Steele, V. M. Hunters of Humans (London: Stanley Paul & Co., [1936]).
“V.M. Steele” was a pseudonym used on four novels by Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946), who was best known as an occultist and writer under the nom-de-plume “Dion Fortune.” The first three of the four “V.M. Steele” novels were published in London by Stanley Paul & Company: The Scarred Wrists in April 1935; Hunters of Humans in February 1936; and Beloved of Ishmael in April 1937. The fourth, The Yellow Shadow, the rarest of these rare books, came from Quality Press of London in 1942.
In The Scarred Wrists, Chief-Inspector Saunders of the C.I.D. is introduced in a minor role, while the main character is a private investigator. Chief-Inspector Saunders returns in Hunters of Humans as one of the main characters, the others being his subordinate, Detective-Sergeant Jack Austen, and Ann Studley, who rents the two policemen rooms when they come to a London suburb to investigate a death, quickly determining that it was murder by poison. The publisher’s catalogue, bound at the end of the copy I read, notes: “This is not a detective novel—a jigsaw puzzle of imaginary crime and arbitrary clues, but a story about detectives. Crime and detection form the background but it is the love, the hate and fear of hunters and hunted that form the motive of the plot.” This is precisely true. The detective aspect of Hunters of Humans provides only the frame, though the author makes occasional comments on how different the study of a crime is in the real world, unlike what is portrayed in detective novels. Additionally Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke are occasionally referenced in the text. But the bulk of the novel concerns the growing love between Jack Austen and Ann Studley, and the complications of such a love between members of different social classes. The detectives quickly come up with a likely suspect, Ann’s father Francis Studley, which makes for additional difficulties for the detectives. The novel continues on through Ann’s father’s inquest and subsequent trial. Whether the two subsequent V.M. Steele novels utilize either the character of Chief-Inspector Saunders, or the detective story format, is not known.
In 2017, Twin Eagles Publishing reissued all four V.M. Steele novels.
Stevens, Francis [pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)]. “Sunfire,” in Weird Tales, vol. 2 no. 1 (July-August 1923): 2-13 [Pt. 1]; vol. 2 no. 2 (September 1923): 48-58, 90, 92 [Pt. 2].
“Sunfire” is the last publication of “Francis Stevens,” whose entire published output (that is presently known) consists of thirteen stories, five of short-story length, the rest longer, varying from novella to novel size. “Sunfire” has previously been considered to be a holdover from Stevens’s most active period (1916-1919), one that finally reached publication only in 1923. But according to the author’s daughter, “Sunfire” (or “Fire of Noon” as it was originally called) was written around 1922-23, after her mother had taken a hiatus from writing following her severe illness from influenza in 1919. That said, it represents the author’s final story, and it is a real disappointment.
The story concerns five young Americans exploring a river in equatorial Brazil. They discover an island, Tata Quarahy, in a strange lake. The island houses a huge pyramid, where a woman and a monster play out a strange ritual before “an enormous glowing mass above the pit.” The latter turns out to be a mammoth diamond, the monster is an ill-conceived huge centipede, and the girl turns out to be an acquaintance of one of our five adventurers, under the hypnotic influence of an old woman, the last priestess of Corya the centipede. The characters are all one-dimensional, and motivated by the slimmest of pulp-stock emotions. All in all, the story is an embarrassment to the reputation of a writer capable of much better.
Steward, Sam M. Pan and the Fire-Bird (New York: Henry Harrison, 1930).
This is a slim vanity-press collection of seven short stories, two short prose dialogues, and one item (“Libation to a Dead God”) that might best be called a prose poem, with an introduction by Benjamin Musser, a poet and small press publisher. It was the first book published by Samuel M. Steward (1909-1993), who was an English professor who later turned into a tattoo artist and gay pornographer. Steward was also a kind of literary and sexual gadfly, who boasted of seducing the elderly Lord Alfred Douglas solely in order to claim a closer personal connection to Oscar Wilde.
The obvious influence on the stories in Pan and the Fire-Bird was James Branch Cabell, whose mannered and sexually ribald novel Jurgen (1919) had been celebrated in the early 1920s, after attempts had been made to censor it as obscene. As in the case of Cabell, the sexual innuendo in Steward’s tales is at times pronounced. In the title story, Pan’s close friend, the Fire-Bird, is named Kircp (the anagram is quickly seen through), and in other stories there are similar uses of sexual innuendo, some suggesting homosexuality. Probably the best tale in the collection is the final one, “The Word-Dealer,” in which ten-thousand year-old Erimos sells words to people in return for a piece of their soul. Finally, a youth comes wanting to exchange a word with him, a word that is “hateful because I am it myself, but a word which I love outside of me.” The word is “man,” and Erimos makes the exchange but says he cannot touch the youth’s soul.
In “Silence on Earth,” the creator gives Silence a chance to wear her four dresses over Earth, once every tenth century, in a game to see if she can keep two lovers in a vow of silence. The fourth time, in the Thirtieth Century, the two lovers are women, and they succeed.
In all, this is a strange collection of mostly minor pieces, but some are quite interesting prose experiments. So far as I know, these tales stand as anomalous in the author’s oeuvre, for none of his other writings are in any way similar.
Stock, E. Elliot. The Ring of Ug and Other Weird Tales (London: John Ouseley, [1911]).
This is a rare collection of four tales, two of which had previously appeared in contemporary magazines. The title story is the best in the book, and concerns the modern discovery of a prehistoric magical ring associated with great evil. The next, “A Door Ajar,” originally appeared as “The Peak of Terror” in the June 1907 issue of The Idler. It tells of two men searching after the fate of their friend, lost while hiking in the Alps. His ghost appears at a critical time in order to help his friends. “A Cry from the Ice” (reprinted from The Wide World) tells of the mental disintegration of a young doctor who, while on a rescue mission, is charged with photographing the Arctic in all its moods. To the doctor the “awful loneliness had during the last days lain like an icy grip upon his very soul, holding yet repelling; till, despite a well-balanced mind and iron constitution, an eerie, resistless temptation had more than once all but forced him to break ship and tramp ever northward till body and mind gave out, and he sank at last to perish alone among this northern ice he had begun to love, yet hate with a hatred not far removed from fear” (pp. 100-101). The final story, “The Hidden Guest,” concerns the shadowy past of a half-ruined castle on the Pembrokeshire coast. The four tales are typical magazine fiction of the time, competent (if underdeveloped) and entertaining though not exceptional. The book contains four inserted plates (apparently there was originally to have been five, as per the list of illustrations, but it has been reported to me of three observed copies that each contains only four plates), only the frontispiece (in a different style) is signed (by Ernest R. Dean).
Ernest Elliot Stock (1869-1957) was the second child of five born of the well-known London bookseller and publisher Elliot Stock (c.1838-1911). He apprenticed at his father’s publishing firm, and married Ada Alice Booth in 1897. They in turn also had five children. Stock’s first three books came out from the publisher John Ouseley. The Ring of Ug and Other Stories and Scrambles in Storm and Sunshine among the Swiss and English Alps were both published in February 1911; they were followed by The Land of the Lords Marchers: Being a Record of Six Vagabond Days among the Peaks and Rivers of the West Country in February 1912. Stock’s subsequent books, three musical plays for children, were published by Heath, Cranton & Company: Jim Crow, The Magic Chest, and Th
e Pied Piper, all 1913. Stock contributed to periodicals a few poems and some stories on sporting and historical arts. After The Ring of Ug, he seems to have published no further fiction.
Suster, Gerald. The Devil’s Maze (London: Sphere, 1979).
The Devil’s Maze is at root a kind of fan fiction, based on Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors (1895). It is not pastiche, but a rather more ambitious undertaking, with its own literary agenda. It is set in London in the late 1890s. Suster takes the diabolical character Dr. Lipsius from one of the tales in The Three Impostors (“History of the Young Man with Spectacles”) and puts him, along with three devilish colleagues, in opposition to the benevolent Charles Renshawe and his associate, Lady Clarissa Mountford. It becomes a kind of cat-and-mouse game, where in a turnabout the hunters become the prey. Interspersed within the story are short prose pieces of an occult nature supposed to have been written by one Septimus Keen, before he was hospitalized as a mental patient. The Septimus Keen narratives are quite well-done, and blended in with some arcana related to the mythos invented in the 1920s-30s by H.P. Lovecraft and his friends, make for an engaging and entertaining work.
The Devil’s Maze was the first novel published by Gerald Suster (1951-2001), a Cambridge-educated school teacher and occultist. He published over thirty books, his nonfiction ranging from biographies of Aleister Crowley and of his follower Israel Regardie to studies of lightweight boxers and military commanders. His first eight novels came out quickly, between 1979 and 1985. Two later ambitious novels return to the Machen-styled world of the sinister Septimus Keen, comprising The God Game and The Labyrinth of Satan (both 1997). Suster, with his second wife Michaela (1948-2001), also co-wrote the anonymous explicitly-erotic series The Black Pearl: Memoirs of a Victorian Sex Magician (four volumes, 1995-1999).
Swithin, Antony. Princes of Sandastre: The Perilous Quest for Lyonesse: Book One (London: Fontana/Collins, 1990).
“Antony Swithin” was the pen-name of William Antony Swithin Sarjeant (1935-2002), who was born and raised in Sheffield, educated at the University of Sheffield (B. Sc. 1956, Ph.D. 1959) and the University of Nottingham (D. Sc. 1972). Sarjeant had a distinguished career in the sciences, primarily in geology and paleontology, and in 1972 emigrated to Canada, accepting a position at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, where he remained until his death from cancer one week before his sixty-seventh birthday.
As a child, Sarjeant had become fascinated with the small uninhabited island of Rockall in the North Atlantic Ocean, and upon it he focused his intense imagination. Rockall became for Sarjeant a small continent, for whose inhabitants he drew maps, invented alphabets and languages, designed postage stamps and heraldic devices. He also worked on its various social systems, its zoology and botany, and on its long history—influenced by his wide reading and special love of fantasy literature.
When Sarjeant went to university, his work on his imaginary world receded. Over the years as he established himself as an academic, he nursed the desire to write at least one novel about Rockall. At the age of forty-five, he finally began the novel, which evolved into two main stories. During the process of writing the first story, it became a quartet of novels. Later on, he projected that the second story would need two quartets of novels. The first four books were published between 1990 and 1993. Sarjeant is known to have completed five volumes of the lengthier second story as of two years before his death, but all volumes subsequent to the first four remain unpublished.
Princes of Sandastre is the first of four volumes telling one story under the comprehensive title of “The Perilous Quest for Lyonesse.” It is set in the early fifteenth century, the first person narrative of young Simon Branthwaite, whose father and older brother fought for the losing side in the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, sending Simon a message that he could meet up with them in exile in distant Lyonesse. Princes of Sandastre is thus only the very beginning of Simon Branthwaite’s story, telling of his passage to Rockall on his way to find Lyonesse. And basically, it is a leisurely-paced yet exceptional example of world-building, as Simon comes to understand this new unfamiliar land and its many inhabitants, ranging from numerous tribes of competing humans to its unusual animals, some of which have telepathic connections with their human associates. Simon makes friends, learns the social customs, explores the cuisine and landscape, and the complexities of the Sandastrian language (a “Glossary of Sandastrian Words” at the end of the book assists the modern reader).
Though published as fantasy, these novels of Rockall sit rather closer to the boundaries of the genre. The utopian impulse is strong, and perhaps Sarjeant’s closest literary relative might be Austin Tappan Wright and his Islandia, posthumously published in 1942. The fantasy elements in the Rockall novels are minimal (e.g., the telepathic communication with animals), but one significant aspect Sarjeant’s creation shares with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is that it is set not in an imaginary world but in an imagined history of our world (Tolkien’s Middle-earth is an imaginary prehistory of our world). The modern reader’s perspective is directed to the past of this world.
For reasons of style and approach Princes of Sandastre and its sequels—The Lords of the Stoney Mountains (1991), The Winds of the Wastelands (1992) and The Nine Gods of Safaddné (1993)—seem almost anachronistic for the times in which the books were written and published. They hearken back to the eclectic and personal types of fantasy novels published in the early decades of the twentieth century. Though they exhibit some occasional contrivances with the plotting and characterization, their strengths of world-building far outweigh any such lapses, and these books deserve to find an appreciative audience of discerning readers.
T
Thacker, Eric, and Anthony Earnshaw. Musrum (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968). Illustrated by both authors.
Musrum is a difficult thing to describe. It is an oversized book, containing both text and illustrations, telling of the surreal adventures of one being called Musrum and of his difficulties in regaining a prized Musroid Tree, stolen from his garden by the Weedking. In a curious and haphazard way, Musrum floats in and out of what appears to be our world and our history, only to quickly return to the chaotic and imaginative Musrum-world. The illustrations accompanying the text are vital, and of two kinds. Those by Earnshaw are simple and repetitive; those by Thacker (fewer in number by far) are much better technically and much more interesting. The text is even harder to describe— it borders on whimsy, sort of like Lewis Carroll but with a much freer flow of thoughts. Its delights are certainly not narrative in form, and perhaps it is the epigrammatical quality of certain phrases and sentences that are its greatest appeal. And some sections have that marvelous simplicity (often found in Edward Gorey) in which is captured one single large moment out of a complex scene. One really doesn’t need an illustration to go along with the following such sentence (but I’d love one): “Wearing nothing more than a pearl necklace Bella led her similarly attired wolf-pack in search of long-lost blizzards.”
Despite occasional flashes of brilliance, much of the text reads like random filler, with slight verbal play here and there, which was probably amusing for the authors to create, but which merely bores the reader of the printed exercise. A very, very odd book.
Thrush, Arthur. The Capture of Nina Carroll: An Extravagance (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924).
In the decade following the 1920-21 Cottingley fairy photographs episode, in which Arthur Conan Doyle championed some photographs of two young girls with cardboard cut-out fairies as proof of the existence of fairies, there was a small last gasp of fairy novels written and published for adults, the best known of which are Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) and Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist (1926). One of the least-known of these novels—and one of the most deserving of attention—is Arthur Thrush’s The Capture of Nina Carroll.
It concerns one Festiniog, an unusual being who was born of a demon father and fairy mother, but who has an unbaptized human soul. A
fter falling asleep on a fairy mound and thereby subjecting himself to the commands of the fairy court, Festiniog has been ordered to capture the beautiful young girl Nina Carroll, who is the older daughter of a family in the village of Greynover who scoff at the traditional belief in fairies and demons. The Faery Queen is determined to make immortal Nina Carroll and her beauty. Just after Festiniog is given this task, he is in turn captured by the demons, who similarly order him to deliver unto them the beauty of Nina Carroll, for as one demon puts it, “Beauty may be mortal, but it is sweet upon the palate.” The local Shepherd Tisburn represents the more traditional beliefs in Greynover, and Festiniog first observes the various conflicts before involving himself. This may sound like a simplistic tale of moral contrasts, but it is not. Rather, it is an intelligent and engaging drama of conflicts of belief in a small town, and it is similar in ways—and worthy to be on the shelf beside—Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist, published two years later. Thrush’s fairies are descended from those in Shakespeare, but yet his tale has a freshness and attractive originality. The book evidently sold poorly, for it is very rare today.
Arthur Thrush (1894-1963) worked in publishing for many years as a sales representative, authoring as his final book Representative Majority (1945), the history of the first twenty-one years of The British Publishers’ Representatives’ Association. His first book was poetry, The Day of Battle: An Epic of War (1915), which was followed by two novels, Seed Time and Harvest (1923), a coming of age story, and The Capture of Nina Carroll. A one-act play, “The Wisdom Tooth,” which appeared in 8 New One-Act Plays of 1933, edited by John Bourne, rounds out his bibliography. In 1920, he married Dorothy Charlotte Money (1899-1983); they had one son.
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