A reprint of The Laughing Elf came out in 2017 from Nodens Books.
Macleod, Fiona [William Sharp]. The Hills of Ruel and Other Stories (London: William Heinemann, 1921). Illustrated by Margery Lawrence.
A selection of seven tales of the fin de siècle Celtic mode of Fiona Macleod, the pseudonym of William Sharp (1855-1905). I’d read all of these tales before, and I have to confess that I thought much higher of them ten or twelve years ago when I first encountered them than I did in rereading them. Then, they seemed ornate and gorgeous; today, they seem precious and tired. This edition has an added plus of very nicely done colored-plates and illustrations by Margery Lawrence, who would later make a name for herself as a writer of romance and horror stories.
Matthewman, S. The Crystal Casket: A Fantasy (Leeds: At the Swan Press, 1924).
Matthewman begins his short fairy tale with a proem, noting that any reader may take it for an idle tale, written for an idle hour. Yet if the reader wishes for more than this, Matthewman notes that “assuredly shall he find therein that which is in his own heart.” The tale itself is in three parts. The Great King is near death from a mysterious illness, and his peaceful and just reign is honored by his subjects and the neighboring realms. The people decide to send ten virgins to consult the Oracle of the High Gods about their King’s sickness. It is a long and complicated journey.
In part two, the virgins return, and on the scroll sent in reply to their petition the King sees letters of white fire that read: “Let the King become possessed of the fairest jewel in the world. So shall he be healed of his sickness.” The jewel turns out not to be a jewel in the usual sense, but the Soul of a Pure Woman that is confined in a crystal casket, for which the owner, a hideous wrinkled old man, requests the hand of the King’s beautiful sister in marriage. The King refuses, valuing his sister’s happiness above his own life, but his sister accepts the strange suitor. Upon their wedding, the suitor is revealed to be a young prince of the Land of Faery, who had been under the spell of a wizard that could be lifted only through the unselfish love of a woman.
Many years pass before the final section, where the King decides to travel to the South-Lands in order to see the fair body from which the beautiful soul had come. He finds the pure young woman on a couch of ice, and determines to restore her soul to her body. In his excitement on returning home to obtain the soul, the crystal casket in which it is housed slips from his hands and shatters on the floor. The King again falls sick and dies, but whether or not the soul is reunited with the maiden’s body remains unknown.
This original fairy tale is very well-done, and is one of two known prose fantasies by its author, Sydney Matthewman (1902-1970), who from 1921 to around 1930 was active as a poet and publisher in Leeds, producing over sixty small press booklets under the imprint The Swan Press. Other contributors to Swan Press publications include Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfred Rowland Childe, and J.R.R. Tolkien, all of whom were then members of the faculty of the University of Leeds.
Metcalfe, John. My Cousin Geoffrey (London: Macdonald, 1956).
John Metcalfe (1891-1965) is remembered today primarily for his weird fiction, which is mostly comprised of stories from his two collections, The Smoking Leg and Other Stories (1925) and Judas and Other Stories (1931), as well as two novellas, Brenner’s Boy (1932) and The Feasting Dead (1954), and other uncollected tales. This interest in Metcalfe’s short fiction has left his five published novels curiously neglected, despite their intrinsic similarities—compositionally and thematically—to his short fiction.
My Cousin Geoffrey, Metcalfe’s final published novel, is a typical example of Metcalfe’s work. In the vast bulk of the novel, nearly nine-tenths of it, there is only a small hint of the supernatural—found primarily in a visit to a fortune-teller and the subsequent unfolding truth of her predictions. But in the final tenth of the book, there is a swerve completely into the supernatural.
The story revolves around one Martin Combrey, whose birth and parentage is shrouded in mystery that is only gradually unveiled. Martin is raised by a bachelor uncle, who was devoted to his sister, Martin’s mother. Geoffrey Wheldrick is Martin’s slightly older cousin, and in Geoffrey Martin finds a kind of hero. Later, Geoffrey becomes a rival with Martin for the affections of a girl, whose own parentage is as suspect as Martin’s, so much so that Martin’s uncle suspects the girl to be Martin’s half-sister. All this family intrigue is played out over the course of the novel, which takes place from the late 1920s through the beginning of World War II. Like Metcalfe’s other work, it is well-written and subtle, at times perhaps too subtle. Without giving too much away, the conclusion involves a type of personality transference—the erasure of one character’s personality by means of the usurpation by another, the result of what is called in the novel “psychic vampirism.” In retrospect the conclusion seems logical, if one recalls Metcalfe’s subtlest hints, but its sudden unfolding puts the rest of the entire novel in a different light.
Miller, Sutro. Ghost Stories (London: Sentinel Publishers, 1947).
This small booklet is confusing bibliographically because on the title page the title is given merely as Ghost Stories, while on the typographical cover the title could be taken to be either “H” for Horrific! or Six Ghost Stories. The author Sutro Miller is identified only as the “contributor of twenty-two short stories and more than forty poems to various publications.”
This booklet contains six stories. Two of the six previously appeared in Short Stories, “The Intruder” in the January 1943 issue, and “Ships That Pass” in the May 1943 issue. The first story, “Two Died, One Survived,” tells of three young psychic investigators who stay overnight in a haunted house. The title completely gives away the plot. “His Lordship’s Request” is a vampire tale, and “The Intruder” involves a stranger appearing to Julian Moscrop on the one year anniversary of the death of his brother. Moscrop had of course killed his brother, who has returned to cause Moscrop’s own demise. All six of the stories are crudely written, predictable, melodramatic and forgettable.
Nothing is known of Sutro Miller. He published this booklet, and there remain a small number of uncollected stories in Short Stories and Crime Shorts. All of these publications date between 1943 and September 1947, when the booklet appeared.
Mills, Lady Dorothy. The Dark Gods (London: Duckworth, 1925).
Dorothy Rachel Melissa Walpole (1889-1959), the daughter of Robert Horace Walpole (1854-1931), the 5th and final Earl of Orford, and his first wife, Louise Melissa Corbin (1863-1909), an American from New York, had a solitary childhood and was educated in Paris. As a child she traveled frequently, often to spend time with her mother’s family in the United States. On 22 June 1916 she married her cousin Arthur Frederic Hobart Mills (1887-1955), who wrote quite a few novels and short stories (according to E.F. Bleiler’s The Checklist of Science-Fiction and Supernatural Fiction, his 1923 volume The Primrose Path, has supernatural content). After her marriage she styled herself as Lady Dorothy Mills. The marriage ended in divorce in 1933 after her husband’s adultery; there were no children. Early in her marriage she lived in Palestine, but for health reasons she soon moved to the warmer climate of Algiers, and on into the Sahara. She travelled extensively, and was reputed to be the first Englishwoman to visit Timbuktu. She made various expeditions (all apparently by herself, without her husband) through Liberia, Portuguese Guinea, and other parts of the Middle East and the Sahara. She published nine novels between 1916 and 1928 (sharing two publishers, Duckworth and Hutchinson, with her husband). In addition to her novels, she published several books of travel writing and a memoir, A Different Drummer: Chapters in Autobiography (1930). She was a keen photographer and illustrated her own travel books. An automobile accident in 1929 caused some serious injuries, and left her with a scarred face, but it did not stop her final trip to Venezuela in early 1931. This expedition became the subject of her final book, The Country of the Orinoco (1931). Later that year her father died, thereby giving her
complete and open access to a trust fund left to her by her American grandfather. She retired to Brighton, where she lived for nearly three decades but published nothing further.
The Dark Gods was the sixth of her novels. Andrew Legrand, the son of a French father and English mother, has lived in West Africa for five years. In the previous year, on leave in Winchester, he had met and impetuously married Anne, who now has come to live with him in the hard life of Africa. Anne is quickly fascinated by the native Africans, and becomes a pawn used by the M’Bongwe wizard and his witch-harlot Andova, who takes Anne to into her confidence and brings her to meetings of the secret women’s societies even as she works black magic upon her. Anne finds a sympathetic friend in another trader, Pierre Chanel, who like her has come to feel more sympathy for the natives than for his own race. An uprising against the whites looms in the background, and Anne’s husband Andrew, though devoted to his wife, finds a friend in the knowledgeable and self-willed traveler June Aleson. Mills manages the crescendo of the personal and public crises very skillfully, and though some of the attitudes encountered in this novel are dated and may cause a present-day reader to squirm, the author’s love of Africa and its people remains evident.
Two of Mills’s other novels contain elements of fantasy. In The Arms of the Sun (1924), a lost race (descended from the Chaldeans) in an underground city in Africa plans to use science to conquer the world, and in Phoenix (1926), a sixty year-old woman is rejuvenated to her youth with tragic consequences.
Monette, Paul. Sanctuary: A Tale of Life in the Woods (New York: Scribner, 1997). Illustrated by Vivienne Flesher.
A posthumous fable by Monette, who died of AIDS in 1995. It tells of a forest protected by a self-sacrificing witch, whose familiar, an owl, attempts to take the credit for preserving the forest for the animals. The owl becomes a voice for conformity, and sets his lackeys to the chore of watching the animals for any signs of being different. Of course, the intra-species and same-sex love between a fox and a rabbit is thereby condemned, and the two gentle female lovers are separated and punished. An apprentice wizard from outside the forest comes and awakens the witch, who sets everything right again.
The story is slight, but it is well written and engaging, for Monette never crosses over into proselytizing the morals and lessons he seeks to teach. A worthy, minor piece of fantasy from an author well-known and well-received in other fields.
Moore, Frank Frankfort. The Other World (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1904).
This book begins promisingly, with a quote opposite the title page:
“This Other World is indeed not so far distant from our own that is ruled by the sunne and moon. Therein the Prince of the Power of the Air hath his dominion, whose servants are the Witch and the Warlock, . . . the Night hagge, . . . and those that some, for want of a better name, term Ghosts, Ghouls (breeders of sadde dreams), . . . also the Hob Goblin (himself a foul fiend, albeit full of pranks), . . . Lyars all, but dangerous to traffick with and very treacherous to Mankind. They lure to Perdition soone or late.”
Dickon Penhaligon
Dickon Penhaligon is evidently an invented source (or person), for the name appears in only one other place—it is similarly cited at the front of Moore’s The Commonsense Collector: A Handbook of Hints on the Collecting and Housing of Antique Furniture (1910). Alas, it is a false promise: this mere quote is the high-point of the book, everything afterwards being a disappointment.
The Other World is a collection of six short stories, and one novella (which by itself constitutes about one third of the book). Most of the stories are probably reprints from periodicals, and the novella, here titled “Black as He Is Painted,” originally appeared in The Graphic and as a separate volume titled Dr. Koomadhi of Ashantee (1896). The focus of these stories is upon romance between young men and maidens. The supernatural intrudes only slightly—for example, in the form of a vision in “A Providential Escape” and in some kind of magical rescue over thousands of miles in “Magic in the Web of It.” “Black as He Is Painted” tells of a cultured West African doctor who loves a white woman, and attempts to use magic on her when she spurns him. Unfortunately this tale is rife with the racism of its time, which appalls the modern reader, and even the supernatural interest is marginal. The four remaining stories are less memorable. In the end there is nothing at all to recommend about this regrettable volume.
Francis Frankfort Moore (1855-1931) was born in Limerick, Ireland, and educated at the Royal Academical Institute in Belfast. He worked as a journalist for various Irish and London newspapers, before the success of his romance novels, I Forbid the Banns (1893) and The Jessamy Bride (1897). He published nearly one hundred books, including novels, plays, poetry and many nonfiction works. His first wife was Grace Balcombe (d. 1901), whose sister Florence was the wife of Bram Stoker, making Moore and Stoker brothers-in-law. In comparing their writing careers, it is interesting to note that it is Stoker’s supernatural stories that have brought him lasting fame, while Moore played only minimally with the supernatural, instead writing contrived and predictable popular romances which were more successful but which have dated badly. On the other hand Stoker’s writings sold less-well initially but have lasted much longer. There is unlikely to be any Frank Frankfort Moore revival.
Morant, H.C.F. Whirlaway: A Story of the Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1937). Illustrated by Jean Elder.
Whirlaway is a children’s book which has achieved a bit of a legendary status as a scientific children’s fantasy. In it, twelve year-old Helen, who has just moved near the coast to Lyell Lodge, which was willed by the mysterious former owner to her father, an old friend. Helen, and Tirri, her pet koala bear, go exploring in the house. A spark shoots out from the fireplace, and this turns into a merry elf-like figure, a Sunbeam (who had been shut up in a piece of coal for a hundred million years). Helen names him Whirlaway. In a hidden cellar they find a kind of lift that takes them into the far distant past, visiting various geological periods, having adventures, and learning things. After the first introductory chapter at Lyell Lodge, there are fourteen more, each an adventure into one of the geological periods, from the farthest back in time, the Cambrian (chapter II), through the Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, and ending with the nearest, the Pleistocene (chapter XV).
There are nine full page color plates by an Australian artist, Jean Elder, along with many ink drawings throughout the text. The one-page “Introduction” by Frank Tate, President of the Australian Council for Educational Research, appears to give the book some kind of imprimatur, which is altogether unnecessary.
Henry Charles Frank Morant was born in Dulverton, Devon, in late 1883, the son of cavalry officer Major George F. Morant. By the early 1920s Morant had settled in Melbourne, Australia, where he seems to have worked for a while as a photographer. Beginning in the 1940s, he edited The Young Farmer Annual until his death in Melbourne in 1952. Whirlaway is his only known published fiction. It evidently did not sell well, and stock was destroyed in the Blitz, leaving it a rare book today. Morant planned but never completed a sequel, The Ether Chariot, in which he intended to treat astronomy as he had the earth sciences in Whirlaway.
Morris, R.A.V. The Lyttleton Case: A Detective Story (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1922).
Ronald Arthur Vennor Morris (1877-1943) was the older brother of fantasist Kenneth [Vennor] Morris (1879-1937), whose classic works include The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed (1914), and its sequel Book of the Three Dragons (1930; expanded edition 2005), as well as his posthumously-published fantasy of the Toltecs of ancient Mexico, The Chalchiuhite Dragon (1992) and The Dragon Path: Collected Tales of Kenneth Morris (1995). Both Ronald and Kenneth were educated at Christ’s Hospital in central London; both afterwards became theosophists. Kenneth was associated for many years with the Katherine Tingley sect and lived in southern California from 1908 through 1930; Ronald joined in the Adyar Theosophical Society run by
Annie Besant, and he assisted A. Trevor Barker in compiling the first four volumes of The Complete Works of H.P. Blavatsky (1933-1936).
In the autumn of 1898, Ronald married Eliza Augusta Jevons (1858-1945), who was nearly nineteen years his senior. They remained in London, and had one daughter, Eileen Vennor Morris (1900-1972). Ronald and his wife became longtime members of the Theosophical Society, and in 1899, they joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. In the 1901 Census, Ronald gave his occupation as “banker’s clerk,” while his death certificate lists him as a “retired company director.” By 1930 Ronald and his family had moved to Hove. His brother Kenneth stayed with him for several months in 1930, when Kenneth came back to England before settling in Wales.
The Lyttleton Case is Ronald’s only known fiction. In their Catalogue of Crime (1971, revised 1989), Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor call it “an early specimen of the well-written, slow, carefully plotted puzzle,” and note that “it is an acceptable tale of murder, impersonation, and abduction, with entertaining asides about the contemporary scene.” The story begins with the disappearance of James Lyttleton, one of three partners in the financial firm of Lyttleton, Menzies, and Lyttleton, and this spurs his daughter Doris and her fiancé, newspaperman Basil Dawson, to investigate. Meanwhile, Inspector Candlish of Scotland Yard finds a dead body while on holiday in Hillborough in Surrey. Gradually over the course of the novel the two strands of story come together. The Lyttleton Case was reprinted six times, the last time in 1930 as part of the Detective Club series. Thus it was fairly successful in its first decade, and one wonders why Ronald never published a follow-up.
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