Clive Pemberton (1881-1954) was the fourth son of Thomas Joshua Pemberton (1837-1907) and his first wife, Catherine Jane Eccles Fisher (1838-1894). One of Clive’s older brothers was the popular novelist Sir Max Pemberton (1863-1950). After Clive’s mother’s death, his father married Alice Phillips, the daughter of the famous baritone Henry Phillips (1801-1876). Clive’s paternal grandfather was Charles Pemberton, famous as an advocate for Liverpool.
The stories in The Weird o’ It were originally published as a numbered series in the weekly paper Sketchy Bits, edited by Charles Shurey, beginning in early 1906. When collected in December 1906, these stories became Pemberton’s first book. It was followed soon after by The Harvest of Deceit (1908), a mystery novel published by Greening & Co. A small biographical sketch of Pemberton (including a photograph, which shows a close facial resemblance with his older brother Max) appeared in the Greening house-organ, The Imp: A Monthly Magazine, at Christmas 1907, where it notes that Pemberton “has a leaning towards detective stories, and finds a peculiar fascination in keeping dark the mystery to the last line.” It also notes that Pemberton began work on the Stock Exchange, but after three years abandoned it for journalism. Between 1902-07 he published over a hundred short stories and many novelettes and poems. He was among the first to contribute stories in verse to The Novel Magazine (founded in 1905), which became a distinctive and popular features contributing to the success of the magazine. Pemberton is also known to have contributed to The Morning Leader, The Daily Mail, The Daily News, The Dundee Advertiser, Cassell’s Saturday Journal, Sketchy Bits, and various publications of Newnes and the Amalgamated Press. It seems likely that Pemberton’s connections to the latter were due to the influence of his brother Max, who worked closely with the founder of Amalgamated Press, Alfred Harmsworth (after 1905, Lord Northcliffe). Some undated Pemberton novels, including The Valliscourt Mystery (Lloyd’s), Her Own Secret, Until You Came (Amalgamated Press), and possibly others, likely appeared in the 1910s in paperback formats. Such popular fiction titles, often part of a many-volume series, are not separately listed in the British Museum Catalogue, and as surviving copies are scarce, it is virtually impossible to find accurate bibliographical details.
Pemberton married Winifred Crooks in the summer of 1915. Two more novels appeared, including A Member of Tattersalls (1920) and The Way of the World (1921). Nothing is known of his later life. Pemberton’s death was registered in Newton Abbot in late 1954.
Pendered, Mary L. The Secret of the Dragon: A Romance Ancient and Modern (London Harper & Brothers, 1911).
This is basically an occult romance. It concerns two families, the Manwoods, and the de Paganels. In the past, when Ansculf de Paganel knew he was dying, he wrote a letter asking his friend Christopher Manwood to inform his son and heir, when he would come of age, of a great secret, guarded by a stone dragon in the garden of the de Panagel estate. But this never happens because Manwood died before de Paganel’s son reached manhood.
In modern times, Manwood’s descendent, also named Christopher, reads the documents and determines to discover the secret. He poses as a gardener and maneuvers himself to work for the de Paganels, the widowed and bookish Godwin, and his attractive daughter, Melisent. An unctuous rival, Ivo Newman, appears and cozens up to Godwin de Paganel, working on his own agenda to determine the secret of the de Paganel estate. Manwood explores the fabulous de Paganel book collection, and deciphers some alchemical ciphers. In the end, a large supply of gold (the intimation is that it was successfully produced by alchemical means) is found under the stone dragon, and the end result is three marriages, two between the de Paganels and the Manwoods, and one for Melisent’s servant whose long-lost love has returned.
The book is better than it sounds, and the prose is supported with many allusions and quotations from medieval writings. It is in many ways similar to Arthur Ransome’s The Elixir of Life, published four years later. And it is rather more ambitious, and more interesting, than Pendered’s later more commercial novels, though at best it remains merely a curiosity.
Pendered, Mary L. The Uncanny House (London: Hutchinson, [1927]).
This ghost story has achieved some cache of fame in the collector’s market because of the striking art on the dust-wrapper of the 1929 International Fiction Library edition published in the United States. The text itself, however, is much more routine, but not entirely uninteresting.
The Dacre family purchases a house cheaply, and the wife, Peggy, and some of the children occasionally see a funny old man who isn’t there, the specter of the reclusive previous owner of the house who died intestate. Nothing really sinister happens, and too many pages are filled with the back and forth banter between Peggy, the believer in the supernatural, and her husband Percy (nicknamed by her “Perks”—their dialogue is sprinkled with annoying sobriquets), the materialist scoffer. The story picks up three-quarters of the way through when Percy enlists the aid of an art school friend, an Irish man possessed of visions and second sight, who visits and suggests some sinister possibilities underlying the haunting. In the end, however, the ghost is only trying to point out the location of his lost will, which directs promised legacies to his faithful housekeeper and a long-serving gardener.
Mary Lucy Pendered (1858-1940) was a prolific novelist; four of her books have fantasy content, including The Secret of the Dragon (1911), The Uncanny House, Mortmain (1928), and The Forsaken House at Misty Vale (1932). She also wrote a study of the romantic artist John Martin, Painter: His Life and Times (1923).
Peterson, Margaret. Moonflowers (London: Hutchinson, [1926]).
Moonflowers has a reputation as a rarity and as a supposed vampire novel. The former is certainly true, the latter is a bit more complicated. Moonflowers is set in Uganda, in eastern central Africa, and centers on Blaise Norton, a young man from England who is new to Africa. He meets and becomes instantly enamored with Mrs. Melisande Martin, the wife of his boss, who is the manager of a cotton ginnery. His boss is soon dead, and Melisande marries another man, who is also soon dead. Meanwhile, as Melisande still toys romantically with Blaise, he becomes friendly with June Fellows, the daughter of a local English doctor. Melisande’s mysterious background is revealed by Father Ryan. She is part African—her grandfather was a native King, Mwanga, whose daughter was cast out by him after she gave birth to a white daughter. Father Ryan rescued the young baby when her mother died. Melisande’s great beauty is partly attributed to her heritage, as is the witch-magic that other natives believe she possesses. Melisande marries yet again, and this man is soon dead. June’s materialist father, a medical doctor, has determined that Melisande murdered all of her husbands, the latest by a poison made from crushing the petals of a moonflower lily. June has come to love Blaise, and she and her father and Father Ryan work to save him from becoming Melisande’s next victim. And here is where the question of whether the novel is supernatural or not comes into play. Father Ryan firmly believes Melisande to be an evil spirit, a kind of vampire, while Dr. Fellows equally firmly believes that everything about Melisande is explainable rationally. The author maintains this opposition to the very end, but some of the final incidents, as when Melisande attacks June and bites her on the throat, only to be killed herself, with Father Ryan impaling Melisande in the heart with a thin-pointed stick, a method he had read in his books about the final destruction of a vampire, leads one to suspect which side the author is on. Father Ryan dies of a heart attack, and the main characters left alive are the non-believers in the supernatural. But even the straight-minded doctor entertains a bit of doubt, in telling June of how Father Ryan stopped Melisande from potentially destroying her soul. As a whole the novel is pure commercial fiction, with the love interest and future marriage of Blaise and June telegraphed from very early on. It also exhibits the colonial racism of its day. But it is the interplay and ambiguity of whether the supernatural is present or not that keeps the reader going to the book’s end.
Margaret Peterson (1883-1933) was born
and raised in India, where her father was a professor of Sanskrit. She came to England in 1910, and quickly became a successful and popular novelist, after winning a 250 guinea prize offered by Andrew Melrose for the best first novel of 1913. (The judges who awarded the prize included Joseph Conrad and Mary Cholmondeley.) Peterson’s main readership was women, and her books are mostly forgotten today, but besides Moonflowers she wrote some other novels of interest to readers of supernatural and lost race fiction, including Deadly Nightshade (1924), Flame of the Forest (1930), The Yellow People (1930), and The Eye of Isis (1931). Between 1930 and 1933 Peterson also published four pseudonymous detective thrillers about Inspector Fred Wield, as by “Glint Green.” In 1915, she married Albert Oliver Fisher (1880-1952). They had one son.
Phillpotts, Eden. The Lavender Dragon (London: Grant Richards, 1923).
This short novel was serialized in Colour, from September 1922 through March 1923. It concerns a questing knight, Sir Jasper de Pomeroy, and his squire, George Pipkin, who come to Pongley-in-the-Marsh and hear tales of the Lavender Dragon, who periodically turns up and devours some of the village’s inhabitants. Jasper vows to fight it, and seeks out the dragon. What he finds is not a monster of legend but a courteous creature, who refuses to fight him, but who agrees to meet Jasper the next day. The meeting happens, but not in the way Jasper expects, for the dragon swoops down and carries off Jasper and his horse, taking them away to the hidden town of Dragonsville, where Jasper find all of the dragon’s supposed victims living in a kind of utopia, ruled benevolently by the Lavender Dragon. Some long chapters develop the Dragon’s philosophy, and as the Lavender Dragon is quite old and senses his approaching end, he ponders on what will happen to his happy experimental community after his passing. Meanwhile Jasper’s squire shows up, and both knight and squire find wives and settle down. This is a clever and well-written tale, at times charming, at other times somber.
Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960) was a hugely prolific British writer, many of whose works lies near the borderland of the fantastic but rarely fully embrace it.
“An Pilibín” [pseudonym of John Hackett Pollock, 1887-1964]. A Tale of Thule Together with Some Poems (Dublin: Talbot Press, [1924]).
An interesting story of Siegfried Ragnar, who lives on the coast on a cliff’s edge underneath the roots of three huge pine trees, known locally as the Three Sisters. Siegfried marries Maura Douras, who finds the trees dislike her, and haunt her dreams. An unusual story, well-told. The poems in the volume are unrelated to the story, and seem out of place.
P[im], H[erbert] M[oore]. A Vampire of Souls (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1904)
Herbert Moore Pim (1883-1950) was born in Belfast, and educated in Ireland, England and France. Though he had early literary ambitions, his initial published writings were pseudonymous. Pim’s son recalled that his eccentric father published (untraced) pornography and religious tracts simultaneously under pseudonyms. Pim’s first known book was A Vampire of Souls (1904), signed only with his initials, “H.M.P.” The Man with Thirty Lives: A Romance (1909) was published as by “Herbert Pym” [sic], and The Pessimist: A Confession (1914) appeared under the pen-name “A. Newman.” Unknown Immortals in the Northern City of Success (1917), and later writings (including poetry) appeared under his full name
A Vampire of Souls, despite its lurid title, is a short and rather sedate work. Its narrator, one George Ventnor, aged twenty, has died, and his spirit is on the road to Hell, where the King of Hell gives him a tour of the five great towers, the monuments to the five great sins which drag an earthly soul to Hell: Drink, Cruelty, Deceit, Sensuality, and Indifference. The Devil also shows him the Siniscopes, whereby the lives of men on earth are watched and monitored. Ventnor defies Hell and is rescued by Jesus. The story is rather undeveloped, and more could have been made of it to its betterment.
Plarr, Marion. Cynara: The Story of Ernest and Adelaide (London: Grant Richards, [1933]).
This book tells the story of Ernest Dowson and his ill-fated love for a young restaurant waitress Adelaide Foltinowicz. It is neither a biography nor a novel, though it has been described as both. It was written by Marion Plarr, the only child of Victor Plarr, friend and memoirist of Dowson. Marion Constance Helen Plarr was born in Greenwich, Kent, in 1893, and knew Dowson as a young girl, but the story Marion tells is based on materials collected by her father (letters from Dowson, etc.). Marion also acted in various plays as a young girl, including a 1902 production of Yeats’s play Where There Is Nothing. Cynara was published in 1933, the same year that Marion married Noel Frederick Barwell (1879-1953), the last British barrister of the Calcutta High Court, and settled in India for the rest of her life. She published a second (and final) book India without Sentiment (1960) under her married name Marion Barwell. After her husband’s death she encouraged the young Bengali writer, Mani Shankar Mukherjee (b. 1933), known in English as “Sankar,” who had been a clerk for her husband.
Cynara interestingly quotes from a number of Dowson’s letters that are attested nowhere else. (Whatever happened to Plarr’s Dowson materials after Marion’s death is unknown; indeed Marion’s own date of death is also unknown.) These letters are reprinted from Cynara in The Letters of Ernest Dowson (1965), edited by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas, without any other textual authority. Overall, though, Cynara is a skilful telling of the story of Dowson and Adelaide.
Plarr, Victor. Thor and the Giants, or, Some Very Old Stories for Very Young People (London: “Books for the Bairns” Office, [March 1905]). Illustrated by Brinsley Le Fanu.
Victor Plarr (1863-1929) was a minor 1890s poet who is perhaps best remembered as a friend of Ernest Dowson and author of Ernest Dowson 1888-1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (1914). Plarr was also immortalized in literature as the original of the character Monsieur Verog in Ezra Pound’s long poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920). Plarr’s poetry volumes include In the Dorian Mood (1896) and The Tragedy of Asgard (1905), the latter being Plarr’s most ambitious work, a long poem that continues from Matthew Arnold’s poem Baldur Dead (1855).
Plarr’s least known work is the little booklet he did for W.T. Stead’s “Books for the Bairns.” Thor and the Giants dates contemporaneously with his episodic poem on the end of the Old Norse gods. Stead’s main series of “Books for the Bairns” ran from 1896 through 1920, and Thor and the Giants was number 109 out of some 288 booklets. Illustrated with two dozen full-page line-drawings by Brinsley Le Fanu (1854-1929), son of J.S. Le Fanu, Thor and the Giants contains six stories and a short introduction (“A Few Words about Thor”). The stories are not mere retellings of Old Norse mythological tales, but imaginative workings based on some elements of Thor’s known character and exploits. The stories include “The Forging of Thor’s Hammer,” “Thor among the Giants,” “Thor’s Battle with the Giants,” “Thor and the Dwarf,” “Thor’s Lost Hammer,” and “The Last of Thor.” In “Thor among the Giants” Thor and some companions are tricked by the King of the Giants during some contests of adventure. The stories are well-done for what they are, but the booklet remains a rare oddity among Plarr’s small output.
Prosper, James. The Mountain Apart (London: William Heinemann, 1913).
The primary interest in this otherwise forgotten novel is that it is the only known pseudonymous work by Barry Pain (1864-1928), a prolific writer who was best-known during his lifetime as a humorist and who is best remembered posthumously for his supernatural tales. Though he hoped to be taken as a writer of serious fiction, Pain was never able to accomplish this; The Mountain Apart may have been Pain’s attempt to do so under another name. If so, though the book was reviewed well, it evidently sold poorly. There were no other books bylined James Prosper.
The Mountain Apart is the story of Rose Hilton, who runs (with a married friend, deserted by her husband) a house in Brighton that lets furnished rooms. Rose is honest and hard-working, and spends occasional days at the theatre watching Ibsen plays which deeply move her, though she doesn’t quite un
derstand them. Rose becomes friendly with two sisters who stay at the house, and through them meets a rich elderly businessman who becomes infatuated with Rose. They marry, but on the wedding-night, Rose deserts her new husband, Gilbert Penage. The next morning she learns that he has had a serious stroke, and she returns to him. As he convalesces, they grow friendly, and Rose sees her husband in a new light. But he soon dies, leaving Rose a rich widow. Rose befriends other women, and rarely meets men. One of the two sisters she knows has carried on a secret affair with a married man and has become pregnant. Rose whisks her away and buys an out-of-the-way house where the woman (posing under an assumed name as married) can have her child without scandal. Rose hopes to keep the baby and raise it herself, but everything falls apart, and she is pursued by the only two men she has known. She finds she loves one of them, and marries him. “The mountain apart” is a shorthand comment that recurs through the novel, referring to people who are so complete in themselves that they can do without love. Rose finds that she cannot live on the mountain apart.
That is the bare plot, but it is engagingly written, with Pain’s usual ability to turn a good phrase and make a telling and revealing description. Much of the thought in the book, and the discussions by the characters, concern what a woman’s place in life is to be. For the time it was written, this was probably very progressive, and reviews, like the one in The Spectator, note that the women “are real and not conventional types” and that the author’s “understanding of women’s problems is deep, and, on the whole, kindly” (13 December 1913).
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