Invitation to Murder

Behind the high, ivy-covered walls of the Burchfield Estate in Oakland, California, the Lord and Lady of the Manor spend many an evening huddled before a warm TV, watching British mystery series, mostly on PBS, some on BBCA. (They’re also available for streaming on Roku, through Acorn, but we haven’t snipped the cable yet, mostly because the servants object. And with good help so hard to find these days, well . . . .)

Among our favorites—and there are a fair number--is Midsomer Murders.  Based on a series of novels by Caroline Graham, it’s not the crème de la pinnacle of its genre (an honor I bestow upon Prime Suspect, Foyle’s War, Sherlock! and Poirot et al). But it rates high as a most companionable and genial program, with John Nettles (Ret.) playing a droll Sheriff Andy to a bizarre population of kinky eccentrics and village nutcases. It’s perverse waltz theme, featuring the Theremin, makes a fine ear worm.

We like Midsomer for choosing sharp, polished fun over tortured profundity, making it a relative rarity in 21^st Century cable TV’s savage, despairing environment. (I can watch Sam Peckinpah’s original Straw Dogs--also set in rural England--again anytime I want to despair over the human condition.)

Though ostensibly contemporary (cell phones abound), Midsomer cheerily wanders a never-never land of rural English villages, woodlands and fields, all nested in the titular bucolic county.

Peaceful as it appears though, Midsomer County has what seems the highest homicide rate per population on Earth. Underneath all that chipper bourgeois Winnnie-the-Pooh gentility bubbles a bloody cauldron of homicidal mania. The English can’t stop killing! Any good-hearted, innocent wide-eyed American who dares to tread its green sward is bound to return in a pine box (as I might as I am in the planning stages of journey there in a couple of years. I am so glad I have cable!)

The blame for England’s descent into genteel slaughter though, lies not with Midsomer Murders itself, but with its ancestral inspiration: the stories and novels of Agatha Christie, still the best-selling author in the world nearly forty years after her passing, and the Queen of the so-called Golden Age of Mystery.

This ancestry is most ably and enjoyably explored in The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story by Martin Edwards, the latest in several books about how mystery fiction grew to so dominate western literature.

While paying due tribute to the founders of detective fiction, Poe, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle and G.K. Chesterton, The Golden Age story begins in the 1920s. That was when the painfully shy Ms. Christie, then an upper-middle-class housewife, published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which introduced one of literature’s most endearing oddballs, Hercule Poirot.

Mystery fiction already had monuments left by Doyle and Chesterton, but thanks to Christie’s deft plotting and the imaginative characterization of her heroes (especially Poirot), the genre’s popularity ballooned to phenomenon. Her success inspired near-countless other writers to try their hand, among them Dorothy L. Sayers.

Eventually, in 1930, a group of them living in London, co-led by Sayers, united to form The Detection Club, electing G.K. Chesterton as their first president. This happened, in part, to help promote the work of members; form a united front against greedy scheming publishers; but, mostly to provide an excuse to socialize. They held their own cheeky, flamboyant bizarre initiation ritual, complete with robes, candles, murder weapons, and a skull grinning from a velvet cushion, all topped with a grandly solemn oath. They often collaborated on novels, stories, and radio scripts in round-robin fashion.

They were truly like characters out of their own books, as odd and fascinating as the tales they imagined. Their private lives concealed their own mysteries and scandals.

Sayers had a child out of wedlock whose existence she never fully acknowledged (in keeping with the strict mores of the day). And Christie pulled a sensational vanishing act in 1926, for reasons that remain foggy. Other writers wove their secret fantasies of murder and adulterous misbehavior into their stories, engaging in a level of meta-gamesmanship, perhaps equal to Vladimir Nabokov in daring and cleverness, if not in style and vision. (Nabokov, sad to say, was too much a snob, for he could have well thumped these writers at their own game playing. What a book that would have been!)

They all thought nothing of cheerfully peeling their plotlines right out of the day’s headlines, imagining solutions to many a famous and unsolved murder. But they were not a callous bunch. Some critics theorize that many of them were subconsciously dealing with the trauma of World War I, in which many served.

Christie and Sayers are among the few Detection Club members who are read widely today. Some of the other noted names were A.A. Milne and, later, Eric Ambler.

Others are now forgotten, some undeservedly. Among those, John Dickson Carr, an American, was master of the “locked room” mystery (and author of a sinfully enjoyable non-mystery, the time-travel historical romp, The Devil in Velvet).

Then there is Michael Innes, who helped develop the “Oxford Don” mystery. Innes wrote fine prose with a razor wit and a flair for wild n’ wooly action climaxes. His influence can be gleaned in the series featuring Inspectors Morse and Lewis.

Despite their reputation for upper-class twittery, Golden Age writers often adeptly captured their era, the years between the wars. Nor were they all reactionary Tories. Their viewpoints ran from left to right and up and down the class system. Some even sounded early alarms about Nazism while inveighing against both Communism and Capitalism. The Detection Club drew members from near and far, among them New Zealand’s Ngaio Marsh and the American Carr.

The Detection Club is still active, with author Edwards as a member and first club archivist. His research has borne good fruit here. But if you want to join the club yourself, good luck on even finding a web page. It’s invitation only. Some things really should remain a mystery, hidden in locked rooms for good.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Ramsey Campbell: Not Quite Long Lost

TALE FROM A LONELY MARSH

On a summer evening long ago, I wandered with a group of underground urban explorers to Drawbridge, a ghost town slowly sinking into the marshes of South San Francisco Bay, a stone’s throw from San Jose, yet weirdly isolated, as abandoned places always are, a lonesome nub in the world.

Our group entered one of the dozen or shacks yet to be claimed forever by the mud of the bay. Some of us had brought along stories and poems to share.

As twilight deepened and shadows rose up the plank walls, I read to my companions a story called “Again,” about a needy soul on a walk in the lonely English countryside and the needy thing he finds in an old abandoned cottage--like the one we stood in, all of us perilously balanced on rotting sagging floor boards or ankle deep in burbling mud, the ground breathing under our feet, crows cawing as they swung and flashed by like swift black spirits outside the windows.

O, how they reacted, exploding with cries of shock and outrage for a tale that, while rooted in the work of M.R. James, was cruelly, grotesquely modern and alarmingly vivid, explicit, and poetic as it pulled us into its ghastly quagmire.

THE WRITER

The author of “Again” was not one of the names that pounce on the minds of American horror readers:  Stephen King, Peter Straub and Dean Koontz, for example. This name belongs to the best writer of horror you’ve never heard of, one from England--Ramsey Campbell.

Campbell, who has won more awards for his fiction than any of three names above—started his career in the early 1960s with a series of admittedly grinding H.P. Lovecraft pastiches. Then, sometime in the mid-1970s, (due maybe to the influence of psychedelics), his style underwent an abrupt, unnerving change, the kind where the wall you’re leaning on, flips on a hinge and spins you into another, secret room.

His writing became both hallucinatory and more skillful. His imagery became strange and colorful beyond words, almost as though he was under assault from synesthesia. His prose traveled into different atmosphere’s and reached around deadly twisted corners. The air itself breathed menace.

Meanwhile the characterizations deepened, from pale blunderers opening wrong doors, to realistic, complex, sympathetic men and women whose minds are cracking, as the world cracks under and all around them.

When I started reading Campbell’s work in 1980 (led to his Rosemary’s Baby novel The Parasite after the transforming experience of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story), what struck me wasn’t that he wrote good, smart scary stories, but that he was such a good good writer: eloquent, daring, experimental, inventive.

Campbell was—and is--a true literary writer, but one who openly, defiantly dwells in a genre of ill repute. From my view, horror fiction may be a where an artist can do as he pleases, take risks while both entertaining and challenging readers willing to go along. No worries about the highbrows from the book page of The London Times or the marketing crews of the Big Seven Publishers and their greedy shareholders demanding absurd profit margins.

Campbell’s usual haunting ground is his native Liverpool, a grim industrial place; nary a Beatles’ tune is heard. (Admirably, Campbell avoids Beatle references almost entirely, except for some rare satiric asides in one novel. Ohh, it would be so easy to play that tune, wouldn’t it?)  His 1980s fiction is shadowed by Thatcherism. His fiction since then is no sunnier and just as daring.

is 1980s fiction is consideredHHHH

Campbell is amazingly fecund, being the author of over twenty novels and countless short stories. As with most horror fiction, his best work is in short stories, which can still be found in the U.S. in collections such as Alone with the Horrors (which I recommend first of all). You will shudder, of course. And you’ll be amazed at his blazing talent.

THE LONG LOST

Campbell’s novels tend to fall short with me, though some are more than worthwhile: The Face That Must Die; The Doll Who Ate His Mother (two that deserve best-title awards); Ancient Images; and Secret Stories, an offbeat take on the serial killer genre. (An early edition of Face, from now-defunct Scream Press contains a revealing and disturbing autobiographical essay.)

The Long Lost, a novel from 1991, features many of Campbell’s greatest strengths, and some of his weaknesses. It tells the story of an English couple, David and Joelle Owain, on holiday in David’s native Wales. While exploring a deserted island near David’s ancestral village, just offshore in the Irish Sea, they find a very old woman, Gwendolyn Owain, living alone. She miraculously produces an old photo of herself standing companionably alongside David’s family.

Persuaded that Gwendolyn is David’s long lost relative, he and Joelle take her back to their home in the modern city of Chester and set her up in a nearby nursing home. Days later, they invite her to their annual neighborhood barbecue, introduce her to their many friends. Gwendolyn brings along dessert, some intriguing, but nasty tasting cakes.

One of these cakes slips off the plate and lands on the grass. Not long after, the grass dies.

Worst, those who partook of the dessert find their lives falling apart, their sanity crumbling. No supernatural shadows here: just minds breaking down, everyday people going mad.

As with many of Campbell’s stories, its strongest suit is his skill at seeing through a character’s eyes. Campbell writes in a highly original oblique style where the characters see the world through warped and broken planes of glass. They respond diffiedently, and often mistakenly, to each other and to the events in their lives. The world seems beyond their grasp to where even everyday objects become portentous and inoffensive comments carry deeper meaning than intended. No one can see straight in Ramsey Campbell’s world. People in the grip of solipsism and a terrible, angry loneliness.

Nor can they talk to each other. I get the impression of people unable to even look each other in the eye. This leads to desperate sense of miscommunication, dislocation and alienation. The consequences are often fatal.

More frightening is Campbell’s talent for plunging into individual madness. Consciousness becomes smashed into even smaller shards that seemed to get sucked down a drain of terror.

This is especially true in episodes portraying a train operator’s revenge on his wife’s new boyfriend and a computer salesman’s furious reaction to being driven out of business. There is little in the way of gore and no supernatural presence at all, but violent descent into madness are disturbing to a degree more explicitly violent writers can never hope to match.

That said, The Long Lost has its issues. Campbell’s allusive style sometimes seems a little too clever for its own good. When he carries it over to his dialogue, the effect seems clumsy and ineffectual. In a few scenes, the characters spend so much time mumbling around their conflicts, their fear and rage muffled by English politesse and indirection, I wanted to yell: “Look, out with it!”

Nor is the ending entirely satisfying as we learn the secret of Gwendolyn’s identity, which seems rooted in old pre-Christian Celtic notions of sin and retribution through time. Campbell is reaching for the ineffable here, the boundaries and the source that so many tales of horror try to approach, but never can really reach. Genius that he is, that realm remains no less beyond his great talents.

Still, you really should give Ramsey Campbell a go, especially his short stories, even though his work—like many ambitious, midlist genre writers--is hard to find in the U.S. these days. This problem I’ll save for later fulmination.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up, to be published later this year, along with his original screenplays The Devil’s Due and Dracula: A Tale of Power. His contemporary Dracula novel, Dragon's Ark, was winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Thoughts on "Perdido: A Fragment " by Peter Straub

Imagine you find the remains of a shattered window on the sidewalk outside your door. One shard in particular intrigues you, a large trapezoid. It draws your eye as would a strange precious jewel. Pick it up easy, because it’s sharp. Ah, there’s your reflection, but no details. It’s not a mirror backed with reflective material, just a piece of broken glass. You should be able to see right through, say to the sidewalk you stand on. Your hand starts to tremble. Because instead of sidewalk, you see another world bound by that fragment, neither a view of the world in front of nor a reflection of the world behind you.  The fragment is a portal, like the broken lens of a camera staring into part of another world. You shudder with fear and sorrow at the wrongness of it.

You might get that feeling, as I did, from Peter Straub’s Peridido: a Fragment, (Subterranean Press, 2015), a slender but dense and atmospheric excerpt from a novel that was originally written and then left to lie in 2001.

We meet Carver and his wife, Margie, as they’re climbing toward Perdido, a resort located high and deep in the rugged mountains of Norway. The vacation was suggested to them by a periodontal friend of Carver’s, Silsbee, a man whom Margie despises. Perdido, he promises, is a resort like no other, “a place for people who don’t mind the unexpected.” The idea sounds intriguing to Carver, but almost revolting to Margie.

But as they reach their destination and start their long climb up the mountain, their attitudes toward their strange vacation reverse as Margie almost flies up the mountainside, leaving her husband behind. Their vacation has just begun. And a traumatic one it will be.

From here, we discover that we’re being told this story at one remove, years later, by their son, who seeks to uncover the truth of what happened to his parents on their strange journey that drove them apart and made them into such different people when they finally came home, their marriage broken for good, both of them made strangers to him as well.

What remains is chilling, riveting and intriguing. Our glimpse of the Perdido resort shows a ghostly ruin, wreathed in eerie fog, an act of epic seduction into a malicious warped reality.

There are many questions raised and left unanswered: the details of a game called “Murder Among Friends,” for one. And just who is Silsbee and why does there seem to be two of him? An author’s natural indecision in the early stages of creation? Or something more intriguing. And disturbing.

In an afterword, Straub explains how the idea for Perdido emerged from a dream. And.that he abandoned the project once he realized it might turn into “a kind of metafictional whimsy” he felt disinclined to pursue. Perhaps some post-modern game, amusing, even hilarious, the first read through, but as thin as tissue on reflection, the kind of book that reads like plastic wrap when read again, no new secrets to find.

Still, like anything from this master of modern terror, the author of the indomitable Ghost Story, it you makes you wonder what lies outside everyday vision. It makes you want to wander beyond what you know. To reach through that fragment of broken window.

Copyright 2015 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield’s latest (yet to be published) novel is Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.