Murder Up the Glen: A West Highland Story (1933) by Colin Campbell

 

Colin Campbell is one of those writers about whom frustratingly little is known. “Colin Campbell” was the pseudonym of Douglas Christie (1894-1935), the author of several novels under his real name and under the assumed one. At least three of the novels written as “Colin Campbell” feature the occult detective, Larry Neal. The first, Out of the Wild Hills (1932) is very definitely supernatural, while the third, Murder on the Moors (1934) is a standard whodunnit. The second, Murder Up the Glen (1933), is an altogether more ambiguous affair.

Lorin Weir, visiting a friend in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands, is startled to witness a brutal murder, apparently committed by the local ghost known as the Black Walker. No solution, either supernatural or otherwise is given to the murder – and even though it is strongly hinted that the affair has a supernatural solution, no explicit details are given as to what exactly this might be. Neal simply insists that the narrator (and the reader) have been given all the information required to solve the case. The publisher’s blurb in the first edition promotes the novel as having a solution that will satisfy “connoisseurs” of the mystery genre – but frankly, I can’t help feel the inconclusive ending makes this unlikely.

As a supernatural or Gothic mystery, however, the novel is far more satisfying and its atmospheric evocation of a haunted highland landscape of ancient burial mounds, populated by superstitious locals who wouldn’t venture out on Beltane for any price, makes it very much worth reviving for modern readers interested in early-twentieth-century supernatural fiction.

Murder Up the Glen [Kindle]

Murder Up the Glen [Epub]

Murder Up the Glen [PDF]

IMPORTANT NOTE: Unfortunately, this work is not in the public domain in the U.S.A. – in order to comply with United States copyright legislation, readers in that country should not download the ebook.

 

 

Tales of Terror (1899) by Dick Donovan

Dick Donovan was a pseudonym of James Edward Preston Muddock – though he was better known as Joyce Emerson Preston Muddock. A well-travelled journalist, he wrote prolifically in a number of genres. The vast majority of his output were sensational detective stories in which “Dick Donovan” was the main character. So popular did this Glaswegian detective prove that Muddock issued later works under this pseudonym. Other works include the horror novel, The Shadow Hunter (1887), the ‘lost world’ novel The Sunless City (1905) and two volumes of supernatural tales.

Muddock’s life was the equal of any of his own fictions. During his travels as a journalist, he visited several continents, experienced the Indian Rebellion first hand, met cannibals and mined gold in Australia. He also married three times and fathered ten children! These and more details of Muddock’s life and career can be found in this article by Bruce Durie.

Tales of Terror (1899) was Muddock’s second collection of macabre stories, after Stories Weird and Wonderful (1889). Not all of the stories are supernatural. “‘Red Lillie'” is a sensational story about a lover’s promise; “With Fire and Death” is a gruesome (and very one-sided) account of the Indian Rebellion of 1857; while “The Pirate’s Treasure” is a pretty straightforward tale of piratical adventure. The majority of the stories do have a supernatural content, however, ranging from the vampire narrative “The Woman With the ‘Oily Eyes'”, to the traditional ghost stories of “The Corpse Light” and “The Spectre of Rislip Abbey”, the bloody Gothic horror of “The Cave of Blood”, and the folklore of “The Dance of the Dead”. Appropriately for the time of year, the collection also includes “The White Raven” – an effective ghost story set at Christmas.

Tales of Terror [Kindle]

Tales of Terror [Epub]

Tales of Terror [PDF]

Legendary Tales (1830) by H. Fox Talbot

This collection of stories in verse and prose was published in London in 1830 by James Ridgeway. Most of the pieces contain supernatural elements and all of them are in the tradition of the Gothic “first wave” of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Talbot translated or adapted them from various sources which had themselves collected them from the folklore of various European countries. The fashion for such stories is attested in Talbot’s correspondence (which you can read at the excellent website from which much of this biographical information is drawn) in which he states that he has written them to be published specifically to coincide with the London “season”.

Talbot was born in 1800. His father was William Davenport Talbot, who died when his son was only months old. Talbot’s mother, Elisabeth Theresa, remarried in 1804 to Captain Charles Fielding, who came to occupy in Talbot’s affections the place of his biological father.

Talbot is a well-known figure to historians of nineteenth-century culture, but not for his literary ventures (Legendary Tales is his only literary work). Rather, he is known as a pioneer of photography. While he was not the first to create a method of producing light-fast and permanent photographic images, Talbot is credited with the invention of the negative-positive process of reproducing pictures – that is, the method by which one negative is used to produce several positive reproductions. The image below, of a window of the family estate at Lacock Abbey, taken in 1835, is the earliest known surviving camera negative.

In 1844-46, Talbot was also responsible for the first commercially-published photo-illustrated book – The Pencil of Nature, which is both a book of photographs, and a book about the process and art of photography, then a cutting-edge science.

While Talbot is well-known as a pioneer of photographic reproduction, his volume of Gothic tales relies on the mind’s eye in its evocation of the supernatural sublime and is an enjoyable reminder of the fashionable tastes of early-nineteenth-century society.

Legendary Tales [Kindle]

Legendary Tales [Epub]

Legendary Tales [PDF]

I have made very few edits to the text and have largely retained the original’s somewhat erratic use (or non-use) of speech marks and the convention of capitalising random nouns. In some cases, adjusting the settings of the e-reader display from ‘portrait’ to ‘landscape’ will ensure that poems with longer lines display correctly.

All Souls’ Night (1933) by Hugh Walpole

Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) was a prolific and hugely popular writer who wrote in many genres, and whose early realist novels were nurtured by a friendship with Henry James. He also wrote popular fiction for a juvenile readership, along with historical romances for older readers. His career as a writer was a refuge from an emotionally traumatic youth and young manhood, in which he grappled with an unhappy school life, latent homosexuality (including an early and powerful crush on fellow ghost-story writer and mentor A.C. Benson) and a waning religious faith that put paid to his father’s ambitions for his son to join him in a clerical career. Walpole earned critical and commercial success as a professional writer, but this was only one aspect of an eventful, if tragically short life – so much so that it’s hard to summarise here. His Wikipedia page is worth a look for his wartime activities alone, and I shall certainly be reading more by Walpole in the future, beyond the supernatural stories, which were the only part of his life and work I had so far been familiar with.

Since his death, Walpole has come to be recognised as a master of the supernatural tale and a staple of ghost story anthologies. His 1933 collection All Souls’ Night contains sixteen examples – including such well-known stories as ‘The Little Ghost’, ‘The Silver Mask’ and the werewolf narrative ‘Tarnhelm’.

All Souls’ Night [Kindle]

All Souls’ Night [Epub]

All Souls’ Night [PDF]

IMPORTANT NOTE: Unfortunately, this work is not in the public domain in the U.S.A. – in order to comply with United States copyright legislation, readers in that country should not download the ebook. The book is available to purchase from Valancourt Books, in an edition which includes a scholarly introduction by John Howard.

Ghostly Tales (1896) by Wilhelmina FitzClarence

Wilhelmina FitzClarence (1830-1906), Countess of Munster lived a fairly standard peeress’s life – despite being an illegitimate granddaughter to William IV of England. As a young girl she travelled widely in Europe, eventually marrying her first cousin William in 1855. The couple lived in Brighton and had nine children.Wilhelmina’s first novel, Dorinda (1889), about a female art-thief, was praised by Oscar Wilde for its characterisation, although her second novel, social satire A Scotch Earl (1891), was less well-received. She also wrote numerous short stories and articles for periodicals, and published an autobiography in 1904.

Ghostly Tales (1896) consists of stories in a supernatural and/or Gothic vein and some (as in Isabella Banks’ Through the Night, which it in many ways resembles) are supposed to be drawn from stories recounted by its author’s family and friends. This is reflected in the milieu of the tales’ protagonists – the grand European tour, the marriage market and aristocratic country and town life. Although the collection contains several stories which fit easily into the traditional Victorian ghost story genre (most notably ‘The Ghost of My Dead Friend’) the volume contains a wide breadth of ‘weird’ or uncanny phenomena – from religious visions and animal telepathy to the narrator’s unsettling encounter with a mentally disturbed young man.

Ghostly Tales [Kindle]

Ghostly Tales [Epub]

Ghostly Tales [PDF]

A facsilmile edition, containing a number of illustrations, can be downloaded for free from from the British Library.

The Witching Time (1885) edited by Henry Norman

This is an anthology of stories and poetry published as T. Fisher Unwin’s Christmas annual for 1885. It was edited by Sir Henry Norman, a politician, journalist and author, who also edited Tales in Mid-Ocean the following year (available to read here). As the title implies, the collection features pieces appropriate for the twilight of the year, with most featuring prominent Gothic or supernatural elements. Highlights include Anne Crawford’s Vampire story, “A Mystery of the Campagna” (published under the pseudonym “Von Degen”); the humorous ‘explained supernatural’ tale, “The Spectre of Strathannan”- and an unusual foray into the Gothic from American realist William Archer.

The Witching Time [Kindle]

The Witching Time [ebook]

The Witching Time [PDF]

Ghost Stories from the “Argosy” by Mary E. Penn

Mary E. Penn is an enigmatic figure – nothing whatsoever is known about her other than the fact that she wrote several stories for late-Victorian periodicals, most notably The Argosy, a monthly miscellany associated with the sensation novelist Ellen Wood (not to be confused with the American periodical of the same name). Penn’s fiction encompassed supernatural and criminal themes and the last story definitely attributed to her appeared in 1897. More details about Penn and her stories can be found here.

In 1999, Richard Dalby resurrected Penn’s ghost stories for inclusion in his Mistresses of the Macabre series, published by Sarob Press. In the Dark and Other Ghost Stories (the second in the series) featured seven stories definitely attributed to Penn, and one which was published anonymously, but which Dalby ascribes to Penn on stylistic grounds. For this edition I’ve used the texts as published in The Argosy, most issues of which are available online. A linked index to each volume can be found here and is well worth having a browse for more hidden gems of Victorian genre fiction.

Ghost Stories from the “Argosy” [Kindle]

Ghost Stories from the “Argosy” [Epub]

Ghost Stories from the “Argosy” [PDF]

Pharos the Egyptian (1899) by Guy Boothby

Guy Boothby (1867-1905) was born in Australia but spent most of his career in England. A professional writer, his most famous work is the Dr Nikola series – a sequence of five novels about a criminal mastermind determined to take over the world with the help of the occult. Boothby was tremendously prolific. His writing career took up only the last decade of his tragically short life, but during this time he produced over fifty novels.

Presented here is one of a handful of overtly supernatural novels written by Boothby. First published in 1899, it is typically late-Victorian in its concerns about contamination by a foreign other from the fringes of occidental Empire – in this case the eponymous Pharos, a grotesque Egyptian with a talent for mesmerism, who harbours an astonishing and deadly secret. Also included are three of Boothby’s best-known ghost stories, taken from his collection The Lady of the Island (1904).

Pharos the Egyptian [Kindle]

Pharos the Egyptian [Epub]

Pharos the Egyptian [PDF]

The text of Pharos the Egyptian is from Project Gutenberg. The text of the extra stories are from ebooks at Adelaide.

Professor Brankel’s Secret (1886)

Fergus Hume is best known for his first novel, the Melbourne-set detective story The Mystery of the Hansom Cab (1886). He was, however, an extremely prolific writer, churning out more than fifty books of detective and fantastic fiction over the next few decades. Although none of these achieved anything like as great a success as his first book, which became a publishing phenomenon, he remained fairly popular and is still a favourite with many modern-day devotees of detection, his reputation having benefited from several cheap electronic reissues and the advent of Project Gutenberg.

Hume followed up Hansom Cab with a Gothic shocker, Professor Brankel’s Secret (1886). This short novel was first published in Melbourne in an edition specifically produced for sale at railway bookstalls. It’s a fairly obvious rip-off of elements of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but it also foreshadows some of the Edwardian weird fiction of Edward Heron-Allen, with its story of a German professor who becomes obsessed with finding the missing ingredient for a potion which he believes will grant him mystical abilities.

The original edition is extremely rare – but Hume later included the novella as a sort of ‘B feature’ to his murder mystery The Lone Inn (1894) which is, if not widely available, then at least not quite as scarce!

Professor Brankel’s Secret [Kindle]

Professor Brankel’s Secret [Epub]

Professor Brankel’s Secret [PDF]

The Joss: A Reversion (1901)

Best known for The Beetle (1897), Richard Marsh was a hugely prolific fin de siècle writer whose output includes several highly entertaining works characteristic of the late-Victorian mode of the Gothic. This novel, first published in 1901, begins with a haunted house and ends with a truly bizarre story of an Englishman’s transformation or, as the subtitle has it, his ‘reversion’. The nature of this horror is revealed gradually through multiple narrators, initially focussing on Mary Blyth, whose unfair dismissal from her job as a draper’s assistant turns out to be one of the least terrible events in what transpires to be the most horrific week of her life!

The novel deals in typical fashion with characteristic late-Victorian fears about racial degeneration and contamination by a foreign other. The setting too is highly characteristic, depicting London as a labyrinthine metropolis at the heart of Empire, in which mystery lurks behind the façade of every building and down every dark alley – the London of Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, Conan Doyle and Stevenson – and is a must-read for any fans of the period’s Gothic tales.

The Joss: A Reversion [Kindle]

The Joss: A Reversion [Epub]

The Joss: A Reversion [PDF]