Some of the short tales in The Reason of the Beginning appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette and Vision. They are philosophical and sometimes theological, and many read like prose poems. They are interesting but one wishes they had more substance. Two representative stories were reprinted in Fantasy Macabre no. 14 (1992), but otherwise the original book is rare enough that few have encountered it.
Segal, Lesley Keen. Many Enchantments (London: Peter Davies, 1936).
This strange but compelling book tells the stories of the various inhabitants of the secluded village of Brimsdown in Suffolk. In the earlier part of the book, the people who come into contact with the village doctor experience strange dreams and visions which alter them as individuals. Some other unusual happenings appear to be related to an anonymous local book of sinister stories, two of which appear as chapters in the present volume (these two tales are thought by the Vicar to be “free from the corroding bitterness of the other stories”). Some of the events in the book touch on the whimsical, though in a pleasantly detached way, while others range from eerie to menacing. The style is relatively simple, which adds to the effect. The author has contributed eight unusual illustrations in the style of woodcuts. Initially, viewed out of context, these illustrations did not seem especially attractive to me, but when encountering them from within the book I found them to be both intriguing and good representations of the elusive tone of the stories.
The author/illustrator was born Lesley Elise Julliet Keen, the daughter of a merchant, Louis Keen, on 23 May 1895. She married Mark Segal, a film and book critic, at the West London Synagogue on 22 June 1928. Many Enchantments is her only book, and, regrettably, her only known publication. Published in August 1936, it was remaindered by Peter Davies in February 1938. During the war Segal bought up unbound sheets, and in December 1942 re-issued it in a cheap paperback edition (with the original Davies dust-wrapper) as from Pioneer Publications in Worthing. Lesley Keen Segal died in Worthing in the summer of 1971.
Sheppard, Ethel. The Sun-Worshippers: Stories of Pre-Roman Britain (London: The Century Press (Bennett & Co.), 1910).
This is the only book by Sheppard, about whom nothing is known. It consists of seven tales along with a short preface and one poem. In the preface, the author describes how a Voice came down to her from long ago and was the source for the tales she has written down. Four of the stories are longish—“The Sun-Worshippers,” “The Red Queen,” “The Sleeping Stone of Mynydd Vawrt,” and “The Golden Warriors”; the other three are shorter. All tell of the early Celtic people who inhabited Wales, and familiar names from The Mabinogion and other Welsh legends are sprinkled in (Branwyn, the Mighty Hu. Ceridwen and her Cauldron, etc.), but the stories are original—they are not retellings, and there are some good subtleties and twists in the writing and plotting. A very rare book, it may be considered as a possible rival to Kenneth Morris’s works for the claim of being the first original volume of Celtic-inspired fantasy.
Sherry, Oliver. Mandrake (London: Jarrolds, 1929).
Mandrake is yet another of the circulating library thrillers that were published in England in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a bizarre concoction in which an American occultist Tom Annesley (author of a book Amulets and Ancient Sorcery) assists a priest and other townspeople in the area around the small English town of Haddeston in solving various disappearances and deaths which Annesley comes to associate with the reclusive ancient sorcerer known as Baron Habdymos. One of Habdymos’s minions is an ensorcelled mandrake root, which takes various human forms. The writing is at times over the top, and the plot occasionally ridiculous. Add to this a whirlwind romance between Annesley and a local girl he has just met, and all of the usual clichéd qualities of the library thriller are present. Mandrake was reprinted in a very attractive edition by Medusa Press in 2010, with an introduction by Richard Dalby.
“Oliver Sherry” was the pseudonym of the Irishman George Edmund Lobo (1894-1971), who was active in the Dublin poetry scene, and who founded and edited the short-lived magazine The Dublin Art Monthly (which lasted six issues between October 1927 and March 1928, was followed by one issue after it amalgamated with The Dublin Mercury). It included several short stories and articles by Lobo. Of his novels, Golden Desire (1926) was signed as by “Lobo.” One other horror novel, Brood of Death (c. 1930) by Oliver Sherry, shows up in lists of Lobo’s works but was apparently never published, for no copies are known.
Shortt, Vere, and Frances Mathews. The Rod of the Snake (London and New York: John Lane, 1917).
Vere Dawson Shortt (1874-1915) was the only son of James F. Shortt (c. 1839-1883), and his wife, Elizabeth Kathleen Woods (c.1850-1877), who were married on 4 April 1872 in Parsontown (now Birr) in central Ireland. Vere Shortt was a man of considerable military experience. He spent five years in the Cape Mounted Rifles, and later served in Steinacker’s Horse during the Boer War, obtaining the King’s Medal for his service. His first novel, Lost Sheep (1915), tells of the French Foreign Legion contending against the Senussi in Africa. After it had been accepted for publication in 1914, Shortt began work on a second novel, tentatively titled The Rocky Road. During July 1914 Shortt visited his sister, Frances Howard Mathews (1875-1943), in Ireland, where he wrote the opening chapters and had many discussions with her about the work in progress. After the outbreak of the Great War in August, he ended his visit and returned to England to volunteer for service. Shortt was gazetted in the 7th Battalion of the Northamptonshire Regiment, and given the rank of Captain. He soon had to put the novel aside, but he planned to complete it after the war ended. Captain Short was killed in action on the Western Front on 25 September 1915 in the Battle of Loos.
After Shortt’s death, his papers found their way to his sister, and she completed the novel, retitling it The Rod of the Snake. Her brother’s manuscript broke off in the middle of chapter twelve, and Mathews added fifteen further chapters, but aside from a slight elevation of the romantic elements in the second half, the two parts read very similarly. The story tells of an Irish orphan, Charlie Shandross, raised by his mother’s relations, against whom he rebels. Five years later, with “three years’ service in the Cape Mounted Rifles and two years’ knocking about Europe,” Shandross is in Paris. Looking for action at a striker’s demonstration at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, he saves the life of Major Carter, an elderly man from the American south. Shandross also observes that working behind the strike is a Haytian army officer, Captain Achille de Brissac, together with an attractive woman of black heritage, Madame de Barres, a German agent who also has her own agenda.
From here the coincidences become increasingly contrived. Major Carter admires Shandross’s black ironwood walking stick, the titular rod upon which is carved a snake that, in a certain light, appears as if it were climbing up the stick. Major Carter arranges for his friend Erichsen, a Swede, to see the stick. Meanwhile Shandross finds a sinister ape-like figurine, probably of voodoo origin, and when he keeps his appointment with Erichsen, he is conveniently told the background of both unusual items. The figurine inspires strange dreams in Shandross, and Madame de Barres advertises in the newspaper for its return. Next Shandross happens upon his old Irish servant, Michael Hegarty, now down on his luck, but Shandross—though presently of limited means—re-engages him. Another pair of old Irish friends appear as if from nowhere, a Mr. Lacy and his daughter Nora.
When Shandross returns the figurine to Madame de Barres, she observes his walking stick and covets its power. Madame des Barres happens to live right next door to Nora Lacy and her father, and the Haytian army office Brissac is often seen in the Madame’s garden visibly lusting after Nora. On his way home from dinner with the Lacys, Shandross is beaten and robbed, but the thieves, sent by Madame des Barres, take from him the wrong walking stick (which he had erroneously grabbed when leaving the Lacy home). From here on the convolutions of plot are piled on until, eventually, Nora is kidnapped, and she is to be sacrificed in some large underground temple reserved for voodoo worship. Shandros
s, with the help of Hegarty, Lacy, Carter and Erichsen, saves the girl, with whom he has fallen in love. Major Carter generously buys Shandross half-interest in a South African ostrich farm so he and Nora will be set-up for life.
The above summary barely does justice to the plot-turns of the book, and overall this novel is a pretty poor specimen of literature. The few occult scenes, in which the powers behind the rod and figurine, respectively, contend with each other, are probably the only attraction. The overwhelming impression one gets from reading this book is how poorly it stands up to the passage of time. It whitewashes over all possible dissatisfactions to be found within a rigidly traditional class system, while also demoting the woman, Nora Lacy, into a mere damsel-in-distress who must be hypnotized at the end so that her traumatic experience will not upset her delicate nature. The book is also, by modern standards, explicitly and virulently racist. It has been years since I found the task of reading a book through to its end so irremediably unpleasant.
Sime, Sidney. A Curious Case (London: Digby and Long, [May 1891]).
The most intriguing aspect about this short novel is the question of whether or not its author is the same person as the artist Sidney Herbert Sime (c.1865-1941). Sime the artist was raised in Liverpool but came to London around 1883. His distinctive work began appearing in magazines around 1892, and it is entirely plausible that early in his career he might have attempted to write fiction. However, two of the main books on Sime—Sidney H. Sime: Master of Fantasy (1978) by Paul W. Skeeters and Sidney Sime: Master of the Mysterious (1980) by Simon Heneage and Henry Ford—do not acknowledge the existence of this book, while another valuable resource, From an Ultimate Dim Thule: A Review of the Early Works of Sidney Sime (1973) by George Locke, merely mentions it, noting the possibility that the author might be the artist. At that time, Locke was unable to comment further because of his unsuccessful attempts to examine a copy of the book in the British Library.
This shilling shocker is comprised of fifteen chapters. The crime is told in the first two. The four-year-old son of Dr. Richard Hart is found dead in his crib late one night, after Hart’s mad wife had entered the house following her escape from an asylum. First the mad woman is suspected, until it is learned that the boy died of laudanum poisoning at least a few hours before the woman had arrived. Suspicion then shifts to Dr. Hart’s barrister brother, Richard, who had dined in the house that evening, and who, since being turned down as suitor for the hand of Helen Woodruffe, had incurred large gambling debts. With the death of the boy, Richard Hart becomes the heir to the fortunes held in the boy’s name. In order to prove his innocence, Richard takes on a disguise, and thereby discovers his brother’s mistress and illegitimate child. He seeks aid via an advertisement for a “female detective” and this detective turns out to be Helen Woodruffe. Through their subsequent investigation, they decide that the mistress is the killer, and Richard discloses these findings to his brother before revealing them to Scotland Yard. Dr. Hart kills himself, leaving a strange note in which he admits to killing his son because he had learned that the madness of his wife was hereditary, and he had already seen the first signs of it in his child.
The prose of the novel is for the most part competent, and even occasionally intriguing, but the flow of the book is erratic, the plot is not very well executed, and the shifts of perspective are distracting. Even the opening sentence (“It was a stormy night, dark and rainy”) is not auspicious, resembling too closely the now infamous first-line of Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford (1830). Yet with the very next sentence the story becomes interesting, showing some of the tone of the prose found in the rest of the book: “The wet pavements of Harley Street glittered with reflected gaslight, in a way that suggested the ‘darkness visible’ of Milton’s Hell.” Here and elsewhere we observe hints of the dark perspective we know from the artist Sime, as when the mad wife stops outside her former house: “She stood for a moment looking up at the gloomy front of the house, and then, with a sudden, passionate movement she flung out her hands towards the starless sky. She looked like the last priestess of some dead-and-gone religion, offering dumb worship to a god that seemed asleep, pleading perhaps for help, perhaps for forgiveness, perhaps for revenge” (p. 9). Some of the descriptions are quite wry as well: “The tiny sitting-room was almost filled by an enormous mahogany table, upon which lay various fearful and wonderful books, ‘The Birds and Beasts of Scripture,’ ‘The Earthly Sailor’s Voyage to an Eternal Home,’ and so forth. The room was so constituted that a good large fire meant slow roasting; and an inch of open window produced incipient influenza” (pp. 56-57).
The artist Sime is known for only a small amount of prose, some being the delightfully mordant captions for his magazine illustrations. One of the more extensive pieces, a short fable called “The Wilone” (likewise written to accompany an illustration), was published by George Locke in the November 1973 issue of his short-lived but highly interesting magazine Search & Research. Unfortunately the prose of this florid fantasy bears very little resemblance to that of A Curious Case. And checking the 1891 Census for England is inconclusive as well. One does not find the artist Sidney Sime, but there is another person of that name, age 52 and born in Marylebone, London, living with his wife at their daughter’s house in Islington. (The artist Sidney Sime is easily found in the 1871 and 1881 Censuses for England. In the 1901 Census there is only one Sidney Sime, age 13, living in Bromley, Kent; but by 1901 the artist is known to have been living in Scotland, and would therefore not appear in the Census for England.)
The question of authorship is not answerable with any degree of certainty. Yet because of the occasional darker aspects of the prose in the book, and because Sidney Sime is not a common name, I lean towards the view that the artist and the author are probably the same person.
Sloane, William M., III. Runner in the Snow: A Play of the Supernatural in One Act (Boston: Walter H. Baker Company, 1931).
This short play is labeled on the title page as “adapted from the story by W.B. Seabrook entitled ‘I Saw a Woman Turn into a Wolf,’ ” And Seabrook’s title basically says it all. It is the story of the bookish John Bannister, who has a small, ugly black idol, Yi King, the Chinese demon or god of the past. Bannister has asked his old friend Richard Seton to visit and monitor an experiment that their friend Mara Orloff will perform. Mara is a nervous Russian woman with an accent, and she has experimented with the idol. When under a trance and while holding Yi King in her left hand, she relives an ancestral memory, human or prehuman. In this instance, she relives for some short while the life of a wolf. As a play, it is hard to imagine this coming off well.
Sloane (1906-1974) is better-remembered for his two novels, To Walk the Night (1937), and The Edge of Running Water (1939; filmed in 1941 as The Devil Commands, starring Boris Karloff). Seabrook’s story appeared in the July 1931 issue of Hearst’s International, with a reprint in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine in May 1932. It was reworked as chapter VII of Part Two of Seabrook’s book Witchcraft (1940).
Southby, Logi. The White Dragon (London: Rich & Cowan, 1934).
This folio-sized volume, originally priced 21 shillings, is generously illustrated by the author with ten full-page coloured drawings, as well as coloured chapter headings and chapter endings. A flap bound in at the back of the book holds an envelope containing an extra set of colour plates suitable, we are told, “for framing.”
The story begins in Sirrilunt, a strange and very beautiful land discovered by the present Prince Airling’s great-grandfather. No one lives in Sirrilunt who can not do something to make it more beautiful. Airling is a rude and arrogant youth, who has never worked hard at anything. On the night before his sixteenth birthday, he runs away to escape becoming king, and over the next year he has numerous adventures that alter his character for the better. From a woman of magic he learns that he has white magic from his mother, and that he will never be a man or a king until he has lost, by confrontation, this magic of the White Dragon. Additionall
y, Airling is haunted by the vision of a boy in his dreams, whom he calls Pyrrhus. Eventually he discovers this is actually Pyrrha, the daughter of a king, with whom he falls in love. The storyline is only intermittently engaging, and illustrations are definitely eccentric—sketchy, effete, and overly concerned with oddly-designed clothing.
Little is known of the author/illustrator. Before The White Dragon, she contributed illustrations to two books by Naomi Mitchison, The Hostages and Other Stories for Boys and Girls (1930), and Boys and Girls and Gods (1931). A March 1946 article on Southby in The Argus (Melbourne, Australia) notes that she studied in London at the Royal College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, and tried book illustrating before turning to fashion design. She served in the Motor Transport Corps in Egypt during the war, returning to fashion work first in Cairo and then in England upon her return in 1946.
Stanton, Will. Once Upon a Time Is Enough (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970). Illustrated by Victoria Chess.
A short book of seven stories which are all told with a wry modern awareness of the illogical nature and clichés found in fairy tales. These tales pick on and rework the familiar stories of Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rumpelstiltskin. The humorous style, particularly in the Bluebeard story (“Can This Marriage Be Saved?”), is a delight.
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