Monstrous Monday

The Gnoles drag away screaming the unlucky Tonker from a story by Lord Dunsany. 'And where they took him it is not good to ask, and what they did with him I shall not say.' The illustration is by Dunsany's regular, Sidney Sime (1912).

Weird Wednesday

I guess I should have remembered to note that I would be away for a week. Aye me! Oh well, for Weird Weds, here is another image from a 1929 Strand, this time from April. It's from quite a good story about arrogant colonial types coming up against native magic - one of whom disappears into a cloud and is later found dead. The artist has gone a bit OTT with his image: the story only suggest there may have been something horrible in the mist, and the matter is left open.

Monstrous Monday

Huge, horrible, underwater creepy-crawlie illustrating the second of the two parts of The Lord of the Dark Face, a short sequel to The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Not only is the horrid earwiggy thing enormous and armed with scary pincers, it can shoot out killer volts like an electric eel - lucky that poor fish got in the way of the blast or our heroes would have been done for. I'm thinking of reproducing the instalments of The Maracot Deep and The Lord of the Dark Face in book form. All I have to do is scan them, set up a print-on-demand account and find a way of letting people know it's available - but the latter bit is the hard bit.

Monstrous Monday

Illustration of big hairy giants for a whimsical short story by all-but-forgotten but once very popular author Cutcliffe Hyne about a fisheries civil servant who gets kidnapped by a big, burly mermaid and taken to an undersea kingdom in the Far North of the British Isles. From the December 1928 edition of The Strand.

Spooky Sunday x 2

Two full-page illustrations for Conan Doyle's The Land of Mist. In the top picture, a man sees the spirit of his mother at a seance; below it the psychic investigators encounter a 'dark soul' in a haunted house, a malevolent shadow that swoops down on them from the upper storey. They are from the September and October 1925 editions of The Strand respectively.

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!

Golden age fantasy fiction

The volume of Pearson's Magazine which I bought recently - Vol 6, July-December 1898 - has proved of interest. A book which helped encourage me to start buying these Victorian/Edwardian illustrated magazines was one Peter Haining's many: A Pictorial History of Horror Stories. It would seem that he owned Volume 6 of Pearson's himself, for the startling image I reproduce here was also reproduced by Haining in his book (click on it to view it bigger). It accompanies a particularly outre scene in a series of short stories about medieval Venice, The Monsignors of the Night by Max Pemberton.

In his book Haining also reproduced the headers from another story series in this volume, The Last of the Borgias, about a vigilante medico who bumps off undesirable people with undetectable poison. This series was written by one of the most interesting of the now forgotten fantasy writers, Fred M White. Aside from this rather surprising series about a murdering anti-hero - and indeed many others - Smith wrote several disaster stories about various dooms that might befall London, a yarn about killer trees in Meso-America [The Purple Terror] and one of my favourites, The Great White Moth.

In this tale - which appeared in Pearson's rival The Strand - adventurers try to make their fortune by securing exquisite and voluminous white feathers that would sell for a fortune to decorate ladies' hats. But, as you can guess from the title, they come not from birds but from monstrous moths. The gigantic insects live in a cave in (I think) darkest Africa, are worshipped (of course) by the locals and the plucky entrepreneurs get into all sorts of scrapes trying to secure a few plumes. I like it particularly because it could not have been written at any other time - the fashion for feathers, extensive parts of the world still unexplored, young men seeking to make their fortunes in exotic locations etc.

I'd LOVE to start reprinting some of this stuff. And one day I will.