FFB: Master of the Macabre - Russell Thorndike

In the tradition of works like Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors and R. Austin Freeman's The Uttermost Farthing: A Savant's Vendetta (which this book markedly resembles) The Master of the Macabre (1947) is another collection of supernatural and macabre tales that take the form of a quasi-novel. Taylor Kent, writer of thrillers, is travelling by car to deliver a package to Charles Hogarth. En route he encounters a raging snowstorm, loses control of his car and crashes not far from Hogarth's home. Kent now injured with a broken ankle is rescued by Hogarth's servant Hoadley and taken to the house where he soon becomes both guest and invalid. While recuperating Hogarth shows Kent his collection of macabre objects and relics he has amassed over several decades. Each one has its own peculiar story and over the coming nights Hogarth proceeds to relate several stories.

The book has an amazingly similar structure and skeletal plot to The Savant's Vendetta in which a sinister collector of human skulls also tells a variety of stories to a house guest. Each novel has an underlying connecting story that recurs throughout the narrative resulting in a surprise climax. In the case of Thorndike's book the climax has to do with the ghost of the corrupt Abbott Porfirio who haunts Hogarth's home and who appears in a series of apparitions which Kent first attributes to nightmares.

An aspect of the novel I found most interesting is Thorndike's take on the haunted house as a living entity. This idea had previously been explored by Bulwer-Lytton in the late nineteenth century in "The House and the Brain" and to much greater effect in the mid 1920s in Cold Harbour by Francis Brett Young. The topic would continue to be explored by generations of supernatural fiction writers and would reach its apotheosis in 1959 with The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson and continue to be reworked by Richard Matheson (Hell House) and Robert Marasco (Burnt Offerings) in the 1970s. In Thorndike's book prior to the serial narration of the stories of the objects both Hoadley and Hogarth discuss the weird influence the house has on its occupants. The house is described as being "susceptible," exhibiting "the strangest properties", displaying "powerful and insidious" effects. There is talk of the Spanish Chamber being the "most active" room in the house with weird examples of what goes on there. Thorndike carries this discussion to the objects themselves when Hogarth says to Kent:

"Come over to the tapestries and I promise you they will treat you entirely sympathetically. You may think me childish, but I have always hugged the belief that every so-called inanimate object in this world, whether beautiful or ugly according to our standards, has a being--an entity of its own. When you are fond of a thing -- your typewriter, for instance -- why shouldn't that thing be fond of you? I almost think that things can think."

Russell Thorndike in costume as Dr. Syn

The "insidious influence" becomes a running theme throughout the book as each relic in Hogarth's collection has its story told. Yet this theme is rarely mentioned in any reviews or criticism of Thorndike's book. That Thorndike was an early proponent of this popular motif in haunted house literature cannot be denied. It is unfortunate that his obvious fascination with the idea of objects that are alive and a house with influence has been overlooked by supernatural fiction critics.

Instead Thorndike is usually discussed for his other obsession -- graves, decaying corpses and the grisly aspects of death. Building upon an already rich library of supernatural and weird fiction tropes Thorndike is clearly paying homage to the grotesque penchants of Poe, Machen, James and Blackwood in these stories. Pickled maggots, graveyard ghouls, live burial and other assorted often repulsive set pieces all make their appearances.

Of the stories I enjoyed the most are his very Poe-like tale of a man fleeing execution by hanging  during a breakout of plague and his bizarre idea to disguise himself as one of the victims of the disease. When is thrown into a mass grave his harrowing, nightmarish escape recalls some of the more grisly sequences in the tales of the American master of the macabre. There is also a very well done and brief story of a 20th century Ahab named Captain Dawson and his obsessive pursuit of a man-eating shark known as "Great Crafty."  It's both a nod to Moby Dick and an eerie prediction of Peter Benchley's massive bestseller Jaws.  There are other tales as well which make up quite a mixed bag (many of them go on far too long)  including a very strange one about the origins of a shovel with a horseshoe welded to its handle and a protracted tale about the scarlet lining of an Indian soldier's coat that has several sequels throughout the book.

The Master of the Macabre was released earlier this year in a new trade paperback edition from Valancourt Books. It includes a biographical introduction about Russell Thorndike by supernatural fiction authority, avid book collector and writer Mark Valentine. The book is available through Valancourt Books and amazon.com in both tangible and digital editions. I'm very happy to see The Master of the Macabre back in print as it has so much to recommend it as both a turning point in haunted house literature and the development of the supernatural short story.

The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern - Nicholas Olde

Who was Nicholas Olde? No one seems to know. In addition to this collection of clever and often quite funny mystery short stories, Olde apparently was also the author of two slim volumes of poetry published in pamphlet form in the early 1930s. It is generally thought that Olde was a pseudonym and attempts to uncover any biographical data on him have yielded nothing. Whoever he was he certainly read a lot of G. K. Chesterton. The plots and dialogue are rife with the kind of paradox that Chesterton imbued his mystery stories—not only with Father Brown but also in the Gilbert Pond stories and the tales found in The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Another Chestertonian aspect of some of the stories is an element of the supernatural and the impossible crime, or more often an impossible problem. Chesterton employed these often in the Father Brown stories. Readers will surely find analogies between many stories. “The Windmill” by Olde and “The Invisible Man” by Chesterton share similar solutions to their crimes, for instance. “The Monstrous Laugh” tells of a town haunted by phantom laughter and a local superstition that is similar to the seemingly supernatural aspects of “The Ghost of Gideon Wise,” “The Dagger with Wings” and several other Father Brown tales.

Robert Adey in his excellent bibliography of impossible crime stories and novels, Locked Room Murders, makes a side comment about Olde’s book having been undeservedly passed up for Queen’s Quorum status. Had it been listed in that Hall of Fame listing of seminal short story collections in the detective fiction genre, Olde would perhaps not have been condemned to obscurity and the book might not have descended into the limbo of forgotten and neglected works. In the countless anthologies devoted to crime and detective fiction published since the 1930s, only three publications have ever included a Rowland Hern story: “The Windmill” in Twelve Murder Tales, one of Jack Adrian’s anthologies for Oxford University Press (1988); “The Accidental Disembowelment of John Kensington" and “The Invisible Weapon” both in Japanese translation, the first in Hayakawa's Mystery Magazine (#468, 1995) and the other in a 1990s locked room story anthology, the title of which is Japanese (I cannot reproduce it here). It’s a shame this has happened because The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern contains some of the most ingenious and funny detective stories of the 1920s.

Like most detective fiction fans I had never heard of Nicholas Olde or Rowland Hern. No surprise given the fact that Olde and the quirky Rowland Hern have both been overlooked (or shunned) by nearly all of the crime fiction historians and critics. Through sheer serendipity -- that miracle that usually leads me to a treasure of a book -- I was lucky enough to obtain a copy through the internet in the spring of 2005. Lucky, because as I later discovered, it is among one of the rarer books in mysterydom and sought after by collectors of impossible crime stories. Later research revealed that the copy I stumbled upon was the only copy being offered via the internet and has been the only one for several years. An attempt to locate other copies, even in academic libraries or public libraries, showed less than ten copies held in the US and UK. There may be other copies in private collections, but I’ve been unable to verify the existence of even one. All of this made me think that someone ought to reissue this book. And the sooner the better.

As I delved into its pages I discovered the book to be filled with the bizarre, the surreal and the outrageous. Throughout the fifteen stories in the volume the reader is treated to several wicked clergymen, a devious physicist, a vengeful botanist, and many murderous lords, earls and other titled gentry. The plots involve a secret code in a lost language, a murder committed with an invisible weapon, a tell-tale beard, a near disembowelment, a village where no one laughs, and a killer whose motive is linked to a literal battle of wits.

The more I read the more I thought Olde cannot really intend these to be taken seriously. They must be detective fiction parodies. As such they are perhaps some of the earliest examples. I can think of only Philo Gubb, the correspondence school sleuth created by the American humorist Ellis Parker Butler, as the earliest of intentional detective fiction parodies in short story form. The first clue that Olde’s mood is far from somber in ...Rowland Hern are the characters’ decidedly British and often alliterative monikers. Here’s a brief line-up of these unusual suspects: Pounceby Brisket, K.C., Sir Chudleigh Chalfont, Mrs. Tregaskin Simpson, Hercules Herklot, Sir Pendragon Higginbotham and Porteous Pemberton- Drysdale. And the names give only a hint of the oddities that the reader will encounter.

In “Potter”, one of my favorites in the collection, Hern and his nameless sidekick head off to a boutique that specializes in the sale of exotic animals. Why? Because Hern is in need of an armadillo and the emporium has several sizes to choose from. Their advertisement is certainly enticing to anyone in search of exotic animals: “Potter & Hara, Wild Beast Merchants. Tigers from £85, certified Man-eaters 5s extra. Snakes and crocodiles a specialty. Free burglary insurance policy presented to each customer.” How can one go wrong with those promises? Exactly why Hern needs that desert beast is never explained. And must we really know? The mere fact that he needs an armadillo is surreal enough. How many fictional detectives have ever required an armadillo to solve a case? Or for anything!

Olde’s sense of humor reaches its pinnacle in “The Mysterious Wig-Box.” For a story written in 1920s it displays a truly contemporary black humor presenting us with legal professionals who make light of killing and death during a sensational murder trial. Their lively repartee receives hearty laughter and applause from the irreverent courtroom attendees. The trial ends in a surprising acquittal of the serial killer thought to be obviously guilty. Later the defense attorney (one of the punning wits of the courtroom) is found decapitated in his home and his head decorated with his barrister’s wig is found in a wig-box in a railway station. Hern sees in this bizarre crime a particularly nasty sense of humor. The victim lost his head, after all, along with his ears and nose. What appears to be a wanton and insane act is in fact a purposeful and vengeful crime. When Hern reveals the killer’s identity his cohort is astonished. He says, “Apparently [they] were on the best of terms. […] They were even joking with one another during the trial.” Hern replies, in his characteristic Chestertonian paradoxical manner, “Yes, and that was the trouble.” It was their sense of humor which led to the crime. The first time I know of in crime fiction that the telling of jokes served as a motive for murder.

For decades The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern was one of the legendary and unattainable books of the genre. Thankfully, that is a thing of the past.  Mystery fans now have an affordable edition to enjoy available from Ramble House. Nicholas Olde’s original sleuth need no longer be imprisoned in that limbo of forgotten and neglected fictional creations. I suggest you acquaint yourself with him soon.

(This is an abridged, slightly altered version of my introduction to the Ramble House edition of The Incredible Adventures of Rowland Hern first reissued in 2005.)