well Mrs. Peeke that last point was much more hilarious until 2005 but may yet prove to be just as hilarious in time. Oh and there's a psychic Black girl who can summon birds but she's in the story for like three pages and ends up as the house maid in Elfreeda and Dana's house.

And if it seems like that was actually a decent length of plot, boiled down it's a bunch of people going to a house, finding a ghost and scroll there, going to a place to dig up bones and then coming back, all while never shutting up about moon spirits and soul transference and the sanctity of fire. Which is really a shame.

Zanoza, a Borzoi Story by Ralph G. Kirk (1920)

If only a little while ago I complained about Philip Verrill Mighels being hard to find information on, Ralph G. Kirk is a near complete enigma.

There is no information on the man whatsoever apart from his date of birth and death (1881 & 1960) and a listing of stories he published in various magazines over thirty years. Two of these stories, Malloy Campeador and United States Flavor were made into films, though they appear to be melodramas, while the title of another, A Poem as Lovely as a Blast Furnace, at least has an amusing title. Kirk also seems to have had a thing for dogs, as he published at least 5 stories dealing with dogs, two of them as novels before they were collected together in his 1923 "Six Breeds" collection.

This was also the last time the chief item of interest today, Zanoza, saw a reprint, being originally published three years prior.

The book is odd to say the least. The first part deals, in very great detail, with a legendary hunting-dog-aided wolf hunt taking place in 19th-Early 20th century Russia. It's chief point of interest for the story as a whole is that, right at the conclusion of the hunt, a bitch named Zanoza gives birth to a pup who inherits the same name.

Then all of a sudden the book switches time period, location and the person in which the story is told, so suddenly in fact it's bound to give you whiplash. The setting itself is infinitely less interesting then the snowy expanses of Russia that Kirk managed to evoke very well without very many words, and the now first-person narrator never really bothers to introduce himself. In fact the whole thing is written as if we're supposed to know many of these things already, as if this was a sequel to something. Zanoza, for instance, is reffered to at almost the very end of the novel as the granddaughter of another bitch bearing the name Zanoza, and the narrator reffers to her cunning, but it's the first time the author even mentions the existence of this particular dog, as I don't believe she ever comes up in the first part, in fact within the first section of the book Zanoza II doesn't really have that much to do with the plot either.

The reader is unsettled by the sudden lack of interesting things happening, as well as the author's excessively keen interest in the poetic beauty of dogs, which Kirk writes about in such detail in this story that I was a little worried.  Only a sudden mention of the narrator's obsession with werewolf mythology even hints at anything fantastical maybe happening, and distracts us from questioning the inner workings of Kirk's mind.

To sum up the plot of Part II: The narrator, who has just had a baby child, and is the owner of Zanoza III, is visited by a strangely smelling man called Doctor Lupus. He shows up for no other reason then a social visit, arranged by a mutual friend, but mid-coversation a messenger boy comes about and hands the narrator, who has yet to change out of his bathrobe, a note from said friend who apparently assumes this may be a wereworlf and so he assumes the narrator can deal with him, somehow.

Then Doctor Lupus, for no real reason, turns into a wolf, steals the narrator's infant child and leads him and Zanoza on a mad car chase, (wherein the werewolf is driving a car) that ends with him splattered on the ground and strangled by the narrator. After a distressing discovery, he returns home with heavy heart, but finds out that everything he experienced was just a dream. And while this is a cliché, it certainly explains the weird logic which characters follow in the story, as in the content of the note, or why Doctor Lupus even showed up, or in fact the very being of a Doctor Lupus who is also a werewolf. It's a sort of strange non-logic one oftentimes finds in dreams, and one I've experienced myself.

I believe the most fitting way to summarise the story is to note that it is, in fact, not Lupus.

No I could not resist.

The Crystal Scepter (1901) by Philip Verrill Mighels

The person of Philip Verrill Mighels is a bit of a mystery to me at present. I didn't find a single photo of the man for starters. I found pictures of his parents, his wife, even his wife's second husband but none of the man himself.

Mighel's family grave

His personal details are limited to the year of his birth (1869), the year and place of his death (1911 in Carson city) and the fact that he married Ella Sterling Mighels, a pioneer and historian. And a handful of choice anecdotes: the fact of his being raised in Nevada, the second son of Nellie Verrill Davis and Henry R. Mighels, who both worked as editors on Carson city's "Morning Appeal"/"Carson Daily Appeal", his being a lawyer and journalist, a snippet from the publically available section of the New York Times concerning his wife's divorce from Mighels, which states that Mighels had deserted his wife in Nevada under some circumstances and another NYT article which lists him as one of the people present for the funeral of Mark Twain. According to "No Rooms of Their Own: Women Writers of Early California" by Ida Rae Egli he died at the age of 42 in a hunting accident a year after their divorce.

Philip's parents Henry and Nellie Mighels

Of his novels, most seem to deal with the old west and the frontier, and seeing the place he died at, the fact that he wrote some novels about prospectors doesn't come as much of a surprise. The only other work of his that seems to have some immediate interest beyond the fields of period adventure and gold digger fiction seems to be"When a Witch Is Young", his 1901 historical novel taking place around the time of death of Metacomet, the so called "King Philip".

The only piece of his fiction that is known to me to deal definitely with anything fantastic, beyond the elusive 1896 story "The Polar Magnet" from the Black Cat magazine mentioned on the SF encyclopedia page for Mighels, is his 1901 tale "The Crystal Scepter".

In it Mighels describes the journey of the narrator, who remains nameless for more then half the book, where thanks to a ballooning mishap hefinds himself in the middle of somewhere, on a tropical island, face to face with primitive early humans which he dubs "Missing Links". The novel focuses on him forcing improvements onto the poor savages, including better cooking, housing and defense mechanisms. The narrator never actually explains his own backstory in any way, but seems strangely knowledgable about archery, mixing explosives and boat building.

The tribe of Missing Links good old John Nevers finds himself sharing his lot with are white, and constantly besieged by a horde of other Missing Links who are black. Now there seems to be some racial bias in the way these latter ones are treated, beyond the one good natured black Link who was raised by the white Links and who, for his athletic figure, is dubbed "Fatty" by the narrator. However at least Mighels clears them of the charge of having murdered a traveller whose skeleton the narrator finds in their camp, as it turns out to have been an accident.

The novel, while it could have opened up to far more fantastic things, is a solid read regardless, though the Crystal Sceptre of the title, being the chiefly insignia of the head of the tribe the narrator joins forces with, is a rather miniscule part of the novel, though it's a good title I suppose. Oh and there's a woman who ended up crashing on the same island and was the unwilling guest of the black Links. I can't really say anything about her as she comes into the story in Chapter 36 (out of 45) and there's not much space actually given her.

The book is written in an amusing way, and Mighels is good with an occasional quip or two. Still there's a certain thing that happens at the end which I hope he wouldn't have done because it was a bit sad and it was also kind of a clichéd thing to do, and seems rather tacked on to the ending.