Monster, She Wrote

by Lisa Kröger

  Casualty of War

  Alice Askew

  1874–1917

  Séances sound like fun, don’t they? Sitting around a candlelit room, maybe with a little mood music, holding hands with everyone and having a chat with dead loved ones. When solving mysteries is added to the mix, though, things can get complicated. The wife-and-husband writing team of Alice and Claude Askew describes occult detection as one part old-fashioned deduction, one part dogged sleuthing, and one part familiarity with the astral plane.

  Such is the tone of their stories featuring the supernatural detective Aylmer Vance, the Askews’ most famous literary creation. Vance travels around and solves cases involving all manner of ghosts and possessions, and, in one case, a vampire. He shares a last name with Eleanor Vance, the heroine of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, perhaps signifying Jackson’s appreciation of the Askews’ character.

  The Askews likely saw plenty of blood while serving in World War I in Serbia as war correspondents attached to a British medical unit. The pair didn’t stay on the sidelines and observe. They actively participated in the unit’s work. Their lives ended tragically in 1917, when, in the Mediterranean, their ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. Both were reported lost at sea, though a body washed on shore at Corfu immediately afterward was thought to be Alice’s. The couple left behind two children and more than ninety works (published as novels and as serialized “sixpenny” pieces of fiction) written before and during their war service.

  The Askews’ writing was adapted for six silent films, two of which were based on their novel The Shulamite (Chapman & Hall, 1904). The Hollywood adaptation, the Paramount-produced Under the Lash, came out in 1921 and starred Gloria Swanson. The Shulamite was a tragedy about a woman in a loveless marriage in South Africa who falls for an Englishman visiting the region to learn about agricultural techniques. During the course of the love triangle, the Englishman kills Deborah’s overbearing husband and then reveals that he must return home to care for his ill wife. The Askews’ most successful work was in romance, and The Shulamite is a prime example. Unfortunately, no copies of the film adaptations exist.

  The pair’s major contribution to horror is in the subgenre of occult detective fiction. Even before Dion Fortune’s popular Dr. Taverner appeared in 1922 (see this page), the Askews had created an eponymous occult detective in their story collection Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer, published in 1914 in the Weekly Tale-Teller. Vance and his sidekick Dexter are effectively Sherlock Holmes and Watson, only the cases they solve are weirder. The detectives are part of an organization known as the Ghost Circle, though the group is never clearly described. They’re the ones to call if your problem is otherworldly—like when you think you might have fallen in love with a ghost or a vampire, but no one believes you.

  In addition to being Vance’s roommate, Dexter reports on the duo’s paranormal investigations, and during the course of the series he develops his own psychic talents (unlike Holmes’s partner Watson, who never transcended his role as the reporter of their cases). Aylmer Vance’s adventures unfold over a series of “penny dreadful” stories, notably “The Invader” and “The Vampire.” The duo faced scenarios that were familiar to readers of horror fiction: vampires, poltergeists, possessions, haunted houses. If all this sounds trite by today’s standards, keep in mind that Vance and his occult detectives of the early twentieth century brought us several modern characters and stories: Constantine, Kolchak, Ghostbusters, The Dresden Files, The X-Files or any other supernatural files—Aylmer Vance is a common ancestor of them all.

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: For haunted fare by the Askews, read the Aylmer Vance tales that Wordsworth Editions reprinted as Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer in 2006. The Vance stories also can be found in volume two of Coachwhip Press’s 2011 Supernatural Detectives series.

  Also try: Film buffs may be interested to know that several of the Askews’ works were adapted to silent movies, though they’re not supernatural. God’s Clay (published in 1913; adapted to film in 1919 and 1928) is about trysts, blackmail, and intrigue. The book can still be found in good used condition, for those willing to look.

  Related work: For a notable psychic detective who predates Alymer Vance, try the adventures of Flaxman Low, who first appeared in 1899. This occult investigator was created by “E. and H. Heron,” the collective pen name for the British authors Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard and Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard…a mother-and-son writing team. Not much is known of the elder Prichard; her son was an army sniper, a cricket player, a journalist, and a world-traveling big-game hunter, in addition to being a writer. The character they created is a bit of a skeptic when he investigates a supernatural phenomenon; he’s slow and careful, and sometimes the body count rises uncomfortably high while he’s still deducing (bystanders don’t fare well in these stories). “The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith” is one of the most anthologized Flaxman Low stories, with truly goosebump-inducing imagery, like a “blotched, yellowish face, flanked by two swollen, protruding ears” that hangs around uninvited.

  More recently, Flaxman Low appeared with Sherlock Holmes in the short story “The Things That Shall Come upon Them,” by Barbara Roden, and was included in the anthology The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Night Shade, 2009), a collection that includes contributions by Neil Gaiman and Stephen King.

  DYNAMIC DUOS

  Alice and Claude Askew aren’t the only married writing partners in the horror genre. Frankenstein author Mary Shelley collaborated with her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the travelogue History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (Hookham, 1817). Husband-and-wife writing team C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner wrote under the shared pen name Lewis Padgett (see this page). Stephen King is married to writer Tabitha Jane King (see this page). Legend has it that Stephen was ready to trash what would become his first published novel, Carrie (Doubleday, 1974), until Tabitha prompted him to continue writing it. And Jeff VanderMeer, one of the leading voices of the New Weird genre (which we discuss in Part 8), is married to Ann Kennedy VanderMeer, well known in weird fiction as an editor of Weird Tales (2007–11). The VanderMeers have coedited numerous anthologies.

  Speaker to the Spirits

  Margery Lawrence

  1889–1969

  Margery Lawrence didn’t just write paranormal fiction. She fervently believed in the supernatural. Although she was baptized and raised in the Church of England, upon the death of her parents in the 1920s, Lawrence became a dedicated Spiritualist. The loss of several friends and an early love in the First World War likely also contributed to her turn to Spiritualism. While writing about ghosts in her fantasy and horror stories, she communed with them in her everyday life, even claiming to speak with her deceased parents and, later, her dead husband. Her explanation of her introduction to Spiritualism resembles the plot of one of her stories: A family member died, and three days later his specter appeared to Lawrence and told her where to find some important papers (because why else do ghosts appear to the living, except maybe to solve their own murder?). She found the papers exactly where the ghost said they’d be and immediately desired to learn more about what was across the ghostly veil between our world and the place beyond death.

  Lawrence lived a bohemian life, studying art in London and abroad in France. As a young woman, she traveled across Europe; when her mother died in 1921, the two were together in Monte Carlo. During World War I and the years leading up to World War II, she continued traveling through Europe and then into Africa. In 1936, she lived in Jamaica briefly before returning to London. In 1938 Lawrence married Arthur Edward Towle, and the couple remained in London, for the most part, until his death in 1948.

  All that travel lent an air of authenticity to Lawrence’s first novels, published in the 1920s, which were primarily adventure stories with romantic entanglements. (Several of her later ghost stories wer
e set in locales outside of England or recounted hauntings that resulted from travel abroad.) She wrote romance novels, too, two of which—Red Heels (Hutchison & Co., 1924) and The Madonna of Seven Moons (Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1933)—were made into films. In both her adventures and her romances, Lawrence didn’t shy away from describing women’s experiences. Her 1928 novel Bohemian Glass (Hurst & Blackett) focused on the topics of sexual and artistic awakenings and was viewed by critics as scandalous. In The Madonna of Seven Moons, she wrote about a character with a split personality that resulted from witnessing sexual abuse. Her stories, primarily the supernatural ones that she wrote throughout her career, were popular both in British literary magazines, such as The Tatler, and in pulps, like Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story Magazine.

  Lawrence was headstrong in her opinions, and not just about the occult. In January 1929, she wrote an essay called “I Don’t Want to Be a Mother” for Cosmopolitan magazine. According to the historian Daniel Delis Hill, when Cosmopolitan ran an advertisement for the article in Good Housekeeping, the latter published a disclaimer, stating that it could support Lawrence’s right to an opinion without endorsing her ideas. She liked to push the boundaries of gender roles in her fiction, promoting issues like sexual independence and gender equality. She did marry but never was a mother, and she always valued her life of travel and freedom. Lawrence was a woman who wanted to follow her own path, and she certainly didn’t believe a woman needed to rely on a man, financially or otherwise.

  Perhaps inevitably, given her interest in all things occult, Lawrence’s writing took on a supernatural bent. The shift was apparent first in her short stories, but soon her novels abandoned adventure and romance plots in favor of overtly Spiritualist themes. Her first novel to explore Spiritualism was Madame Holle (Jarrolds, 1934), in which an orphan is rescued from the clutches of the evil title character. Next came The Bridge of Wonder (R. Hale, 1939), which was a kind of morality tale warning against mediums using their powers for financial gain. Things got even more interesting with her 1966 novel The Tomorrow of Yesterday (Hale). In the author’s foreword, Lawrence wrote that the story was dictated by its Martian narrator through a trance medium. The novel describes the utopian civilization on Mars that predated humanity on Earth but was destroyed because of power struggles and unfettered scientific development. It then turns to the development of humanity through the efforts of refugee Martians who left their home planet to escape the end of society. Oh yes, the lost city of Atlantis is also involved. What more could you want?

  Reading List

  Not to be missed: Lawrence wrote in many formats, but her short fiction is of greatest interest to supernatural and horror fans. Her first story collection, Nights of the Round Table, was published in 1926 by Hutchison & Co. Richard Dalby, an editor and relation of Lawrence, describes it as “one of the last remaining completely forgotten great ghost story collections of the 1920s.” A favorite story within is “The Haunted Saucepan,” which follows M. R. James’s theory of the “malice of inanimate objects.” The new tenant of a suspiciously low-rent apartment quickly realizes that there is something weird about the kitchen and a particular saucepan. The pot slightly raises its lid and looks as if it is watching him. Things get worse, but we won’t spoil anything.

  Also try: Nights of the Round Table was followed by The Terraces of Night (Hurst & Blackett, 1931) and The Floating Café (Jarrolds, 1936). Both of these later collections go beyond ghosts and hauntings to explore more supernatural territory, namely, witches and vindictive mermaids and other sea creatures bent on raising hell and exacting revenge. All three collections have been reprinted by Ash-Tree Press.

  Lawrence also wrote an occult-detective series, Number Seven Queer Street (R. Hale, 1945), and Master of Shadows (R. Hale, 1959), which features yet another psychic doctor, Dr. Miles Pennoyer. Pennoyer is a psychic doctor who solves the unsolvable with the help of ghost friends…how has no one turned this into a Netflix series yet?

  Also fun: Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told (Odhams Press, 1937), Lawrence’s collection of true stories of the paranormal…

  THE GHOST CLUB

  Margery Lawrence referred to herself as a “ghost-hunter,” not an exaggeration given her active participation in haunted house investigations and séances with famous mediums of the day such as Eileen Garrett. Lawrence was a member of the Ghost Club, an organization that began in London in 1862 and still exists as a place for discussion and investigation of psychic and spirit phenomena. Members have included Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Algernon Blackwood, W. B. Yeats, and Peter Cushing. In the 2015 Ubisoft video game Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, players can accept side missions investigating the paranormal for Charles Dickens and the Ghost Club. We think Margery Lawrence would’ve been a cooler choice.

  Britain’s Psychic Defender

  Dion Fortune

  1890–1946

  Writers of weird fiction have often turned to the occult for inspiration, and sometimes for personal motivation. Dion Fortune did one better than Margery Lawrence and other writers-turned-occultists: she grew a religion from her philosophies. Her occult beliefs informed her fiction, which in turn blended with her faith as she wrote mystical works.

  Born Violet Mary Firth in 1890 in Wales, Dion Fortune grew up in a Christian Science home, and early in life she reported visions and psychic ability. Her more esoteric beliefs led her to join the Theosophical Society and, later, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. She was unique in that she connected occult practices to psychology—particularly Jungian studies—believing that magic could help seemingly untreatable mental disorders. One of her first books about occultist magic, The Mystical Qabalah (S. Weiser, 1935), was a kind of pseudoreligious guide to the good life that combined Jewish faith traditions with occult staples. Her ideas eventually evolved into the creation of her own occult order, the Society of the Inner Light. The organization is aimed at bringing people to their so-called divine intention, or true purpose in life.

  Prior to her life as seeker of the inner goddess, Fortune wrote occult mysteries and weird fiction. The character of Dr. Taverner, from her 1926 short-story collection The Secrets of Doctor Taverner (Llewellyn Publications), reads like Sherlock Holmes meets a psychic Dr. House. Here’s a typical plot: When traditional medicine fails fatally ill patients, it’s Dr. Taverner to the rescue! With the help of a little magic, the good doctor is able to save the sick from a myriad of supernatural foes…like vampires who drain victims of life-giving energy, and mysterious stones that cause people to commit suicide. If the doctor is stumped, no worries. Secrets from the other side come to him in psychic visions.

  The Taverner stories place Fortune firmly in the canon of occult detective authors, a subgenre that included few women writers (who produced exemplary work). Parallels between Dr. Taverner and Sherlock Holmes are numerous, from their similar appearances to their fascinations with seemingly unsolvable puzzles to their physician assistants who have returned wounded from war. But it’s not a case of simple imitation; both Holmes and Taverner were modeled on real people. Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell; Taverner was based on an Irish occultist and physician named…Dr. Theodore Moriarty, who had served in the Indian Medical Service and was Fortune’s mentor in her study of the occult. (No, he didn’t also inspire Arthur Conan Doyle’s villain of that name; it’s simply a delightful coincidence.) In the introduction to her story collection, Fortune writes that the cases of Taverner and his assistant, Dr. Rhodes, were composites of real investigations that she worked on with her mentor. She even claimed that she had to tone down a few of the stories to make them publishable. Whether or not that’s true, it’s a brilliant bit of showmanship.

  Sexual Sorcery

  Fortune’s second work of fiction and first occult novel, The Demon Lover (Noel Douglas, 1927), has even more recognizable elements of modern horror. In the vein of films like White Zombie (1932) and others of the
period that involved an evil sorcerer wielding black magic against innocent victims, The Demon Lover tells of a magician who plans to sacrifice a young woman. That goal becomes difficult when he falls in love with her. His fellow magicians (evil, of course, and interestingly a bunch of stodgy old white men) turn their dark arts against him and his lady love. There’s also reincarnation and supernatural help from the other side (not unlike the aid that tended to arrive at just the right time for Dr. Taverner). With these stories and others, Fortune doesn’t appear hostile to the idea of magic; rather, she asserts that formalized magical orders are disruptive, both to the practice of magic and, particularly, to the well-being of women who are involved with the men who practice it.

  The Demon Lover was the piece of fiction that Fortune published under the name Violet Firth. The pen name she took was a pared-down version of her family’s crest, Deo, non fortuna (by God and not by luck). The Latin phrase was also her so-called magical name when she was associated with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

  Her subsequent novels, The Winged Bull (S.I.L., 1935) and The Goat-Foot God (Samuel Weiser, 1936), continued to focus on women’s experiences. In them Fortune explored the idea that a freer attitude toward sexuality can lead to gender equality and to freedom from the mental malaise—most commonly, depression and neurotic personalities—that often affected Dion’s characters. These later novels presented sexual healing as magical healing.