by Basil Copper
I had been in the audience at London’s Gothique Film Society when Basil had presented classic silent films from his extensive private collection, and I listened attentively when he gave his Guest of Honour lecture at the third British Fantasycon, held in Birmingham in 1977.
But thirty-two years ago we had yet to meet in person. That pleasure was still five more years away – at the opening of a new crime and mystery bookstore in London’s Soho district.
So when, around Christmas 1983, I opened my copy of Basil’s latest Arkham House volume, The House of the Wolf, I came to the novel simply as a fan of the author’s work.
I was not disappointed.
Put basically, it is a superior thriller in which a group of occult specialists find themselves trapped in an old Hungarian castle while being stalked by a werewolf. Basil had already proved that he could master a mock-Gothic atmosphere in his earlier works, but the author also brought his considerable erudite knowledge of books and movies to the project, weaving in some sly references and overt homages that invest the novel with a charming subtext which will delight all fans of the genre (after all, Basil had already thoroughly researched his subject, having published a well-received non-fiction study of lycanthropy, The Werewolf in Legend, Fact and Art, six years earlier).
From echoes of Agatha Christie’s classic whodunit Ten Little Niggers (1939) to Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s memorable werewolf novel The Hammond Mystery (aka The Undying Monster, 1922), with an occasional nod to Universal’s 1941 film The Wolf Man and even Basil’s own Necropolis displayed along the way, The House of the Wolf is a finely-crafted chiller that appeals equally to horror fans and mystery readers. Its delightfully recognizable cast of Victorian characters are stalked through the shadow-haunted corridors and subterranean torture chamber of Castle Homolky by a bestial murderer whose true identity remains hidden until the obligatory final revelation.
When originally published by Arkham House, The House of the Wolf boasted a dustjacket painting and more than forty interior illustrations by the exceedingly talented Stephen E. Fabian. For the title’s twentieth anniversary edition from Sarob Press (and, incidentally, the novel’s first British publication), I was honoured to illustrate Basil’s incomparable prose with my own stylized scribblings.
Although Basil died in 2013 at the age of 89, I am certain that he would have been exceedingly proud of this latest incarnation of his novel of suspense and lycanthropy from Valancourt Books, who are committed to bringing a number of the author’s early titles back into print again.
Long may they continue to do so.
Stephen Jones
London, England
Stephen Jones lives in London. A Hugo Award nominee, he is the winner of three World Fantasy Awards, three International Horror Guild Awards, four Bram Stoker Awards, twenty-one British Fantasy Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Horror Association. One of Britain’s most acclaimed horror and dark fantasy writers and editors, he has more than 130 books to his credit. You can visit his web site at: www.stephenjoneseditor.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Basil Frederick Albert Copper was born in London in 1924. As a boy, Copper moved with his family to Kent, where he attended the local grammar school and developed an early taste for the works of M.R. James and Edgar Allan Poe. In his teens he began training as an apprentice journalist, but with the outbreak of the Second World War, he found himself put in charge of a local newspaper office while also serving in the Home Guard. He then joined the Royal Navy and served as a radio operator with a gunboat flotilla off the Normandy beaches during the D-Day operations.
After the war, Copper resumed his career in journalism. He made his fiction debut in The Fifth Book of Pan Horror Stories (1964) with ‘The Spider,’ for which he was paid £10. His first novel, a tongue-in-cheek crime story in the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler mode, The Dark Mirror, was turned down by 32 publishers because it was too long, before Robert Hale eventually published a cut-down version. Four years later, in 1970, Copper gave up journalism to write full time.
Copper published fifty-two novels featuring the Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday and also wrote several horror and supernatural novels and a number of collections of macabre short stories. His horror fiction in particular has been receiving renewed attention recently with new editions from PS Publishing and Valancourt Books. Basil Copper died at age 89 in 2013 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.