The Master of the Macabre

by Russell Thorndike

  THE MASTER OF THE MACABRE

  Arthur Russell Thorndike was born in Rochester, Kent in 1885. Although his sister, Sybil Thorndike (1882-1976), was the better-known actor, Russell Thorndike also acted both on the stage and in a number of films, but his first love was writing books. Thorndike finished his first novel, Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh, published in 1915, around the same time he enlisted for service in the First World War. After being severely wounded at Gallipoli, Thorndike was discharged and returned to acting. Perhaps surprised at the perennial popularity of the first Doctor Syn novel, Thorndike revisited the character several times in the 1930s and 1940s, in addition to publishing a number of other novels, of which The Slype (1927), also available from Valancourt Books, is probably the best.

  In the final twenty years of his life, Thorndike wrote no further novels, but continued to act, appearing frequently as Smee in productions of Peter Pan, and made a few film appearances, including minor roles in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955). Thorndike died in 1972.

  Mark Valentine is the author of several collections of short fiction and has published biographies of Arthur Machen and Sarban. He is the editor of Wormwood, a journal of the literature of the fantastic, supernatural, and decadent, and has previously written the introductions to editions of Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, L. P. Hartley, and others, and has introduced John Davidson’s novel Earl Lavender (1895), Claude Houghton’s This Was Ivor Trent (1935), and Oliver Onions’s The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939) for Valancourt Books.

  Cover: The cover reproduces the scarce jacket art of the first edition published by Rich and Cowan in 1947.

  By Russell Thorndike

  Doctor Syn (1915)

  The Slype (1927)*

  The Vandekkers (1929)

  Herod’s Peal (1931)

  The Water Witch (1932)

  Jet and Ivory (1934)

  Doctor Syn Returns (1935)

  The Further Adventures of Dr. Syn (1936)

  Dr. Syn on the High Seas (1936)

  The Amazing Quest of Dr. Syn (1938)

  The Courageous Exploits of Dr. Syn (1939)

  Show House—Sold (1941)

  The House of Jeffreys (1943)

  The Shadow of Dr. Syn (1944)

  The Master of the Macabre (1947)*

  The First Englishman (1949)

  * Available from Valancourt Books

  The MASTER OF THE MACABRE

  by

  RUSSELL THORNDIKE

  With a new introduction by

  MARK VALENTINE

  Kansas City:

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  2013

  The Master of the Macabre by Russell Thorndike

  First published London: Rich and Cowan, 1947

  First Valancourt Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 1947 by Russell Thorndike

  Introduction © 2013 by Mark Valentine

  The Publisher is grateful to Mark Terry of Facsimile Dust Jackets, LLC for providing the reproduction of the original jacket art used for this edition.

  Published by Valancourt Books, Kansas City, Missouri

  Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins

  20th Century Series Editor: Simon Stern, University of Toronto

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thorndike, Russell, 1885-1972

  The master of the macabre / by Russell Thorndike ; with a new introduction by Mark Valentine. – First Valancourt Books edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-939140-47-0 (alk. paper)

  1. Haunted houses–Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6039.H78M38 2013

  823’.914–dc23

  2013011048

  All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.

  Set in Dante MT 11/13.5

  INTRODUCTION

  Russell Thorndike and his sister Sybil, who both became eminent and much-loved actors, spent some of their childhood holidays at their mother’s cottage by the sea wall at Dymchurch, a village in the middle of the Romney Marsh, and they continued to go there in later life. It was an area they loved and often evoked, an expanse of one hundred square miles, much of it flat wetlands, reclaimed from the sea. Russell Thorndike used the Marsh as a setting for his most colourful and memorable character, the dastardly smuggler Dr. Syn. The cottage was also the destination, never then reached, of the writer-narrator of The Master of the Macabre who has to seek shelter instead at the remote house of the title character, the enigmatic recluse Charles Hogarth, a scholar of the occult.

  His sister envisaged Dr. Syn as “poking his head out of a dyke in our dear beloved Marsh” and proclaimed his appeal for “the souls like us who love a thrill,” who “will be jollier for the meeting” with the swashbuckling villain. The Master is a sort of successor to Dr. Syn in her brother’s literary career: but instead of smuggling, his business in darkness is the supernatural. Indeed, Dr. Syn and his crew make use of the strangeness of the “devil-ridden marsh” (as Thorndike describes it) by spreading rumours of phantom horsemen, to warn people off from witnessing their own nocturnal rides after contraband. But these are just ingenious spectral subterfuges: the Master deals in the real thing.

  The Thorndikes were children of the church. Their father was a minor canon at Rochester cathedral, the Kent city which had been a favourite haunt of Charles Dickens (he set the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870, there). Arthur Russell Thorndike was born on 6 February 1885 in the cathedral precincts, and he recalled that for them as children these were not solemn and sacred, but a wonderful playground, “our scenes for plays and romances.” He and his sister were deeply attracted by the theatre from an early age, writing and performing in their own plays as children. This sense of the church as a sort of historical “playground” is still reflected over fifty years later in The Master of the Macabre, his 1947 book, where a former Archbishop’s palace has been turned into the quaint home of the title character, a chapel is a bedroom, and an old tomb has been made into a bath. The religious house has become a theatre for the story: for Thorndike, all the past, sacred or secular, is a pageant of incidents and imagery.

  This instinct had started early. The precocious boy’s earliest literary productions were religious plays, showing how his imagination mingled the matter of the church with a delight in the theatre. This could only have been nurtured further when he became a chorister at St George’s, the Chapel Royal, Windsor, accustomed not only to holy services but also to regal and state occasions, full of elaborate costume and ritual: he sang during the magnificent obsequies of Queen Victoria’s funeral in 1901. Thorndike later wrote a history of the Chapel and the choir, Children of the Garter (1937; the title reflects that St George’s is also the chapel of the Knights of the Garter).

  In their early twenties, both he and his sister, who had been training for the theatre, joined a Shakespearean company touring North America, and they were away for several years. Later tours took them also to India and South Africa, and they performed in London over the next ten years. During the American tour, on the road to a rather volatile Southern town, Russell spun a fantasy to his sister about Dr. Syn: she later recalled she was “rigid with fear and thrill, open-mouthed” as he unfolded “horror upon horror.” On their return, Russell Thorndike began to write
the book. This too revealed his dual fascination with the theatre and the church. For Dr. Syn is a most dramatic, cavalier villain by night; but he leads a double life: for by day he is the pious and kindly parson of the parish. He epitomises, with a grand flourish, the two great impulses of Thorndike’s life, the religious background of his upbringing, and the two siblings’ devotion to the stage. Something similar might be said of the Master of the Macabre too: a secular scholar, flamboyant in costume and address, but also a seeker after the things of the spirit.

  The First World War intervened in their lives, and it brought sorrow: their brother Frank was killed in action, and Thorndike, who had joined up in the First Westminster Dragoons at the outbreak of the war in 1914, was badly wounded at Gallipoli and invalided home in 1916. He had used some of the time at the front to complete the book he and Sybil had planned so long before: and in 1915, Dr. Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh was published by the young and adventurous firm of Robert Holden (they also took early work by Claude Houghton and Australian fantasist Vernon Knowles).

  Thorndike married Rosemary Dowson, a daughter of an actress, in 1918, resumed his acting career and was soon in demand as a leading man, though he was also involved in theatre management and directing. Amongst many major roles, he took both lead and character parts in Shakespeare productions, appeared in the English première of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and was also in demand for modern plays. In film, he often portrayed characters much older than himself, including Dickens’s miser Scrooge, and he could also be relied upon to provide what actors then called “a bit of the ‘old,’” in a different sense, meaning the grand, melodramatic style of Victorian theatre.

  He also became an industrious writer, perhaps sometimes simply because he needed the money: not all his theatrical projects were a financial success. As well as his adventures and mysteries, amongst his miscellaneous books were a series of adaptations of Dickens for children, a biography of Sybil, by then even better-known and adored than he was, and two guides to Shakespeare’s country. But he remained best known as the creator of Dr. Syn.

  It can be as hard for a writer to make a truly memorable villain as it is to come up with a believable hero, but a few authors have certainly succeeded. E. W. Hornung’s Raffles, Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola, Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu and George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman have all won favour with readers. And Thorndike’s Dr. Syn is certainly among their number. In seven swashbuckling adventures and several films, this ruthless rogue rides with his eerie horsemen across the night marshes, ever eluding the watch of the Excise men.

  It wasn’t only the splendid title character that attracted readers. It was also the setting, finely evoked by Thorndike, among the remote wastes of Romney Marsh, a place which already had an uncanny reputation. Nor was the double life of Dr. Syn entirely an unrealistic romance, for in coastal parishes it was not unusual for the local parson to at least turn a blind eye to, if not actually condone, smuggling activity. There’s a story of one church service cancelled because there was no room for the congregation: the nave was full of bales of tobacco and the pulpit stacked with barrels of brandy.

  However, Thorndike had made the mistake of apparently killing off his villain in the first book, presumably not realising how popular he would be. He found various ingenious ways around this in the six subsequent titles, but it was twenty years before Dr. Syn rode again, in Dr. Syn Returns (1935; the other books in the series followed quickly after). In the intervening period, however, Thorndike wrote a handful of other strange and thrilling yarns, starting with the fine murder mystery, Dickensian in atmosphere and set around the cathedral in Thorndike’s home town of Rochester, The Slype (1927, also forthcoming from Valancourt). He went on to write further dark romances after the Dr. Syn series finished. In all, there were nine novels that were not about the diabolical parson, concluding with his historical adventure of the 11th century Saxon rebel Hereward the Wake, The First Englishman (1949). Most of them are crime novels, though all with peculiar and sinister aspects.

  The long shadow of his immortal villain has tended to obscure these other books, which can be as full of picturesque characters and strange adventures as the Romney Marsh titles. The Master of the Macabre is Thorndike’s first fully supernatural story, and as atmospheric a tale as you could want for an autumn evening or a winter’s night, full of foul weather, processions of phantoms, sinister assailants, diablerie and intrigue. Who is the Master? He is, says the narrator, “the most curious, the most uncanny man I ever have met or ever shall meet.” Like Dr. Syn, he leads a sort of double life. He is a scholar, a visionary, a dreamer: but he is also an active investigator of the strange, a collector of legends, and their associated curios, across the world. And these he recounts to his chance acquaintance, the narrator, over a roaring fire in his lonely house.

  Thorndike’s publisher for this book, Rich & Cowan, noted that “Russell Thorndike has himself been named ‘The Master of the Macabre,’” and said “this volume of strange happenings enhances his reputation in this line of literature.” A contemporary notice, in one of the first journals of the field, did not wholly agree. Fantasy Review (February-March 1948) conceded “the individual stories are well told” but thought there was too much of “graveyard worms and putrefying corpses” which “merely induced a slight feeling of disgust.” The tales of Poe, Machen, Lovecraft and Blackwood were thought to be better, as they only “hint darkly of such things”—suggesting perhaps a not very close familiarity with their work.

  The great authority on supernatural fiction, E.F. Bleiler, thought the structure of the book was a problem, calling it a “hodge podge,” but the reader should not find it difficult: it unfolds quite easily in the narrative. There are three clear strands, gradually revealed to the narrator, Tayler Kent, biographer and adventurer, who ends up a guest of the Master after a car accident in deep snow while delivering a mysterious package to him on behalf of a friend. The first concerns hauntings associated with the Master’s ancient house and its hidden mystery, linked to a renegade monk. The second plot line is a duel between the Master and rivals who want a relic he has got. And the third is a set of self-contained episodes in the Master’s career as a sleuth of the supernatural, told to the convalescing writer by firelight. The scheme is rather like that of Arthur Machen in The Three Impostors (1895) or Robert Louis Stevenson in the New Arabian Nights (1882): a major plot and conspiracy, augmented by piquant minor side-adventures. If Thorndike is hodge-podging at all, he’s doing it in good company.

  The idea of a character who was an investigator of the uncanny had begun almost as soon as detectives of crime became popular in fiction, in the late Victorian period. This coincided with a surge of interest in the spirit world, and psychic research, with many formal investigations of haunted houses, séances and poltergeists, by learned bodies to which eminent scientists and scholars subscribed. One of the first to take advantage of this climate was the mother and son team of Kate and Hesketh Prichard who, under the pen-name E. & H. Heron, created Flaxman Low, an early occult detective. Fantasy novelist M.P. Shiel took the genre to its most outré form with his exiled Prince Zaleski, secluded in his Monmouthshire abbey, full of exotic relics. Others soon followed, and noted Edwardian examples were Algernon Blackwood’s rather solemn psychic physician, Dr. Silence, and the resourceful and energetic Carnacki, the Ghost Finder created by William Hope Hodgson. By contrast, Arthur Machen’s Mr. Dyson is a flâneur and idler who rather languidly lets mysteries come to him, inspired by an ingenious theory of coincidence.

  Many more such characters followed, and Russell Thorndike’s The Master of the Macabre is a late flowering in the field, which draws upon the qualities of several of his illustrious predecessors. He has the scholarly, scrupulous rigour of Dr. Silence, and some of the sybaritic, connoisseur-ish nature of Mr. Dyson: his medieval Archbishop’s palace with all its strange and ancient talismans and monuments is like Prince Zaleski’s abbey tower, full of curios in a “half-weird sheen and gloom
.” But he also has the courage and hardihood of Carnacki, and one or two clues perhaps suggest Thorndike might have had Hodgson’s hero in mind when he created his own occult detective. One is that the narrator has, like Carnacki, a Chelsea apartment: perhaps not all that striking, as the artistic, bohemian quarter would be an obvious choice for such characters. But the other is more of a hint: the narrator’s friend, the adventurous, enigmatic explorer who sends him to see the Master in the first place, is Captain Carnaby. True, that surname is also a London street name, later famous in the Swinging Sixties, but it’s so close in look and sound to Carnacki that some tribute might well have been meant. Certainly, The Master of the Macabre is a worthy successor to the classic stories of supernatural sleuths: vivid, richly imagined, and lively.

  Though he wrote no more books in his last twenty years, from 1950 onwards, Thorndike continued to work in the theatre and cinema, with a regular seasonal role, aptly enough, as Smee in Peter Pan, and a few last film appearances in cameo roles in the Fifties. Russell Thorndike died at his Norfolk home on 7 November, 1972, aged 87, after a colourful and somewhat hectic career. Sheridan Morley wrote affectionately of him that he “remained devoted to his wife, sister, and overacting, in approximately that order, across more than half a century of greasepaint touring,” and he will always have a place in theatrical history. But it is likely that he will be remembered just as much as a fine, full-blooded teller of tales, as much a master of the “old” in his storytelling qualities as he was as an actor.

  Mark Valentine

  May 4, 2013

  THE MASTER OF THE MACABRE

  to

  “BUNTS and JERRY”

  SARTORIUS

  in

  friendship

  Chelsea, 1946.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ghosts drive me from town

  If it had happened once, I should have paid no attention to it. But when it went on—every night—stretching into the fourth week—I began to worry.