by Adam Nevill
‘If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your connection, Mark?’
‘Goes back to my teens. I was fascinated by his stories when I was younger. Me dad had both Hazzard books, and later on, when I realized that no one knew anything about the guy, I started looking around to see if he’d written anything else, and that’s when I discovered the SPR connection.’
‘I see. You mentioned prison.’
Mark laughed. ‘Oh, he was a right scoundrel, but it all caught up with him in the fifties. The first time he went down it was because he’d forged a birth certificate and was masquerading as an aristocrat. A minor baron and war hero. He even had a coat of arms on his cards, his cane, cigarette case and watch. He was running a bogus mental illness charity for victims of war, the servicemen, and the refugees coming in from Eastern Europe. Collected subscriptions, that kind of thing, through soirees in West London and newspaper ads. When he was rumbled, he went down for fraud by deception. Conned about three grand out of people.
‘I found all of that in records from Bow Street Magistrate’s Court. He had been in the war, though, in North Africa. He was a private, in Signals, but other than getting shelled once in Libya, he didn’t see much action. He came close to a court martial, though, for desertion while on leave. But he was dumped in a psychiatric hospital in England for a year, then kicked out in 1944. He managed to get himself discharged from the army on a medical. According to his military record, he’d had a breakdown.’
‘And he came out as an aristocrat?’
‘No, that was later. What I could find about him in the late forties and early fifties was sketchy. He did some course at a technical college but never finished the year, though that never stopped him putting BSc after his name. Worked bars in holiday camps for a bit, too. Was a waiter at one point in Margate. An entertainer at a camp in Yorkshire. Most of his stories in the first collection were set in these places, so they are partly autobiographical. That’s what made me look at those places first, where employment records existed. I found some other stuff in the courts where he’d been charged for various things, mostly non-payment of bills, and once for impersonating a woman.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘He was rumbled while in drag, in a restaurant at a rural hotel. I’d say he had problems with his gender identity. I cop a lot of that from his stories too. Lifelong transvestite. And he seems to have drifted back to London after that bust, where he went bankrupt following a spell working in a care home for the elderly. That job didn’t last long, but he did get married to a patient’s relative, a widow, a fairly unsuccessful stage actress. With her, he drifted through various flats in London, pretending to be ‘money’, but never paid the rent or electric anywhere they stayed. I found three eviction notices for non-payment of rent in Kensington, with their names listed. He was going by the name of Robert Beaumont at that time and trying his hand at acting. He couldn’t pay the fines for his unpaid bills either, and that’s why he went bankrupt.
‘His wife was a lot older than him and when she died, the baron was born. Picked up some stage-craft from his wife, I’m guessing. Maybe a decent wardrobe too for his female persona, whom he called Diane.’
‘Diane!’
‘Yes . . .’
‘Sorry, please go on.’
‘Sure. Well, after the baron scam had run aground and he’d served his six months, he’d become interested in psychotherapy and hypnotism. Changed his name to Magnus Ackermann, enrolled on a course in some kind of cognitive therapy, and another in hypnotherapy, and either failed the courses or didn’t finish them, because his name wasn’t on the list of graduates at the colleges he’d enrolled at. Though that didn’t stop him calling himself a doctor either, or putting MBSH after his new name. He added DPsy later too, for the SPR, to make the group look more prestigious. But he had no degrees. His whole CV was fiction.’
‘So the SPR came out of the hypnotherapy?’
‘In part. But his treatments and theories needed fine-tuning before he pulled off something as ambitious as the SPR. So he was still serving his apprenticeship in manipulation when he set up the hypnotherapy practice in Mayfair. That was in a swanky apartment to attract a wealthy clientele. And he aimed these treatments at vulnerable women. The bereaved, ill, depressed, divorced, anxiety sufferers, you name it. Rich, elderly women remained his core market until he died. Charged a tenner a session too and got away with it for a couple of years. Used to advertise in the Observer, New Statesman, even The Times, who eventually exposed him as a fraud.
‘The second time he was sent down, he wasn’t done for faking his qualifications but for obtaining credit under false pretences. Over twenty people pressed charges. Other domestic stuff was added to the charges too, non-payment of rent, bills, the usual Hazzard routine. And he’d concealed that he was bankrupt when going into business too.
‘He went down for three months the second time and finished the stories in his first book in prison. So M. L. Hazzard was actually born in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. He was published modestly over the next couple of years, and he used to harass people like Colin Wilson and Arthur Koestler for help. They even mentioned him in some interviews.’
Seb’s thoughts spun, but the revelations brought some relief. ‘I’ve only read two stories. I remember them being creepy, but the writing wasn’t quite there.’
‘No, he was no Algernon Blackwood, but there’s an authentic strangeness in them that I lapped up.’
‘But from prison to the SPR in Devon? That’s a big leap.’
‘It was. But he must have been encouraged enough to take the therapy angle to the next level, which was the SPR. From what I can work out, he picked up some tips from the woman who became Sister Katherine of The Temple of the Last Days. This was from his time in Mayfair. They once knew each other, years before she went to France. Hazzard adored women too, the glamorous, older, aunty types. That’s crucial to his whole make-up. You can tell from his stories. But what I think he really wanted was to become a woman. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a person so desperate to escape who they were. I don’t think Hazzard was ever comfortable inside his own skin. You could even say that he dedicated his life to escaping it, and literally. I think that might be why he embraced psychedelics as genuine gateways, doors to perception and all that.
‘But the SPR was set up mainly for his own enrichment. When he was in prison he’d re-established contact with some of his old clients. A couple of his patients in Mayfair were still smitten with him, and he corresponded with them while doing his time. Maybe they thought his treatments were effective. One very gullible woman was called Prudence Carey. She’d lost her husband in the war on a submarine. But Prudence was loaded. Old money. She owned Hunter’s Tor Hall, in Devon, and that’s where Hazzard went after he came out of Belmarsh. And, as far as I know, he lived there until he died.’
‘Dear God.’
‘Oh, it gets much better. Prudence became a kind of patron, so that Hazzard could write his masterpieces and develop his treatments and ideas. She’d had out-of-body experiences all her life, which he must have helped her develop in Mayfair. The disassociation of the consciousness and projection of the astral body towards Summerland, as they called it in the SPR, was central to the Mayfair operation. This is all in the court records. And that’s how he must have reeled Prudence in. She wasn’t alone, either. Hazzard became a kind of a guru.’
‘A cross-dressing guru of the afterlife. And people fell for this shit.’
‘I think he was basically promising people an assurance of life after death, yes. Or his version of the afterlife for a tenner a session in Mayfair, but at a much higher price when ensconced in Devon, and in very prestigious surroundings. Apparently, there were peacocks wandering the grounds. They also had a chef at one point.’
‘Good God.’
‘Of course, his residencies were sold as a cure-all for the earthly troubles and illnesses and to some very malleable and naive people. All operated o
n word of mouth amongst the wealthy. And with Hazzard as the gatekeeper of paradise, everything else in life often became irrelevant to his followers.’
‘To the desperate. And he actually got away with it?’
‘For a good long while. Nice earner too. But when my contact, Liza, was there in the early seventies, it was all going to hell. That’s when the second Hazzard book came out. It’s bloody dark too. I reckon he was writing the second book as things turned against him at the Tor, and he must have tried to cash in on the horror boom. His stuff was always too plotless, though, for any but a tiny number of readers.’
‘But this projection, and the astral body stuff, he started that in Mayfair?’
‘No, he’d been at it for years. He had his first out-of-body experience in the army, in the war. He was suffering from dysentery and claimed to have detached from his body in an infirmary. This is described in his story, “Looking at Myself from Nothing”. He claimed that while he stood beside his bed, he’d watched a medical officer inject his body with saline. And he had another episode in a dentist’s chair after the war. An even more powerful one too, after a motorcycle accident in London in the fifties. That’s all in his first collection. You know he always claimed the stories were true and not fictitious.’
‘I’m getting a gist of that. What did you make of his claim?’
‘I think Hazzard was convinced that a soul could leave its body after a shock, or if the soul thought that the body was dying, or had died. Most of his early experiences are in the story, “Sinking in the Dark Room. Rising in White Light”. Of course he claimed he could go much further over time, and that he’d learned to harness and control his “gift”, as he referred to it. But he kept all of that for the SPR. Its unique selling point. This was something he claimed he could teach, this gift.
‘Prudence even helped him get funding for SPR research, with her connections. But, of course, no one but Prudence knew about his past, because he was M. L. Hazzard at that point. The bogus aristocrat and fake doctor had been buried, but I don’t think she was troubled by his past.
‘He and Prudence Carey started retreats at the Hall, correspondence courses too, in the early sixties. He’d developed some technique that involved fasting and hypnosis, while using some psychedelics that he’d tried in London and then medicalized into his “formula”. There was meditation too, with the cultivation of an image and mantra that could, apparently, induce the experience and get his customers closer to the paradise belt. All of this I learned from Liza.’
‘How much of this syllabus do you have?’
‘Bits and pieces from hearsay and the short stories. Most of my book is based on assumptions, to be honest, but they’re as informed as I could manage.’
‘Hazzard never wrote a manifesto, anything like that?’
‘I don’t know. What I’ve pieced together of his ideas mostly came from his stories. I think they are a formalization of his theory, or as close to it as you can get to one. Liza’s interview pretty much attests to what Hazzard wrote about his cultivation. In fact, Liza’s interview reminded me of Hazzard’s stories. They’re cut from the same cloth. And remember, Hazzard refused to even call them stories. To him they were strange experiences.
‘But Hazzard also built all kinds of stuff into his spiel. Ideas ranging from the Hindu soft body to the vital body of the Rosicrucians. He used Greek and Roman mythology, Elysium, Hades, and stuff that was popular in the sixties, from the East, to give himself a zeitgeist and some gravitas. His adepts did most of the teaching on the retreats. There were two women in the early seventies who called themselves Alice and Fay, and they were the equivalent of enforcers at the Tor.
‘You have to realize too that his patients had to dedicate to a long haul, and cough up the cash for months at a time, before getting a private session with Dr Hazzard, or even Diane if they were lucky. And those private tuitions didn’t come cheap.’
‘Do you know what he was he like, I mean, as a person?’
‘My contacts hardly ever saw him. But they said he was some kind of David Niven type. Sharp dresser. Shades, porkpie hat. Very posh. Came across as fussy, brittle and prickly. Bit superior. Assured, one of them said, but always with a promise of confrontation in his tone. He was said to have a penetrative, intense stare, too, that could be absolutely withering if anyone challenged him. Or if he took a dislike to someone, and that was, apparently, a common occurrence.
‘The narrators in his short stories, and they’re all written in the first person, are always self-important and easily offended. I get the impression that no slight would ever be forgotten by old Hazzard. Achieving his will over others was paramount.
‘He also had two sports cars, one for him and one for his female persona. He’d greet people either as a man or as Diane, do his emotive pitch and then piss off upstairs. He had one entire floor to himself. But Diane was very posh, apparently, always immaculately done up. Quite convincing, Liza said, because Hazzard was small for a man. And this was when Hazzard’s life seemed to get even more interesting, at the Tor, but the trail of breadcrumbs thinned once he was off official radars.’
‘But you found some people, some members?’
‘Survivors, more like. But no one from the classic period in the sixties. They must have died by the time I was researching. And I only found three people who were involved with the SPR at the Tor. Liza, and two women who weren’t there for very long. They freaked out and got very frightened of the whole deal, but this was after it had been going for years. I’m pretty sure they had psychotic reactions to the “formula”. But Liza put me in touch with them. They all kept in touch after they left the SPR.’
‘How did you find her, this Liza?’
‘I posted an ad in a mind, body and spirit magazine. But that’s not her real name. She didn’t want me to use it.
‘She was only at the Tor for a few months, towards the end, a couple of years before Hazzard died. But what she told me was still pretty incredible. I don’t think Liza ever recovered from her experience either. She came away traumatized. And even as an old woman she was still terrified of them finding her. Which they did, in her head, if you know what I mean.’
Seb swallowed. ‘How so?’
‘She said they would visit her occasionally as she was falling asleep, to let her know that they were still watching her. Crazy. But in reality they left her with nothing but a failed second marriage, estranged children, bankruptcy, terrible night terrors and bad health. She was my main motivation for writing the book, and I dedicated it to her.’
‘Do you think that something might have happened there?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That it wasn’t just a scam. You know, maybe there was some validity to what Hazzard claimed?’
Fry laughed. ‘You’re pulling my leg! It was a scam. The whole thing was a Hazzard cash cow, make no mistake. He was totally unethical and unscrupulous if it served the interests of the society, which of course were his interests. He was the sole beneficiary financially. There was some kind of complicated pyramid scheme going on through subscriptions and exorbitant fees.
‘According to Liza, people suffering from prolonged illnesses always produced the best results, in combination with fasting. How convenient. Hazzard’s subjects were often ill, or even terminally ill, and desperate. But they were always well-off. I don’t think it’s unlikely that he hastened a few ends either with his unconventional treatments, but that’s speculation on my part.’
Seb was almost lost for words, but not quite. ‘It’s incredible that he got away with it for as long as he did.’
‘Liza reckoned he’d basically imprisoned and terrorized some of the more infirm and elderly members too, who were paying him huge fees to live there. And if anyone caused trouble or challenged him there, they were kicked out. No refunds. But Hazzard was clever enough to choose his patrons and patients carefully. He vetted them for their suitability for manipulation, coercion, and intimidation if it becam
e necessary, before he signed them up. But nothing ever got physical. He left no bruises that you could see. The damage was deeper, from psychological bullying. He got them hooked, Patty Hearst syndrome, gaslighting, the works. He even got Prudence to change her will and leave Hunter’s Tor to him when she died. She passed in the seventies and that pile on Dartmoor was still legally Hazzard’s when he followed her.’
‘Dartmoor? It’s on Dartmoor?’
‘Sure is.’
‘But . . . do you . . . ? I mean, did Liza think that she could actually leave her body? That there was some basis of truth to what Hazzard claimed?’
Fry laughed again. ‘Let’s just say that there was no doubt in Liza’s mind that the experience was real. And the other two I interviewed thought the same thing. They were all convinced because they’d all done it, repeatedly. Projected.’
‘But you aren’t buying it?’
‘That? All fantasy. Isolation, the creation of an environment and atmosphere, sublimation to his ideas, the selection of susceptible people. Just add hallucinogens, fasting and mantras and you can make people believe anything. He must have been pretty convincing at his peak too. But it was all in their heads.
‘My book never set out to prove that there was anything valid in Hazzard’s claims. What I was interested in was the theory and why people believed in it. What they think they experienced, that sort of thing. The culture in isolation, the esoteric parts of it, were pretty interesting. I just wish I’d written the book earlier when more of the SPR were alive and might have spoken up. By the time I pitched in, the anecdotal evidence was really thin. Which is why your files have me intrigued. They’re real, not fake?’
‘Letterheaded. I think you of all people will find them convincing.’
‘How many do you have?’
‘About three hundred.’
‘You are shitting me.’