Late Reviews

by Douglas A. Anderson

  In 2017, HarperCollins reprinted The Lyttleton Case as part of their revival of the Detective Club series.

  Morrough, E. R. (Abu Nadaar). The Temple Servant and Other Stories (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930).

  A collection of seventeen stories, most of them concerned with Egypt, plus a group of twelve short traditional stories under the heading “Some Arab Tales” (the kind, the author tells us, that “the common people of Egypt tell to each other and of what they enjoy”), together with a concluding “Glossary of Arabic Words.” This is the only book published by Morrough, and a few of the earliest stories (from 1926-27) first appeared in the London Mercury under the pseudonym “Abu Nadaar.” Later stories were by-lined doubly, and then singly as by E.R. Morrough.

  The best stories in the book are “Phronymous” (London Mercury, June 1928), which tells the story of an ancient man found in a monastery, who was apparently born around the fifth century A.D. and who could not die; and “ ‘Naam’ ” (London Mercury, August 1929), a tragic story of a servant cursed to transform into a hyæna. The title story (newly published in the volume, but reprinted in 1934 in Powers of Darkness, one of the “Creeps” anthologies from Philip Allan) involves reincarnation; a woman has a recurring dream of a past life, in which as a temple servant she killed herself to avoid being mauled by robbers. In the present, her callous husband brings her to the location of the ancient crime, with the same tragic results.

  Of the other fantasies in the book, “The Fifth of November” (Nash’s Pall-Mall Magazine, November 1929) tells of an effigy-burning by means of which a man unknowingly disposes of a hated colleague via accidental magic. In “The Cave of the Goddess” a young American women is overcome by the past in the Cave of Aphrodite in Cyprus.

  The remaining stories are often vivid and filled with local color. “Uncle Masa’oud” is the tale of a swindle based on one character’s resemblance to a rich businessman. “Ourfi” (New Statesman, 21 September 1929) is the report of a case tried before an Egyptian mudir concerning possible fornication. In reviewing the book in the Manchester Guardian, A.E. Coppard noted rightly that “there may be readers who will prefer the group of Arab folk-tales to anything else in the book” (2 April 1930).

  The author E.R. Morrough is a mystery, for the name turns out to be a second pseudonym. The only biographical information that has been found divulges that the author was born in 1897 at Kingston-on-Thames, and (as of 1929) he had lived for eight years in Egypt but was then a resident in Tanganyika Territory. Married, his chief interest in life was the study of birds. All public record of Morrough disappears after the early 1930s. A number of additional stories remain uncollected from various periodicals, the latest dating from 1934.

  It is now known that “E.R. Morrough” was the pseudonym of the civil servant and ornithologist Reginald Ernest Moreau (1897-1970).

  Muddock, J.E. The Shadow Hunter: A Tragic Story of a Haunted Home (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1887).

  J.E. Muddock (1843-1934) was born and died as James Edward Muddock, but at some unknown point he starting calling himself Joyce Emmerson Muddock, or Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock. Emmerson was an earlier family name, and Preston was his mother’s maiden name. Over his literary career, by a rough count of the titles listed in the British Museum Catalogue, he published just under fifty books as by J.E. Muddock (or J.E. Preston Muddock), and just over fifty books under the pseudonym “Dick Donovan,” which was also the name of a series character he wrote about, a Glasgow detective. Under each byline he published a collection of sensational, mostly supernatural stories: Stories Weird and Wonderful (1889) by Muddock, and Tales of Terror (1899) by Donovan. One novel, The Sunless City (1905) by Muddock, uses science fictional elements in the discovery of an underground lost race. A few of his other novels reach over to the borderland of the fantastic, and this includes The Shadow Hunter.

  This short novel is the narrative of Tryphena Sabine, who though engaged to one Arthur Morton is pursued by the sinister rich neighbor Reginald Walter Jarrald, whose local nickname of the Shadow Hunter gives the book its title. One night Tryphena’s fiancé mysteriously disappears, never to be heard from again. Jarrald continues his fruitless pursuit of Tryphena, who later moves with her family to India. Years pass and at Jarrald’s death Tryphena inherits his estate, and she reluctantly moves into it, so as to provide better for her invalid sister. There are ghostly mysteries about—including the apparition of a large negro who resembles Jarrald’s servant, one who disappeared at the same time as Tryphena’s fiancé. Tryphena sees a vision of the severed head of Arthur Morton, described with a special gruesome relish by the author:

  In a few moments the head rolled to the edge of the stair and went over, bumping audibly as it did so, and sending out a great gush of blood. So it went, from stair to stair, falling slowly and with a strange, dull thud; and every time it rolled over the blood gushed out in a stream until the stairs were all red and gory. It was hideous, ghastly, appallingly awful. I saw the head reach the last stair and roll into the passage where the blood had already collected in a pool.

  The existence of a hidden room is discovered, but Tryphena refuses to have it opened. Her sister dies after a number of ghostly encounters, and Tryphena herself languishes. After her death, her doctor adds a few chapters to conclude Tryphena’s account, telling of the discovery in the sealed room of the bodies of Jarrald’s negro servant and of Arthur Morton, the latter beheaded.

  This tale is routine and undistinguished, and the prose is relatively plain save for a few passages like the gruesome description quoted above. Even fans of the “raw heads and bloody bones” tradition of horror literature will find little here to satisfy their tastes. Despite this, contemporary reviews were quite critical of the book, noting that it “descends at last to the level of a slaughter-house in its ghastly, gory description of scenes which naturally enough kill off the poor heroine and her delicate sister. It is a penance to read anything so horrible in conception” (The Literary World, July 1, 1887). Such a comment makes the book sound vastly more interesting than it actually is.

  Muilenburg, Walter J. Prairie (New York: Viking Press, 1925).

  Prairie is a realistic novel of frontier life on the Great Plains, beginning with young Elias’s rebellion against his strict and tyrannical father, resulting in Elias being cast out of his family forever. The story continues with his marriage and through his troubles with the farming life. He finds a mystical beauty in the loneliness of the prairie, which is not shared by his wife, who pines for more human contact. Eventually Elias’s own son grows up and rebels. He is similarly cast out, and refused pardon, as the cycle continues.

  The prose is very well-done, and the characters finely drawn. The vast prairie itself is almost a character. It is Muilenburg’s depiction of the true, unsentimental nature of the hardship of life on the prairie that makes this book special and worth reading.

  Prairie was the first book published by the newly-founded Viking Press, and Muilenburg’s only novel. Walter John Muilenburg (1893-1958) was born, raised and educated in Iowa. As an adult he moved to northern Michigan, where he had his own small farm. First he spent his summers on the farm, while teaching English for the rest of the year at Michigan State College (later renamed Michigan State University). Muilenburg quit teaching in 1936, and worked his plot of land alone until his health gave out in the early 1950s. He died in Phoenix, where he wintered with two of his sisters. His short stories were collected by Nodens Books in 2018 as Prairie Stories.

  Munster, The Countess of. Ghostly Tales (London: Hutchinson, 1896).

  A collection of eleven stories, one reprinted from The Strand Magazine. Most are similar to accounts of true hauntings, and unremarkable in the telling, but they do manage a frisson in the descriptions of the apparitions. Otherwise the stories are standard, melodramatic fare, perfectly forgettable. The tipped-in illustrations—twelve of the sixteen are signed Fred Hyland (leaving four by other hands)—are amateurish, with exaggerated s
pecters; they match the stories well.

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  Neale, Arthur, ed. The Great Weird Stories (New York: Duffield & Company, 1929).

  This anthology of twenty stories gained some distinction when E.F. Bleiler, in The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983), suggested that “it is a reasonable guess that [Arthur Neale] is a pseudonym for Marjorie Bowen.” Bleiler presumably based his guess on the fact that this collection shares some unusual stories that are also to be found in the near-contemporary anthology Great Tales of Horror (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1933), which was definitely compiled by Bowen, who is credited as compiler on the title page. But as a little bit of digging proves conclusively, Arthur Neale was not a pseudonym of Bowen; yet the relationship between the two anthologies remains particularly interesting.

  According to the 1930 US Census, Arthur Neale was an editor at a publishing house, living in a boarding house in Manhattan. He was born Vivian Arthur Neale in Norfolk, England, on 25 June 1893, the eldest of three children of Arthur Neale (1872-1950) and his wife Jessie Eliza, née Burrow (1872-1961). He immigrated to the U.S. in 1917, and by the 1920 US Census he was a “sketch writer” in Manhattan with an American wife, Kittie, who disappears soon afterwards. Around the same time as The Great Weird Stories, Neale published two other anthologies with another New York publisher, Edward J. Clode: Master Detective Stories (1929; reissued in 1930 under the title Detective Stories for Boys), and Sea Stories for Boys (1930). The anthologist may be the same Arthur Neale who published a short play in pamphlet form as Black and Co. (Norwich, NY: Frank J. Stanton, 1922). Arthur Neale returned to England in the early 1930s, and died in the summer of 1933 in Birkenhead, Cheshire, where his parents lived.

  Of Neale’s three anthologies, The Great Weird Tales shows the most ingenuity of inclusion. Unfortunately, though, the volume has no introduction, and it does not even contain a list of sources or acknowledgements. The selections include work by William Waldorf Astor, L.F. Austin, Algernon Blackwood, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.P.R. James, Rudyard Kipling, Gaston Leroux, Arthur Machen, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, E. Nesbit, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, Sir Walter Scott, Allen Upward, H.G. Wells, and four anonymous tales. In all it is a wide-ranging and worthy anthology, especially for its time.

  Bowen’s Great Tales of Horror also includes twenty stories (and a six page preface), and the overlap with Neale’s anthology amounts to twelve stories. Five of these were under copyright, and Bowen acknowledges obtaining reprint permission from the copyright holders for these tales (“The Great Keinplatz Experiment” by Arthur Conan Doyle; “The Red Room” by H.G. Wells; “The Woman’s Ghost Story” by Algernon Blackwood; “Almodor’s Cupid” by William Waldorf Astor; and “The Shining Pyramid” by Arthur Machen). Of the seven remaining overlapping tales, three were evidently in the public domain (“In Letters of Fire” by Gaston Leroux; “The Tapestried Chamber” by Sir Walter Scott; and “A Night in an Old Castle” by G.P.R. James), along with the four anonymous stories. It may be safely said that Neale’s anthology was heavily mined by Bowen when she put together her own collection.

  The four anonymous stories are perhaps the most interesting stories in the collection, not merely for their elusive origins but also for their qualities. Bowen clearly queried the American publisher of Neale’s book about these particular stories, for in her “Preface” she notes: “The four other anonymous tales I have been utterly unable to trace; the source from which permission to reprint was granted can give no information beyond that they ‘appear to be taken from old magazines.’ Three seem to be translations and to date from the first half of the nineteenth century, or at least, very skilfully imitate the mood of another era and another country.”

  The original appearances of all four stories, and the authorship of two of them, can now be firmly established. “A Ghost of the Head,” a gruesome story of a haunting by a severed head, had appeared anonymously in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal for 25 September 1852; it was reprinted in the U.S. in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for December 1852. “The Doppelganger,” an interesting tale of mesmerism and dislocation, appeared without attribution in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for April 1856. It seems likely that Harper’s reprinted the tale from some as yet undiscovered British source.

  The remaining two stories also originally appeared anonymously, but were afterwards collected by their author in a volume of short stories. “The Two Sisters of Cologne” is a tale of two female serial killers—Bowen noted quite correctly that it is “a story of remarkable power, not easily forgotten.” It was first published in All the Year Round, the weekly owned and edited by Charles Dickens, in the 19 January 1867 issue.

  The final story, “A Legend of Dunblane,” is an excellent study of a man and his wife who come to hate each other, and of the revenge enacted upon the wife when she threatens to divulge her husband’s family secret. It also appeared in All the Year Round, in two parts, in the issues dated 11 and 18 December 1869. The author of both stories was [Charles] Hamilton Aïdé (1826-1906), who was born in Paris but was raised in England. He attended the University of Bonn, and served in the British Army. A regular traveler, he also wrote fifteen novels and some volumes of poetry, in addition to painting and composing songs. “The Two Sisters of Cologne” and “A Legend of Dunblane” were collected with five other short stories in Morals and Mysteries (London: Smith, Elder & Company, 1872). Apparently Aïdé’s only volume of short stories, it should certainly be worth further exploration. (“A Legend of Dunblane” was at one time falsely attributed to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.)

  The credit for resurrecting these four stories from obscurity must go to anthologist Arthur Neale, who seems to have put special effort into the compilation of The Great Weird Stories, unlike with his other anthologies, which contain more routine selections.

  Nicholson, John. Costello—Psychic Investigator (Ilfracombe, Devon: Arthur H. Stockwell, [1954]).

  Even in the wording of its title, this collection of eight stories of the psychic investigator known primarily by his last name, Costello, shows its immediate and direct descent from Carnacki—the Ghost-Finder (1913) by William Hope Hodgson. And it also follows the Carnacki stories in that the solution to any mystery that is investigated need not always be supernatural, but might have a rational explanation.

  Otherwise, there is little that needs to be said about these unambitious but entertaining stories. If you like the Carnacki stories, you will likely appreciate these pastiches. I certainly did. The four illustrations printed in this volume (one with a signature “H. Cox”), on the other hand, are unfortunately juvenile and detract from the effect of the stories.

  “John Nicholson” was one of three pseudonyms of Norman Howe Parcell (1885-1955). Parcell was born in Pembrokeshire and educated at Cheltenham College, Christ’s College, Cambridge (A.B., 1907) and at the Leeds Clerical School, where he was ordained in 1908. In WWI he served in France and Italy as a member of the British Red Cross, and thereafter was a headmaster at a preparatory school in Bridgend, and Master at St. John’s Hospital in Bath. Under the name Norman Percival he published three books of inspirational stories: The Demon Bowler and Other Talks to Schoolboys (1945), The Smoking Mountain and Other Talks to Children (1947), and It’s a Goal, and Other Talks to Children (1948). As Christopher Fairleigh, he published a slim children’s book In Nursery Rhyme Land (1948). And as John Nicholson, he published a juvenile science fiction novel Space Ship to Venus (1948), and Costello—Psychic Investigator.

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  O’Hagan, Howard. Tay John (London: Laidlaw and Laidlaw, 1939).

  Tay John is an imaginative work about a mixed-blood North American native who was called Tête Jaune (French, “yellowhead, heard as “Tay John” by others), whose legend gave name to Yellowhead Pass in the Rocky Mountains west of Jasper in Alberta, Canada. O’Hagan’s novel is divided into three parts, the first of which, “Legend,” set in the 1880s, tells of a yellow-haired trapper-evangelist Red Rorty who comes to the Shuswa
p to convert them. The Shuswap had a legend that a tall, yellow-haired man would come someday and lead them across the mountains to their cousins who had settled along the west coast. Red Rorty seems at first to embody this legend, but any novelistic lean towards romanticism is soon dispelled for the reader. Red Rorty rapes one of the Shuswap women; he is tied to a tree and burned to death. The young woman he impregnated dies before giving birth, but out from her grave comes a yellow-haired boy. Here O’Hagan has reworked a native legend about a dead woman’s son. The boy is called Kumkleseem for his yellow head, and he grows to manhood caught between Shuswap and white cultures, not fitting in with either. The second and third parts of O’Hagan’s novel, “Hearsay” and “Evidence—without a Finding,” take place in 1904 and 1911 respectively, and are related by a white narrator named Denham who is recounting the little he knows of the brutal and tragic man he came to know who was Tay John. The trajectory of the novel begins with the mythic and runs to the grimly realistic, before knowledge and evidence falter and give rise again to the mythic.

  Tay John is an unusual but powerful work, occasionally reaching towards the metafictional to deliver its message: “Every story—the rough-edged chronicle of personal destiny—having its source in a past we cannot see and its reverberations in a future still unlived—man, the child of darkness, walking for a few short moments in unaccustomed light—every story only waits, like a mountain in an untravelled land, for someone to come close, to gaze upon its contours, lay a name upon it, and relate it to the known world. Indeed, to tell a story is to leave most of it untold. You mine it, as you take ore from the mountain—and when you have finished, the story remains, something beyond your touch, resistant to your siege; unfathomable, like the heart of the mountain. You have the feeling that you have not reached the story itself, but have merely assaulted the surrounding solitude” (pp. 166-167). A neat thematic self-dissection of the authorial process.