28. Margery Allingham - 'Three is a Lucky Number' (1969)

'His methods were old-fashioned and heavily romantic and within a week she was hopelessly infatuated.'

(Patricia Craig, ed., The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories, Oxford University Press, 1990, p.320)

This is drawn from a book of 'English Detective Stories', though the actual detection side of things is minimal; it is a study of crime and in how to build tension. Allingham was the creator of Albert Campion, a detective initially taking off Lord Peter Wimsey, who starred in a long series of novels and shorts (1929-65), including The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), described by John Lennard as a 'great later work'. (Of Modern Dragons and Other Essays on Genre Fiction, Humanities-Ebooks, 2007, p.35) That novel was adapted by the redoubtable Roy Ward Baker in 1956, who at 92 is clearly now one of the last survivors of British cinema as it was. His Tiger didn't even include Campion - relegated in the novel to 'background passivity and observations' - as a character. (Lennard, p.35) This short is likewise missing a detective personality, and works perhaps all the better for that, given the rather grim modernity of it - set in a recognisable contemporary England, in its phase of budding consumerism.

It is all rather Hitchcockian in tone, with a woman in peril, the third in a line of women married by the serial killer, Ronald Frederick Torbay, who had struck previously in the North, engineering a fatal accident. Allingham makes a little of how that crime was reported in the media: they had 'entitled the article with typical northern understatement 'Honeymoon Mishap'.' (p.319) In its low-rent grimness, allied with a sardonic humour, this reminds me a bit of the work of Patrick Hamilton, Ten Rillington Place (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1970), as well as ATV's Thriller anthology series (1973-6), which has several episodes revolving around a similar theme - typically starring an assiduous, eerily smooth Michael Jayston adopting guises to disguise a series of killings. Very British in its focus on mundanity and terror; awful things happening behind an impeccable front of respectability.

There is a wealth of detail here - not forensic, but poetic in its effect. Torbay, his own name redolent of English coastal dreams, is captured superbly: every bit the slightly-behind-the-times casanova, pitching himself as a smooth salesman to this would-be third victim, Edyth. He tellingly first sees her 'sitting alone at a little table under the window' - of that most English places of living death: the seaside hotel. (p.319) He is a low-rent English imitation of the romantic tactics to be found in women's romantic fiction, and a man constantly living up to the promise: 'A New Career in A Town' (David Bowie, Low, 1977). Taking things ever so carefully, feeling himself the master of his destiny: 'He was certain he was infinitely more clever than most human beings but he did not dwell on the fact'. (p.318) He is a pallid, middle-aged chap who considers what he is doing almost in scientific terms: 'It lent his designs upon them a certain pseudo-scientific atmosphere that he found satisfying.' (p.319) He might be placed in the John Reginald Christie mould; Allingham is clearly influenced by real-life criminals in this particular case, but careful not to be specific.

I shall not go too much further, as time is in the essence in writing up what has became a backlog of short-stories! (I am reading one a day fine, but the writing hasn't quite occurred) Allingham's excellent story must be read. Fascinating in its subtle evocation at the end of female empowerment, turning Torbay's and perhaps the prurient reader's expectations on their head. A very interesting female development of the Hitchcockian.

8/10

27. James Hogg - 'The Expedition to Hell' (1836)

'There is no phenomenon in nature less understood, and about which greater nonsense is written than dreaming.'

(Peter Haining, ed., Great British Tales of Terror: Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance 1765-1840, Penguin, 1973, p.496)

Another tale from the same Haining anthology as the Thackeray, and from the same year. This is notably more melodramatic, less satirical and creates a good deal of tension. Not a great deal to say other than that this is a notable piece of Scottish Gothic, rooted in Edinburgh - progressing to a subjective Hell.

Nice to see some accented dialect captured; this has been relatively rare in my survey; Barstow and Lawrence, obviously, but relatively few others that come to mind. Dialogue such as points the way towards Kelman and the like: 'Weel, weel, ye maun tell him that he mauna keep that engagement at no rate.' (p.504) 'no' rather than 'not', is another example.

Hogg plays with ambiguity and mystery in how he presents the central dream of George, the coach-driver, only being certain that we cannot be certain - and that the whole affair was of course extraordinary. A notable feature is the present narrator, seemingly Hogg himself, declaiming as in the epigraph above; pontification discounting rational explanations for dreams is followed by his telling of George's story.

It is all rather enjoyable; a before-its-time presentation and manipulation of the state of dreaming. Perhaps lacking that extra dimension Poe brings - as in 'The Facts of M. Valdemar' (1845) - but it is a canny old read, foraging almost unknowing into the uncanny.

7/10

26. William Makepeace Thackeray - 'The Devil's Wager' (1836)

'it appeared that the holy father could not manage the desired prayer.'
(Peter Haining, ed., Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance 1765-1840, Penguin, 1973, p.492)

This is the first of two stories drawn from a Peter Haining curated anthology of 'Gothic Stories of Horror and Romance'. Unsurprisingly, given its moniker, this tale tends towards emphasising the horror side of things.

Thackeray opens with a Gothic flourish which surely even in 1836 had an element of the parodic - presumably deliberate. It is a florid, archetypal setting of the scene that deserves quoting in full:

'It was the hour of the night when there be none stirring save churchyard ghosts - when all doors are closed except the gates of graves, and all eyes shut but the eyes of wicked men.
When there is no sound on the earth except the ticking of the grasshopper, or the croaking of obscene frogs in the pool.
And no light except that of the blinking stars, and the wicked and devilish wills-o'-the-wisp, as they gambol among the marshes and lead good men astray.
When there is nothing moving in heaven except the owl, as he flappeth along lazily; or the magician, as he rideth on his infernal broomstick, whistling through the air like the arrows of a Yorkshire archer.
It was at this hour (namely, at twelve o'clock of the night,) that two things went winging through the black clouds, and holding converse with each other.'
(pp.485-6)

He then breaks with this studiously ominous prose style; there is an almost debunking bathos in his reversion to a duologue remisicent of one of Poe's more philosophical asides: reminding me of 'Mesmeric Revelation' (1844), for example. This dialogue is established between a demon-messenger, Mercurius, and the soul of Sir Rollo, a dead knight in purgatory, whom the demon is supervising, indeed keeping him in line through winding his tail around his neck. The two establish a wager that would enable Rollo to ascend to heaven - if only he can get a living person to save an ave (prayer) for him, given three opportunities. First he tries his niece, who is startled by the visitation 'and of course fainted' (p.486) and when revived refuses to save the ave because the knight goes on to insult her current suitor, Edward. In a move which sums up the freewheeling style of this tale, Thackeray spells the niece Matilda's name in at least three different ways.

Next the pair intrude upon a friar, Father Peter, and his drunken company, who are predictably most amused by the spectacle: 'a person with hoofs, horns and a tail rather distubred the hilarity of the company.' (p.491) As is clear in my epigraph, this inebriated friar is unable to utter a prayer, and indeed is manipulated by Mercurius - who edits the hymnbook - into singing a satirical, anti-Church song:

'My pulpit is an ale-house bench,
Whereon I sit so jolly
A smiling rosy country wench
My saint and patron holy.'
(p.492)

A decided dose of satirical humour is evident throughout this tale, bringing this horror tale perhaps surprisingly into the orbit of WMT's novel, Vanity Fair (1847-8). The third visit is to Rollo's brother, a prior who had entered into a pact with the devil 'never to say a prayer.' The dead knight is by this point unable to contemplate winning the wager, faced with a gloating Mercurius, cutting 'a hundred jokes at the expense of his poor associate.' (p.493)

He enters the room of his brother, a 'wicked and maligant sorcerer', with no hope; as amusingly put by WMT: 'he entered his brother's room more for the five minutes' respite than from any hope of success.' (p.494) Yet, Rollo manages to develop a more wily strategy, taking Father Ignatius into his full confidence and then tricking him into saying the ave, and thus leading to his brother taking his place in hell. Thackeray's vivid tableau at the end includes a memorable description of the miserable Ignatius being dragged downwards by Mercurius towards hell: by his long beard.

This story was enjoyable, much like one of the tales inserted by Dickens within hihumours contemporaneous saga, The Pickwick Papers (1836-7). Thackeray tells a basically moral tale, but invests it with enough diabolic incident and satiric good humour to make it a worthwhile read.

7/10

8. Michael Marshall Smith - 'This is Now' (2004)

'Forests have a way of making civilization seem less inevitable.'

(Stephen Jones, ed., The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Robinson, 2005)

'Where were you in '92?' Part 1




Marshall Smith's story sets up a week of shorts provided by Sunderland central library, after a fashion; all of the pieces to be written about this week were purchased from a sale two Saturdays ago at the Fawcett Street library. 26 books for £4 and all that, with a good number providing lifeblood for my short-story craving sensibility.

The first is from a bumper, indeed Mammoth Book of New Horror, containing stories from 2004. Perhaps appositely for the most recent entry so far in ASSAD, it is basically set in the future (2015), but the main focus is upon reflecting upon a dim-and-potentially-distant past (1992).

MMS is an anglo-American writer, born in Knutsford, Cheshire (1965) and who spent much of his childhood in South Africa, Australia and the US, only to return to the UK in the seventies (he is now a resident of North London). This story is set in a north-eastern corner of Washington state, in America, yet seems inflected with a British perspective in certain ways.

The central three protagonists have known each other at least since adolescence; the main framing sees them aged 38, returning to and then reflecting upon the scene of an episode that might be termed a teenage transgression: when they were fifteen they infilitrated an ambiguous military compound. They are also established in their present-day locale; a bar with omnipresent pool table activity, from which the memories arise - if internally.

MMS establishes a subtly uneasy juncture between the everyday and the unsettling, the odd; the current-day reflections and longueurs are juxtaposed with flashbacks to what happened fifteen years ago - the tense and rather primordial transgressions in 1992 contrasted with the languid and uneasily sedate rituals of 2015. The teenagers find a weak spot in the electrified fence and get over into a military installation - epically ambiguous, as MMS leaves it - that was established in 1985.

This is ultimately winning, perhaps, because it does not resort to 'horror' in any generic sense; it is gratifying to come across a story classed as one of 2004's finest horrors that simply does not need any shocks, undue violence or authorial sleight-of-hand to achieve its effect. Marshall Smith's prose is straightforward yet penetrating; revealing average 38-year-olds settling for life as usual, deciding, albeit tacitly, to put the fascination and curiosity awakened by their adventure at fifteen behind them - for better or for worse.

It is all bittersweet without any real sense of the sweet; there is the ebbing memory of their togetherness at fifteen, having got away with the transgression: 'boys who had come triumphantly out the other side. The forest felt like some huge football field, applauding its heroes with whispering leaves.' (p.259) Now, one is settled in a reasonable if hardly fulfilling marriage, one amicably separated, the other - the 'I' narrator, Dave, is seemingly at a loose end: 'I lit another cigarette and wondered why I still didn't really know how to deal with women. They've always seemed so different to me. So confident, so powerful, so in themselves. Kind of scary, even. Most teenage boys feel that way, I guess, but I had assumed age would help. That being older might make a difference. Apparently not. The opposite, if anything.' (p.253)

There is the melancholy in Dave's past reflections on a perceived missed opportunity with a girl called Lauren, who saw herself in Seattle in a few years: 'What I didn't know, that night in the forest, was that she would do this, and I would not, and that she would leave without us ever having kissed.' This along with the eerie, intangible memory of the transgressive night; seemingly abandoned, 'ruined houses' (p.256). This subterranean progress - albeit on the fringes of a town that is on the road to nowhere in particular - leads both everywhere and nowhere, as the final passages detail. The final point seems to be that it is important, sometimes, to leave old haunts behind, even if there is no obviously gleaming future in store.

8/10