Important notice

At the end of the articles in the June 1925 edition of The Strand is this full-page 'teaser' announcing the commencement the following month of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist, the third of his Professor Challenger novels after The Lost World and The Poison Belt. Doyle had fully established his spiritualist credentials by this time - the infamous 'Coming of the Fairies' article about the to-modern-eyes obvious fakes The Cottingley Fairies - had appeared five years earlier in The Strand's December 1920 issue, for example. The Land of Mist saw Doyle further his campaign for credibility of his beliefs by introducing them into a work of fiction using established and popular characters. It's not an entirely successful story but I'm hoping the illustrations will be good. I shall save beginning the next volume till tomorrow - and then I'll find out.

A scientific genius

Sitting in the sunshine in my back garden at last, I flicked open the June 1925 edition of the Strand Magazine to find this opening spread, for an adventure story called The Island Under Sea. I've found out very little about the extraordianrily named author, other than that he wrote a biography of Paul Verlaine (quite interesting) and appears to have been an anuthority on, or at least a translator of, Russian literature.

Anyway, Island Under Sea turns out to be quite a good wheeze belonging to the Atlantean fantasy sub-genre. Needless to say the exotic girl preserved in the block of crystal is from fabled Atlantis. The 'star' of the piece is a British scientific genius called 'A B C' Hawkes, who is busy plying the ocean in a souped up ship of his own design (naturally). He knows everything about everything, as they always do, and has an endearing habit of exclaiming phrases like: 'Shades of Darwin!'

But what I particular loved was the editor's note below the byline: 'The story is written in collaboration with a well-known Professor of Science, so the reader may rest assured that nothing is related that could not actually have happened.'

Yeah, right. Like maidens perfectly preserved for millennia in a block of something unidentifiable and islands floating up from the sea bed for a bit then descending again, just for the fun of it. Were the readers as naive and trusting as the editor hoped?

At the conclusion of the yarn, there is a note stating: 'Another story of A.B.C Hawkes: Scientist will appear in an early number. Sounds like a series on the way. Hope there are monsters in it!

Snake on a Plain

I've just got an attractive copy of volume 20 of The Strand (Jul-Dec 1900) to plug one of the gaps in my collection. It's notable for including the first two instalments of H G Wells's classic The First Men in the Moon. I thought, though, that you might enjoy the frontispiece to the December edition.

It's an illustration (by the Holmes artist Sidney Paget) for a bizarre story called simply Followed, in which a well-to-do young lady finds herself pursued across Salisbury Plain by nothing less than a huge cobra - a trained assassin set upon her by a sinister foreign gent (devious foreigners feature strongly in these magazines). The showdown, as you can see, is in Stonehenge.

The story is by L T Meade and Robert Eustace. Meade had been a prolific writer of stories for girls but branched out with great success into sensation and detective fiction with the advent of The Strand and its rivals. Eustace was a medical man whom Meade teamed up with to write two series of equally bizarre adventures under the name The Diary of a Doctor: macabre and/or crime-fighting yarns with a medical theme. Later Meade joined force with a scientist Clifford Halifax to write the equally sensational The Adventures of a Man of Science.

Preposterous yarns like this are the main reason I spend my moolah on these magazines.