The Black Reaper
Page 31
Yet, also – there is that little matter of my personal experience.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At the eleventh hour, the 1998 edition of The Black Reaper was transformed from simply an enlarged version to something quite different, thanks to a chance letter from Capes’s grandson, Ian Burns. A friend had sent him my introduction to the first edition, and Ian wrote to me from Melbourne with no more to go on than my name and the town I live in. Not only that, he wrote scant weeks before the book was due to be typeset. A month or so later and it would all have been in vain.
So my first acknowledgements and thanks go to the Capes family, for supplying the kind of material you cannot get other than from an author’s relatives: Ian Burns, for making contact, supplying pictures of Bernard Capes and the Winchester plaque, for writing his splendid foreword, and for revealing the existence of Bevis Cane; Brion Burns, Nerine’s elder son, for supplying a much appreciated copy of The Hampshire Observer’s report of Bernard’s memorial service in 1919, where his plaque was unveiled; the late Helen Capes, Renalt’s widow, who turned out to live near me, and kindly supplied much valuable background on the Capes household and the subsequent history of Bernard’s children; Harriet Capes, Helen’s daughter, who sent me a copy of Renalt’s unpublished memoir, full of invaluable Capes family history; and Elissa, Ian Burns’s daughter, who paid me a surprise visit with her husband Geoff on 29 May 1998 while on a trip to England. I hope they approve of this new edition of tales by their distinguished ancestor.
The Black Reaper goes back some years, of course, and my grateful thanks are due to the late Michael Cox, who was responsible for publishing the first edition in 1989, as part of his splendid but short-lived Chillers series for Equation/Thorsons.
That fine researcher, the late Richard Dalby, supplied what biographical details we had of Bernard Capes for the first edition, and without his priceless work the book would have been pretty thin. Thanks also to the staff of Sutton Public Library, who tracked down all but one of Capes’s books of short stories.
And finally, my friend Mike Ashley, who drove the pair of us to Winchester on 10 May 2000, to look for Bernard Capes’ grave. We didn’t find it (discovering later he had been cremated) but we did find two houses where he had lived. The kindly owners of the last one he occupied invited us in. When we explained our search for Bernard Capes, the husband popped upstairs for a while and came back with a bundle of old papers and deeds that had been in the house when they bought it. Among them were several letters and deeds signed by Rosalie herself. A memorable day – thanks, Mike.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
As explained in the introduction, Bernard Capes gathered together at various intervals those stories he had published in magazines, and tied them up into very enjoyable books of short stories. It is those books I have consulted, not the magazines.
The stories in this edition of The Black Reaper are taken from the following sources:
At a Winter’s Fire (Pearson, 1899)
‘The Black Reaper’
‘Dark Dignum’
‘An Eddy on the Floor’
‘The Moon Stricken’
‘The Vanishing House’
‘William Tyrwhitt’s “Copy”’
From Door to Door (Blackwoods, 1900)
‘The Sword of Corporal Lacoste’
Plots (Methuen, 1902)
‘The Accursed Cordonnier’
‘The Green Bottle’
Loaves and Fishes (Methuen, 1906)
‘A Gallows-bird’
‘Poor Lucy Rivers’
‘The Strength of the Rope’
The Fabulists (Mills and Boon, 1915)
‘The Apothecary’s Revenge’
‘The Closed Door’
‘The Dark Compartment’
‘The Glass Ball’
‘The Marble Hands’
‘The Mask’
‘A Queer Cicerone’
‘The Queer Picture’
‘The Shadow-Dance’
‘The Thing in the Forest’
‘The White Hare’
All Capes’s books of stories are well worth finding. Another volume, Historical Vignettes (T. Fisher Unwin, 1910; revised and enlarged version, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1912) contains no tales of terror but is an interesting collection of stories based on historical figures, ranging from Beau Brummel to Cleopatra.
There is another collection of stories, Bag and Baggage (Constable, 1913) worth tracking down, although it is very rare. It is not Bernard Capes at full strength, but is still of interest.
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