FFB: Pray for the Dawn - Eric Harding

THE STORY:  The relatives of explorer and trader in African artifacts Nathan Claymole are summoned by invitation to visit him at his remote home isolated on a island surrounded by a torrential stream called the Boa. Some will be meeting him for the first time in their lives. In the letters of invitation Nathan has promised that each person will "learn something to your advantage." Little do they know what the night has in store for them.  A weird ritual is about to take place on this night of the full moon, the dead will rise, and the family will fear for their lives as they Pray for the Dawn (1946).

THE CHARACTERS: The novel is narrated by ballet dancer, and sometime actor Barry Vane, nephew to Nathan Claymole. Barry is down on his luck due to a disabling injury that has ended his career as a dancer and performer.  Lack of work has resulted in dire financial straits for Barry.  He is hoping that this "something to his advantage" promised in the invitation will be a boost to his impoverished bank account. There are seven other relatives who are also eager to find out why they were invited and what news Nathan has for them.

Caroline Claymole - Nathan's sister. A religious zealot and termagant extraordinaire who spends much of her time harassing and belittling her daughter...

Betsy - mousy bespectacled teenager browbeaten into submission by her tyrant of a mother. She seems to have no personality at all, or has had it eradicated by her overprotective mother's domination.  But Betsy has a shocking secret that will change how she is viewed by everyone later in the novel.

Uncle Oscar - Caroline's wimpy cousin who spends much of the book silent and hiding in the shadows.  But he also has a secret and a hidden aspect to his seemingly Casper Milquetoast persona

Jonah Clay - the oldest of the guests, Nathan's uncle and Barry's great uncle. Ancient and barely able to walk he is described by Barry as "Death outliving the grave." Nearly forgotten by the group he snoozes and mumbles in a corner until it's time to escort him upstairs to his room

Sylvia Claymole - the ingenue of the piece is lovely to look at, generous and kind to Betsy. Drawn to Barry's gentleman’s nature she will soon fall to pieces and become the most paranoid and fearful of the group.

Bret Janson - the American cousin and requisite dashing yet arrogant man that always shows up in these stories of gathered relatives. He spends a good portion of the book drinking heavily to fend off his fears  

Tobias Judd - husband to one of Nathan's nieces who has apparently died unknown to the host. Judd has come in her place eager to learn what was promised to his wife.  He is the most suspicious of the group and Nathan is wary of ulterior motives.  Judd will turn out to be the most human, the one with the most common sense and, as the most level headed and courageous, ultimately he is the detective hero.

Nathan is assisted in his large lonely house by an African servant named Kish.  This is perhaps the one aspect of the book that will prevent it from ever being reprinted. Kish's presence allows Harding to go to unnecessary lengths in talking about "jungle primitives" and the ominous nature of exotic foreigners. The book is littered with paragraphs contrasting civilized British life with the dark impulses of the jungle, the savage nature of Africans. What little interior decoration can be found in Nathan's home consists of African and South African artifacts. Strange masks and weapons decorate the walls and --most bizarrely -- shrunken heads also pop up in the decor scheme. Kish is not just a servant but also the personification of the Voice of Doom constantly uttering ominous statements in his pidgin English like "Dead sometimes come to life" and "Have care Boss. Strange ground."

And of course there is N'olah, the dwarf witch doctor whose corpse has been kept in an alcove room underneath a staircase.  Nathan and Kish have kept a vigil all night, the 10th anniversary of the death of the South American shaman of the lost tribe of the Javiros who live in the Amazon jungles. [Yes, there was a corpse kept in the house for an entire decade.]  Nathan expects that the witch doctor will be resurrected after some odd ritual magic and African mumbo jumbo. His guests are quite rightly disturbed and frightened.

When the body vanishes due to a mix-up in the changing of the guard, so to speak, between Nathan and Kish the guests’ reactions range from unsettled to outright terror.  Many of them actually believe that the corpse has come to life. After hearing the strange story Nathan has told about why he and Kish brought the body back from South America the relatives are convinced the zombie is out for revenge.  A search is arranged with Toby leading one group and Nathan leading another. They two groups head off to find out if the corpse has come to life or if it was ever a corpse to begin with.  Eerie events, fights, scuffles, and attacks occur for the next several hours. Nathan orders that the bridge crossing the violently coursing stream be destroyed which will prevent N'olah from leaving but also prevents all the guests from escaping the island.  When Jonah is found strangled in his bedroom the novel begins to seem more and more like And Then There Were None redux with a zombie on the loose as the killer. At this point horror and hysteria are unleashed at full throttle.

ATMOSPHERE:  Speaking of hysteria unleashed...  Most striking to me is the manner in which Harding sustains the dread, fear and paranoia. It infects the entire group like a horrible virus. Oscar, the wimp, is seen growling and snarling at Barry. Sylvia loses control and keeps ranting about their collective demise: "Eight nooses!  Eight guests!  We're all going to be murdered!"  But it is Caroline's transformation from spinsterish finger-wagging Bible thumper to full-blown religious maniac that serves as the climax of the book.  

In one of the longest and creepiest sections of the novel Barry, Sylvia and Toby pursue Caroline into the labyrinthine cellars of Nathan's ancient home.  There Caroline finds Kish in front of a firelit altar performing an outlandish ritual complete with African chanting, and ecstatic dancing.  She and Kish have a battle and she ends up destroying a wooden idol he was directing his chanting toward.  Caroline has made both a literal and figurative descent into madness all because her daughter has gone missing.  She fears the worst and no one can find Betsy.  In the midst of her insane fight and destruction of the idol she reveals the deep dark secret that is at the core of Betsy's lack of personality.  It's a shocker of a confession and gave me a thought. I suddenly realized that there was a parallel to this book and Stephen King!

Caroline --who is called Carrie by her relatives -- is a religious zealot overly protective of her mousy personality-less daughter who everyone else sees as a freak. Ring any bells? This coincidence just blew my mind. Caroline, her relationship with Betsy, the heavy-handed quoting of Biblical passages and general over-the-top religious kookiness uncannily foreshadow Margaret White and her relationship with her own freak daughter in King's debut novel Carrie written three decades later. Both Carrie White and Betsy Claymole have a secret connected to violence. While Betsy is not a telekinetic monster when enraged she is just as murderously dangerous.  Perhaps it's a wildly imaginative stretch to think that King might have come across Pray for the Dawn in his youth, but he has been known to borrow from everywhere, horror comic books to old TV movies, for his plots.  Of course it might all be coincidence but it's a mighty crazy coincidence, if you ask me.

INNOVATIONS:  Harding includes an "Author's Note" (see the photo at right) at the start of the book stating that Pray for the Dawn is not a detective novel. He goes into detail to justify why the book is structured the way it is and why it shouldn't be considered a "fair play" detective novel, but rather an adventurous thriller. But that disclaimer, of sorts, is a huge red herring. The book is indeed a detective novel, albeit a very unconventional one. Scattered throughout the story are multidinous red herrings all of which I fell for alongside several cleverly planted clues that can lead you to figuring out exactly what is going on, who the murderer is, and why Jonah and one other person were strangled.

It is not unfair of me to reveal that all of the supernatural events will turn out to be rationalized. For all the hysteria and horror encountered within the pages of this genuinely terrifying and thrilling book there is no black magic at work, no ghosts, no zombies.  But it is rather obvious at the midpoint of the book as Toby Judd reminds Barry and Sylvia that the spooky events are all being engineered by some madman. But exactly who is it?  What happened to the dwarf witch doctor's corpse? Why are the nooses being used to strangle the victims? And what is the purpose of the secret dossier on all the guests which reveals the details of their lives including all their secrets?

THE AUTHOR:  Eric Harding is perhaps a pseudonym for a writer that no one knows very much about. He is the author of only two crime novels Pray for the Dawn (1946) and Behold! the Executioner! (1939), both titles so scarce that they are nearly impossible to find anywhere. I found only one person of note who used Eric Harding as a pseudonym but he turned out to be Eric Harding Thiman (1900 - 1975) organist, composer of songs and church music and Professor of Harmony at Royal Academy of Music.  Thiman's biographical information is rich with his accomplishments as a musician, composer and academic and I learned that he wrote a few songs early in his career using the name Eric Harding.  Is he also responsible for these two bizarre crime novels in that guise?  Anyone who knows anything about either man, please feel free to enlighten us all in the comments.

HALLOWEEN SPECIAL, part 1: Dark Ways to Death - Peter Saxon

It may say #2 on the cover,
but this is definitely the first book.

There was a time when trash fiction was all I would read to entertain myself. I’m sure it was the logical progression for someone always interested in macabre and lurid stories. I drank up the goriest of the Grimm fairy tales as kid in grade school, moved on to horror movies then horror comics, and finally was lured by trash paperbacks sold in the spin racks still seen in the Woolworth’s of my 1970s teenage years. It’s rare I find myself dipping into the kind of thing that most people try to hide behind a newspaper when riding the bus or train, but here I go again. Dark Ways to Death (1968) was chosen for one of my many Halloween reads this year not because it’s trashy. That was just a coincidence. I knew it to be the first of the series featuring occult detectives The Guardians. Having introduced myself to the series a while ago (The Curse of Rathlaw) and enjoying its unusual use of arcane Celtic folklore, occult legends and genuine supernatural content I tracked down all the other books and planned on reading them in order. This first book is nothing like the other which I think is the penultimate book in the series.

I thought I was going to get a 1960s version of the Jules de Grandin novel The Devil’s Bride. Instead I get grotesque horror that outdoes anything Poe dreamt up, cruel sadism, graphic accounts of torture and rape, along with a heavy dose of Hammer horror movie influenced black magic and voodoo shenanigans. Oh! and let’s not forget the overly generous supply of blaxploitation and xenophobia put on display like that garish show of Christmas lights your neighbor down the street thinks is an expression of the holiday spirit. This is the nadir of Halloween reading, gang. Ready to wallow in it for a couple of paragraphs? Let’s go!

Dark Ways of Death begins with a bang and continues like a pistol packin' mama (or papa) trying to kick a meth habit. It’s a relentless story heavy on action and ghoulish incidents told episodically like a verbal comic strip. We meet the whole Guardians gang led by the mysterious Gideon Cross and his would be paramour Anne Ashby, both of whom seem to be the reincarnations of an ancient warlock and his witch lover. There is anthropology professor Stephen Kane serving as the ostensible leader though it is Gideon Cross who controls all the cases and oversees the investigations into the forces of darkness bent on wreaking havoc with the modern world...or at least the greater portion of London. Rounding out the five person team of ghostbusters and exorcists are Father John Dyball and Lionel Marks. What’s a battle against the powers of darkness without at least one person of the cloth armed with the Bible, loads of holy water, a consecrated host or two, and the law of God behind him? Lionel, on the other hand, is a private investigator and the only down to earth guy of the bunch. He's in it to make a honest buck…or rather British pound. For that extra added all-inclusive 60s vibe Lionel also serves as the token ethnic member of the Guardians. He's Jewish and we're constantly reminded of that for one reason or another as if "Peter Saxon" was reminding us that he's hip and not at all racist. The bad guys may be a West Indian voodoo cult of maniac killers but one of the good guys is a Jew. Take that, you decriers !

The crux of the plot is the rescue of a cat not a person and the whole thing just seems a self-parody of pulpy, occult-laden adventures for much of the book until two humans are put in peril. That's not to say the rescue of the hordes of caged cats isn't an admirably heroic effort (couldn't help but find an analogy to a similar scene in a Jonathan Stagge detective novel), but it's not the kind of thing that makes for gripping adult reading no matter how many stomach wrenching scenes of gore and horror are described. Inexplicably added for comic effect are scenes featuring of a cadre of thrill-seeking titled aristocrats who gatecrash, so to speak, the black magic rituals of the West Indian voodoo cult who perform their secret rites and sacrifices in the abandoned tunnels of the London underground. Inadvertently, one of the snobs manages to help rescue two of the Guardians with their inane antics by accidentally causing a blackout with perfect eleventh hour timing. My favorite lines came from the superficial Duchess of Derwentwater who says things like, "An orgy is an orgy is an orgy. Don't go all cynical and rational. How could anyone enjoy it if they thought it was just a game?" and who wants to report the voodoo revelers to the RSCPA for animal cruelty noticing only what's being done to the cat and somehow managing to overlook completely the obvious torture of the two victims before her eyes intended for human sacrifice. Ludicrous!

I know I’m making it sound like I loathed reading this book, but I didn’t. You can’t take this kind of book seriously. Ever. It’s a potboiler and it's meant to entertain and -- hopefully -- shock. Dark Ways to Death does what it's supposed to do even if it takes more than the halfway mark in its brief 143 pages to get to the genuinely thrilling moments with real human lives at stake, all of it imaginatively rendered and not without ample doses of occult lore and voodoo history dropped in to edify the ignorant masses.

Obviously, this is not literature at all. If you're a fan of this kind of stuff you get what you pay for and then some. But I say it's not worth your time or money in reading this debut unless you are really curious about the origins of the occult detective group or prefer your horror to be of the torture porn variety with an emphasis on perversity and cruelty rather than supernatural creatures and occult phenomenon.

The Guardian series definitely improves in the later volumes with the best told story coming in the last book, The Vampires of Finistere. That one will be reviewed very soon. Another "Halloween Special" review on a much more rewarding and spooky book will be posted on Halloween Day. A definite rave versus this middling book. Stay tuned.

FFB: This Is the House - Shelley Smith

THE STORY: This Is the House (1945) is a Caribbean homage to the British claustrophobic village murder mystery. The Jacques family lives in a converted Portuguese fortress on Apostle Island not far from Haiti and they are dropping like flies under mysterious or violent circumstances. Voodoo, smuggling and espionage also figure.

THE CHARACTERS: Julia Jacques is the sad matriarch of the family who in the opening chapter is in the end stages of a terminal illness that has left her paralyzed and bedridden. Unable to speak or barely move a muscle she withers away under the care of a solicitous nurse, her supercilious sister Hattie, and her aloof husband.  She dies mysteriously by suffocation that may have been the result of a cat falling asleep on her face. Quentin Seal, a detective novelist and casual acquaintance of the family, is troubled by the coroner’s dismissal of death by misadventure and ponders whether Julia was somehow cleverly murdered. Then another member of the family dies and this time there is no question that murder was done. Quentin is approached by M. Jacques and goaded into using his skills in creating and solving fictional murders to help the family avenge the deaths. Prudence Whitaker, secretary to Hattie Brown, acts as Seal’s sometime sleuthing cohort. A vagrant beach bum named Boris Borodin makes a cameo appearance and will figure into an intriguing subplot that will eventually tie all the criminal activity into a carefully orchestrated scheme years in the making.

Oh, let me not forget the gibbon named Orlando! For a while I thought that there was going to be a nod to Poe with the introduction of Hattie’s exotic pet, but he’s really only present to raise the bar on the surreal elements several notches higher.

A little past the halfway mark Napoleon Orage enters the story as a representative of the Wigtown police force and surprises most of the characters when he turns out to be a native. A black police officer in the Caribbean? Unimaginable! More of Smith’s very welcome satire.

Smith shows off her obvious love of the genre and has created in this early work (her third crime novel) a hodgepodge of detective novel and adventure thriller. She manages to work into her engaging plot several familiar motifs of the traditional detective novel including a quasi locked room puzzle, alibi breaking, a whiff of supernatural in one character’s use of macabre voodoo spells, and an oddball romantic subplot. All the while the story is filled with intriguing incidents, eccentric characters, puzzling murders and one very well hidden murder method. Clues are so artfully placed that even the most assiduous reader will miss most of them resulting in some eyebrow raising surprises in the denouement. True to an old-fashioned whodunit the big reveal takes place in a sitting room with all the surviving suspects listening to Quentin Seal deliver the elegantly presented solution. In a nod to Christianna Brand’s trademark of multiple solutions Seal shows how every single member of the family was capable of committing one or more murders before he and Prudence unmask the real culprit and reveal the unexpected conspiracy.

Mirani Fort in Muscat, Oman  [Photo ©João Sarmento]
Built by the Portuguese in 17th century, most likely very similar to the Jacques home

ATMOSPHERE: The tropical setting on Apostle Island is suitably languorous in the sun drenched, breezy daytime interludes and with nicely done sinister touches in the Gothic-like Jacques fortress cum manse. The introduction of the voodoo aspects are perfectly macabre highlighted by some grisly spell casting paraphernalia. You may learn a thing or two about voodoo. It’s not all done with just wax figures and pins.

INNOVATIONS: One lurid murder combines a dollop of illicit sex, a corpse found in a compromising state of undress, and a nightmarishly timed plunge of a paper knife. The investigation reveals that one suspect was witness to the murder but completely oblivious that a murder took place. For that daring touch of sex and a thoroughly horrifying murder This Is the House gets my vote as one of the earliest transgressive detective novels. Smith takes a huge risk in dreaming up a crime of passion that other more polite mystery writers of this era would never dare imagine. It would be forty plus years before a similar murder sequence would ever be considered in fiction again only to lose its power to shock when the concept was cheapened in grotesque overuse in 1980s slasher movies.

One passage foreshadows what will become one of Smith's own trademarks in her crime fiction. Quentin Seal considers then dismisses several suspects in the role of the killer and when he finds he must discount Julia's creepy older sister Hattie he remarks to Napoleon: "You've cleared my mind. [...] She seemed so delightfully suitable for the part, too. It's so right to have a nasty old woman whom everyone dislikes for your murderess rather than your innocent and bashful heroine." Hattie is actually very reminiscent of Luna Rampage and Mrs. Jolly who will appear as Smith's badass biddies in future books.

The title comes from the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built.” In the opening pages of the book the cast of characters is listed with each of them matched up to the characters in the rhyme. Some are obvious like M. Jacques for Jack and Father Xavier as the priest, while others are satiric like Hattie cast as the cow and the gossipy bitch Ellen Foley as the cat. The full nursery rhyme is printed as a prologue with Jack being replaced by the family name Jacques. Seems to me this is a nod to Agatha Christie’s penchant for using nursery rhymes as inspiration for plot gimmickry and the book’s title. In fact the whole novel might well be seen as Smith’s homage to Christie for it satirizes the English village mystery and its closed set of suspects by transporting it to a seemingly tropical Eden just as claustrophobic and ridden with secrets and hidden passions.

EASY TO FIND? I thought it might be one of Smith's hard to find books since no one has ever written about it on the web until I did. Even Good Reads, a website I tend to avoid, doesn’t include it in her bibliography. (No surprise there, actually.) But a genuine surprise was finding nearly 35 copies waiting to be purchased and read out there in the digital used book market. There may be even more waiting to be discovered in bookshops that have no internet presence. Very good news indeed! It was published only in the UK and Canada and you have a choice between hardcover (Collins Crime Club, two editions) or paperback (Toronto’s White Circle, the Canadian paperback arm of Collins). Prices range from $2 for a paperback reading copy to $25 for a VG+/VG+ copy with a DJ. I say go for a hardcover with DJ even if most of them are the 1948 reprint. I’ve never seen so many affordable copies of a 1940s era mystery novel with DJs in such great condition! Another surprise: In 1964 This Is The House was translated into German and published under the title Das Haus auf der Apostelinsel (literally, The House on Apostle Island).

WANT MORE? I’ve written about Shelley Smith a lot. She’s one of my favorite writers who I think worked best --and perfected-- the malice domestic and “badass biddy” subgenres. Click here to bring up all the Shelley Smith tagged posts over the past five years.

FFB: A Leaven of Malice - Clare Curzon

Zoe Freeman has left her narcissistic lover Clive Gibley and is looking for a place to stay. She ends up being offered a room in the home of Hester Keeble, a nurse whose specialty is caring for patients with end stage disease and terminal illnesses. Later we meet Dan Hammond, a part time assistant undertaker in his uncle’s funeral parlor but who also runs a second hand and antique furniture business of his own. The three of them become involved in a police investigation of the strange death of Estelle Bentall, Zoe’s best friend in her high school days. Strange because Zoe had visions of Estelle’s death the very night it happened. She heard her voice calling out to her and saw a woman’s bare feet suspended in mid-air in her new lodgings. But she dared not tell anyone for fear they would think the worst of her. When she learns that Estelle was found hanged in her kitchen and barefoot Zoe is sure the vision she had was of Estelle. Estelle’s husband is convinced her death is suicide but the police suspect him of murder due to some oddities like evidence of Estelle’s hands being bound with electrical tape.

The case becomes even stranger when Zoe begins to remember a trail of fatal accidents that followed in Estelle’s wake back in their high school days. Anyone who crossed her seemed to suffer a terrible death or in one case succumb to a nervous breakdown. Estelle used to talk of her being raised in the Caribbean by her mambo Adela who often referred to Estelle as having extraordinary powers since she was the child born after her twin brothers. In Haitian folklore this child is referred to as the dossu (or dossa when a girl) and is supposedly blessed with a charmed life and paranormal abilities that are revered by those who believe in such things. In death Estelle still seems to have an eerie influence over both Zoe and her husband Tim. Is it possible that she has become even more powerful now that she is dead?

Clare Curzon’s novel A Leaven of Malice (1979) is one of the more unusual crime novels to incorporate genuine supernatural and psychic events. It starts off with no real mystery other than Hester's work and past life which are teasingly written about in an ambiguous manner. Then the death of Estelle shifts the story into a crime novel with the murder investigation and the uncovering of her sinister past life. Finally, the bizarre events involving a mural Zoe paints on the wall of her room, the visions she has and some psychic connections Hester reveals shift the book once again into the realm of a paranormal thriller. All the while Curzon’s writing is lush and imbued with a gamut of richly felt emotions. It’s miles above the usual lurid potboilers that made up the bulk of the supernatural thrillers that were being churned out in the 1970s.

Nearly all of the characters have some sort of other world encounter in the book with Zoe acting as the catalyst. Hester Keeble has her own secrets in her past which I will not discuss since they are masterfully revealed over the course of this intriguingly told and well plotted story. Ultimately her knowledge will help uncover the truth behind Estelle’s strange powers and she acts as a sort of modern day occult detective educating Zoe in all things paranormal and the dark side of Caribbean voodoo. The finale is quite a shocker and blends an intellectual approach to evil beyond the grave with some action set pieces that rival the best kind of occult detective battling supernatural beings found in the stories of Margery Lawrence’s Miles Pennoyer or Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence.

Clare Curzon is the best known pseudonym of writer Eileen-Marie Duell Buchanan. She began writing traditional detective stories in the 1960s using the name "Rhona Petrie". Her first book Death in Deakins Wood (1963) was published in both the US and UK to mild acclaim. As Petrie she continued writing a series of books featuring her detective Marcus Maclurg and two mystery novels with Dr. Nassim Pride. She later abandoned that pseudonym and used Marie Buchanan. Under this pen name she wrote a variety of thrillers, some incorporating elements of the detective novel, but all of them dealing with her fascination with occult and psychic phenomena. Greenshards (1972), better known in the US as Anima, is the story of woman possessed by a malevolent spirit and was favorably compared to The Exorcist when it first was published. The Dark Backward (1975) tells of a haunted archeological site near some standing stones and the slow demonic possession of the archeologist obsessed with his findings. A Leaven of Malice is the first book she wrote as "Clare Curzon" and her interest supernatural is still very apparent. Eventually Buchanan focused on straightforward police procedurals and created yet another policeman series character in Supt. Mike Yeadings. It is this series of books for which she is best known, but all too forgotten by most contemporary readers. She died in 2010 at the age 88 having written close to fifty books under four different pen names.

* * *
Reading Challenge update: Silver Age card, space I4 - "Book by an author you've never read before"

COOL FLICKS: I Put a Spell on You - Halloween Movie Fest

The one, the only -- Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe)

Even though I am already seeing Christmas ads on TV (!) and my local café is prominently displaying a selection of “holiday” cards beside the Kind bars, breath mints, and other impulse buys near the cash register it is still the "Season of the Witch" for me. Thankfully, Jack-o-lanterns far outnumber Christmas wreaths in my ‘hood.

With only three days left before the big costume parade on Halsted Avenue and trick or treating everywhere else I have time to sneak in my suggestions for a Halloween mini- movie festival for your DVD player. Most of these films are easily available on DVD and a few can be found online. Looking for unusual frights and shivers? Sample a few or all of these suitably chilling Halloween movies all having to do with spell casting whether literal or metaphorical. We begin with the most recent and travel back in time to the oldest.

Outcast (2010) – an original take on witchcraft and spell casting from a Scottish TV writer/director Colm McCarthy is his feature film debut. A young man is being stalked by a powerful warlock and his mother (Kate Dickie) resorts to witchcraft and runic spells to protect him. Meanwhile a mysterious beast terrorizes the countryside committing gruesome murders. The stories intersect in a chilling climax. A brutal horror film that is also at its heart the story of mother who will stop at nothing to protect her child.

Travel to the Louisiana bayou for a little lesson in hoodoo of the American south. Not at all the same as voodoo as you will learn in The Skeleton Key (2005). Kate Hudson -- normally not at all one of my favorites -- plays a hospice worker who is charged with taking care of the dying patriarch (John Hurt at left) of an old plantation family. Hurt at first seems to be dying of a terminal illness, but is he actually being scared to death? What is he so frightened of? Is his loss of speech a medical condition or the result of spellcasting?

Secrets in the attic, midnight strolls in a spooky Southern Gothic mansion, and a whole lot of witchery and superstition are the ingredients in this combination fright flick and mystery story. Gena Rowlands and Peter Sarsgaard round out the fine cast. Hudson is actually rather good in this one and the story is so well told (original script by Ehren Kruger who also wrote the very fine Arlington Road as well as Impostor and The Ring) and shot you soon find yourself completely engrossed in the mysterious and very spooky goings on.

Rufus Sewell succumbs to the siren song of a deadly mermaid

She Creature (2001) was part of a somewhat successful attempt to revisit old monster movies from the 1950s in a cable TV series called "Creature Features." The original was also called She Creature but that is all they have in common. This remake (the best of the series, IMO) uses the legends of mermaids and the Sirens of Greek mythology, sets the film in Victorian England and is a vast improvement. I enjoyed it a lot.

Sewell & Gugino notice a change in the catch of the day

Sebastian Gutierrez wrote and directed this homage to old Hammer horror flicks and casts Rufus Sewell and Carla Gugino as a couple of con artists trying to pass off Gugino as a mermaid in a lame sideshow act. When they find a real mermaid they capture her, cage her and exploit her for a money making exhibit that will outdo their previous pathetic attempts. They get a lot more than they bargained for with this very angry mermaid. The ending is completely over-the-top but just plain perfect for a monster movie. Sewell and Gugino are splendid, but the real stars of this retro monster movie are the make-up designer and the special effects team.

While not a legitimate horror movie per se Apartment Zero (1988) is still one of the creepiest and under-appreciated films out there. Definitely scary enough to add to any evening of Halloween films. It may be the only arty slasher film in existence. Colin Firth in one of his earliest screen performances shows just why he deserves that recent Oscar. He plays Adrian LeDuc, a loner art film theater owner, who out of financial need rents a room in his apartment to mysterious stranger Jack Carney played by 80s hunk Hart Bochner. The two develop a very strange friendship and soon LeDuc is shielding his roommate when Jack is suspected of being a serial killer. Written and directed by Argentinian filmmaker Martin Donovan whose real name is Carlos Enrique Valera y Peralta-Ramos.

Donohoe doing her snake act

Can there be a more hysterically funny, bizarrely surreal, and ridiculously erotic horror movie than The Lair of the White Worm (1988)? If there is, I haven’t found it yet. Ken Russell has taken Bram Stoker’s weakest novel of the supernatural and transformed it into a campy, slithery, fright fest that could also be a very perverted herpetophile’s wet dream. A mix of surreal nightmare sequences, over the top sex scenes, a generous helping of offensive blasphemy, and an absurd use of snake and phallic imagery The Lair of the White Worm is one head trip of a horror movie. Add to that hodgepodge one of the most delightfully weird performances in the person of the sexy and witty Amanda Donohoe as Lady Sylvia Marsh and you can't go wrong. Hugh Grant is the hapless hero caught up in Lady Sylvia’s serpentine spell. The first time I saw this movie I couldn’t believe half of what I was seeing. To this day I have yet to see a horror film this daring when it comes to mixing sex and laughs and scares.

Looks like 1988 was a banner year for spooky movies. The Serpent and the Rainbow is also from that penultimate 80s year. Bill Pullman plays a doctor who travels to Haiti because he has heard of a drug used in creating a state of suspended animation that might be the origin of zombie mythology and inadvertently stumbles into the dangerous world of voodoo. Zakes Mokae is the powerful voodoo priest who utters the line “I want to hear you scream” in one of horror cinema’s truly bloodcurdling and nerve-wracking torture sequences. Based on a true story of a botanist who did research into the toxic and hallucinogenic plants used in Haitian voodoo rituals.

What's Halloween without a monster or two? I’ve always loved Roddy McDowall and when he plays slimy villains he’s at his best. He does a sort of Norman Bates redux role in It! (1967), a remake of the old silent German expressionist film The Golem (1920). The movie also has Jill Haworth and it is largely due to these two actors that the movie isn’t an utter disaster. Unintentionally funny and campy beyond belief It! does what all monster movies do well -- takes a preposterous story and make it thoroughly entertaining.

Watching ol’ Roddy become master of the murderous statue and using it to eliminate everyone who angers him is too much fun. His performance makes it easier to forgive the story's frequent lapses in common sense. But that’s what makes it one of my favorite monster flicks. What may not be so easy to forgive or overlook is the ridiculous apocalyptic ending involving nuclear warheads that should’ve obliterated half of England.

Conjure Wife is one of the more intriguing treatments of witchcraft in a modern setting. Charles Beaumont, best known for his work on TV’s Twilight Zone adapted Fritz Leiber’s novel for the screen and it remains faithful to the themes of the book. Retitled Burn, Witch, Burn (1962) (or The Night of the Eagle, depending on whether you live in the US or UK) the story works both as satire and horror story. Burn, Witch, Burn is nonetheless a chilling tale of superstition, spells and black magic. Perhaps the least gory of the films appearing on my Halloween film fest list this year it still holds a high place on the honor role of effective movies involving witchcraft. Also it earns special points for simultaneously being an intelligent movie that skewers the world of academia for its satiric touches on the bureaucracy of universities and the way in which wives control their husband’s destinies.

Janet Blair resorts to witchery to save her husband's life and career

The Obeah Murders - Hulbert Footner

It takes a while for The Obeah Murders (1937) to live up to its alluring title hinting at black magic practices in the Caribbean. The novel starts off with Phil Nevitt, employee with an American liquor company, being sent to Annunziata, a mythical island of Footner's creation in the West Indies, to learn all he can about the rum distillery of Randall Trantor. I'm thinking this is going to be some kind of industrial espionage story. But the first encounter with one of the Annunziata inhabitants takes the story into a completely different realm.

Nevitt meets Eve Brinsley, a 17 year-old spitfire, who while astride her horse during a pig sticking hunt is seen whipping her black servants for their failure to corral the pig she managed to wound. Nevitt intervenes, rescuing the servant from the whip, receives a harsh reprimand from the teenager and is nearly whipped himself. This is followed in quick succession by a barroom brawl that lands Nevitt in jail, a jail break, and an attempt to smuggle Nevitt off the island before he causes any more trouble. While waiting for his jail break co-conspirators Nevitt learns that Eve has been abducted by the man who he assaulted in the bar. So Phil is off to save Eve from the bad guys. From corporate spying in the booze biz to western movie serial adventures. Where was the West Indian sorcery known as Obeah, I wondered?

The book is well past the middle mark before the Footner remembers that he intended to write a murder mystery. Eve having been rescued from the West Indian version of the guys with black hats is soon being married off to Randall Trantor, the distillery owner and the island's richest man. At the wedding banquet the newly married Trantor gets stupefyingly drunk, orders a special bottle of his private reserve of Spey Royal whiskey, tosses off his umpteenth drink, and immediately drops dead. There are cries of "Obeah! Obeah!" from the superstitious wedding guests for Trantor had earlier been seen stepping over a bad luck charm which signals imminent death. Eve is suspected of committing the crime as she is the one closest to her husband and the bottle was delivered straight from the cellar to their wedding table. The cellar was kept locked at all times and was only accessible with Trantor's key. The bottle could only have been poisoned by someone at the table. Or was it somehow bewitched via black magic?

Portrait of Hulbert Footner by painter Mabel Welch

As the murder investigation proceeds Footner uses the story to raise some progressive ideas (for the late 1930s) about race and power. Talk of skin color and how that decides how one is treated on Annunziata often comes up throughout the story. Though the island is fictional its history is heavily borrowed from the Danish West Indies. Footner goes out of his way to talk about the white invaders from Denmark who took over in the early 17th century and subtly introduces into the narrative topics like miscegenation and oppression of the native people. Skin color is always being brought up whether it be the yellow of the Creole, the brown of the children of mixed marriages, or the black of the natives often referred to by the N pejorative.

I know that I've read several detective novels with plots featuring white privilege in island populations be they in the South Pacific or Caribbean, but this is the only detective novel to date from the era spanning the 1920s through the 1940s I have encountered in which native culture and race relations play an important part in the solution of the crime. In fact race is the key to understanding the motive of the murderer who is striving to achieve a place of power on the island. He does so by exploiting the cultural superstitions of the population and at the same time playing up to the prejudices of the white policemen in charge of the murder investigation. He nearly eludes capture but for some luck and intuition on Phil's part.

As for the Obeah there is a sprinkling of lore and legend throughout the book. Interestingly, Footner casts in the role of the powerful sorcerer an elderly woman character and she becomes suspect number two in the murder. There is a bizarre and richly detailed scene towards the end of the book showing off how intimidating the magic of Obeah can be even to a skeptical outsider like Phil Nevitt.

Cobweb House - Elizabeth Hughes Holloway

A decrepit house on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, an oppressive household overseen by the hawk-like Captain Jasper Yancy, a cook who practices voodoo, and a mysterious death should make up the ingredients for an exciting bloodcurdler of a mystery. I was all set for something along the lines of Mary Roberts Rinehart in a Southern Gothic setting.  But Elizabeth Hughes Holloway's first and only attempt at a detective novel is a largely unimpressive mixed bag.  Part of the problem can rest on the shoulders of her insipid heroine Anna Sue.

A batch of chatty letters written by Anna Sue to her boyfriend Jim serve as our introduction to the cast of characters made up of her grandfather Captain Yancy; two aunts, Aurelia and Maude; Veechie, the cook; Mr. Webley, the family lawyer; and a mysterious man on the beach. We never really understand why her grandfather invited her to visit or why she has decided to stay for several days since she seems to dislike the house intensely and is more than worried about the relationship between her two submissive aunts and the domineering Captain. Anna Sue is kept up at night by the typical noises and strange going s on in the creepy mansion and does the requisite spying on family members, targetting Veechie as her enemy and the wicked villainess of the piece.  So dark is the portrait of Veechie seen only through Anne Sue's prejudiced eyes that I was convinced she would be redeemed in the end as a genuinely decent and good woman. Anna Sue, on the other hand, grows increasingly childish as the story progresses.

Amid all the fear and dread and oppression Captain Yancy dies in his bedroom. A sudden death, all agree, yet most likely natural due to his seventy years and failing health. But suspicious circumstances once again witnessed by Anna Sue lead her overly developed imagination to the conclusion that murder was done. She writes to Jim to come to the house and get to the bottom of the mysterious events. Jim arrives and learns of Aunt Aurelia's sleepwalking incident, the weird voodoo rite Veechie performed in the kitchen, and the disappearance of $200 in cash and over $15,000 in securities from the captain's study.  Criminal behavior and murder seem more and more likely.

As an amateur sleuth Jim does yeoman work though it's offset by long interruptions and distractions that take the form of several lover's tiffs and arguments with his soon-to-be wife. Anna Sue has a tantrum every twenty pages or so forcing Jim to pause in his detective work to placate and soothe her. She provides most of the clues for Jim but due to her intense dislike of the servant Veechie, who admittedly is painted as a spooky menacing presence, she never sees things clearly. Jim tells her she'd never make a good detective and Anna Sue responds, "I'd never want to be one." Holloway stops short of having her stick out her tongue and saying "So there" but the reader can read between the lines.

Cobweb House (1931) includes an introductory note from the author giving credit to Magic Island by William Seabrook as her source for all voodoo related information. With that bibliographical tidbit under her belt I expected a lot more voodoo in the story. But there is really only one scene and it is partially witnessed by Anna Sue. A cross made of burned matchsticks is found and elicits terrified reactions from Veechie and a few locals for it is a death omen. It seems to be the only proof that a voodoo practitioner is either in the house or visited recently. One barely described ritual in a dimly lit kitchen and a burned cross are all Holloway picked up from Seabrook's utterly intriguing book? Sad.

Chemical analysis done on a medicine eye dropper is the only real evidence Jim has to prove a case of murder. The scene at a college professor's chemistry lab, however, is ineptly handled. Holloway either doesn't understand or never bothered to research how a chemist would find poison in a distillate. He ends making a dilution of a trace of dried liquid found in the eyedropper and injects that into a guinea pig. When the animal dies the professor is satisfied the liquid was poison. Never mind that the victim supposedly took the substance orally in a glass of medicine. Doesn't sound like an experienced professor of chemistry to me. More like mad scientist nonsense lifted from a Universal Studios monster movie. A supposedly scientific scene like this makes me question if Holloway ever read Seabrook's book for her other research. No wonder the voodoo scenes are so sketchy.

In spite of all these disappointments and an overall lack of verisimilitude I stuck with the book to the final page. If the revelation of the murderer is not all that surprising (after all, there are only five suspects) at least the unmasking is done with flourish. Veechie transforms from voodoo spook into Captain Yancy's Nemesis achieving a satisfying, appropriately melodramatic finale when she pulls off a trick that requires no voodoo magic. Jim takes credit for solving the case, but it is clear that Veechie did all the work.

Cobweb House is sometimes easily found in its very attractive, surreally illustrated, Dell mapback edition. I found a copy for $6 at the Printer's Row Book Fair in Chicago a few weeks ago. Almost thirty copies are currently available on-line at prices ranging from $15 for a collectible copy to $2 for a battered reader. The hardcover edition is rather scarce.  I have yet to see a first edition of this book with a DJ, but courtesy of the huge collection of DJ facsimiles at Mark Terry's website I am displaying it here.

FFB: Curse of the Island Pool - Virginia Coffman

I wonder if Coffman read any Anne Radcliffe.  She seems to have taken the formula of the late 18th century Gothic thriller and given it the modern update that everyone is now familiar with.  In her third novel Curse of the Island Pool (1965) she gives us a textbook example of what would become the template for all Gothic suspense books in the craze that developed in the mid 60s and lasted well into the early 80s. Young American heiress travels to an exotic country where she meets a modern day Byronic hero, several superstitious and secretive servants, a puzzling mysterious death and most important of all a house and estate with a terrible secret. It's a good one, my friends.

First introduced to us in her San Francisco home as Cathy Blake, our heroine quickly learns that she is the long lost heir to the Amber fortune and is now the new owner of the plantation formerly owned by her dead cousin Ellen Amber. Cathy flies to a little island in the Antilles (called St. Cloud in the book but in reality St. Vincent) where she meets her other cousin Michael Amber, our dark and mysterious Byronic hero. Almost immediately Cathy's head is filled with colorful anecdotes about Ellen's unusual death in the island pool of the title. Slightly sinister Soochi, a young maid in the Amber household, frequently talks of Ellen's ghost haunting the grounds and Miss Nell, the elderly housekeeper and Ellen's only friend, warns Cathy to beware of all the Ambers. They are up to no good and she is convinced one of them caused Ellen's death. If all this whispered gossip and chattering superstition were not enough Cathy is woken almost every night by the sound of drums in the forest. There are hints that the locals use the area around the lagoon for voodoo rituals and God knows what else.

JMW Turner's painting of La Soufrière erupting in 1812.

Usually the house is the star in any true Gothic. Donald E. Westlake has joked that a Gothic is a book where the girl gets a house. A lampooning reduction of the often complex and involving plots but true nonetheless. However, in Curse of the Island Pool it is the surrounding grounds that become the foreboding presence in a role usually given to the house. The pool is the scene of Ellen's mysterious death a site Cathy finds herself drawn to repeatedly finding clue after clue all of which point to the possibility of not an accident but murder. Ominously, the island also has an active volcano La Soufrière -- literally "the sulfur one" -- smoking and belching and threatening to erupt in a violent display of ash and lava any day.

This is the grand stuff I expect from a Gothic. Far from the tawdry trash most people think of when Gothic novels are mentioned Coffmans' books are plot driven with unusually drawn characters. It should be larger than life, with a creepy setting that dominates the atmosphere and nearly controls the characters' lives. Coffman scores big with her setting. She found ways to invigorate the Gothic genre by choosing exotic settings rather than the usual damp castles in Germany and England.

Coffman is also a subtle stylist with a gift for language. We know this genre is based on well worn archetypes, but in Coffman's hands the Gothic gets a well-deserved facelift. Sure, Cathy takes her first step outdoors at night wearing the requisite nightgown (or, because she's in the French Antilles, her peignoir) but each time Coffman visits one of these now cliche scenes she makes it come alive with her storytelling skill, her vibrant descriptions and, occasionally, a remarkable gift for creating the perfect frisson. What more can you ask for?

FFB: Dead Man's Walk - Richard S. Prather

Cover art by Barye Philipps

I have to thank Christa Faust for first getting me interested in looking for the Richard Prather books. She says her book Money Shot would never have been written had she not read the Shell Scott books. Money Shot is one of my favorite Hard Case Crime originals. That praiseworthy note of a writer's influence was enough for me to check him out. I know I have quite a few of these books now but like most collectors I did more amassing than reading. I saw Dead Man's Walk on one of those old paperback spinning racks in a used bookstore in Ohio last month. With its tantalizing catch phrase "It was murder all right – but was it voodoo too?" I knew that this had to be the first Shell Scott book for me to read. Private eyes and voodoo? Give me that book, now!

Voodoo was a fascination for crime writers from the 1930s through the 1960s. I can think of an entire bookcase full of related detective novels and thrillers, all of which I've read. Let's see how many I can type off the top of my archive of a head: Voodoo by John Esteven, Voodoo'd by Kenneth Perkins, The Obeah Murders by Hulbert Footner (Bahamian spin-off of voodoo), A Grave Must Be Deep by Theodore Roscoe, Conjure Man Dies by Rudolph Fisher (deals more with hoodoo, an offshoot with voodoo roots), numerous short stories from the pulps like "Papa Benjamin" by Cornell Woolrich and "The Voodoo Mystery" by Arthur B. Reeves, and even Live and Let Die, James Bond's own voodoo/occult adventure. I could go on but that would mean leaving my seat and checking the shelves. How about movies? The Serpent and the Rainbow, The Skeleton Key (Hoodoo again), Isle of the Dead, Voodoo Man, Voodoo Woman, Voodoo Dawn, I Walked with a Zombie, White Zombie (yes, the zombie legends have their roots in voodoo and not George Romero). Et cetara, et cetera, and so forth.


I'm not sure any crime writers will touch voodoo anymore as a plot basis. The most recent I can think of that comes close is Michael Gruber's excellent job of incorporating Santeria and black magic in his chilling supernatural thriller Tropic of Night. But that wasn't exactly voodoo. Is it a taboo topic now? Perhaps very un-PC? No matter to me. I'll eagerly seek out as many voodoo thrillers as I can. Dead Man's Walk is one of the best out of all those I listed. It was like a crash course in voodoo. From accurate terminology well defined (no glossary required) to astonishingly detailed descriptions of the rituals, tools and the entire belief system of voudon.

Shell travels to Verde Island to investigate the suspicious death of George Knowles. His business partner, John Farrow, disagrees with local authorities that Knowles died of natural causes. It may have something to do with the death of a local boy only days earlier. Farrow is convinced someone is trying to destroy his business especially since his employees have quit the place en masse for fear that the hotel is cursed. Oddly enough, the guests have decided to take over and fill in as maids, bartenders, kitchen help and what have you. Farrow needs Shell to get to the bottom of the mysterious deaths before his hotel business completely falls apart.

Later he joins forces with local girl Alexandria Ducharme (Dria for short) who will be his tutor in Voodoo 101. It's clear to Shell that he will need a rudimentary understanding of the local beliefs if he is going to outwit the bad guys who are taking advantage of a superstitious population and killing anyone who gets in their way. His imaginative and purely American revenge on the local voodoo bad guy takes the form of an elaborate magic show employing balloons, voodoo dolls, a booby-trapped tree, a very large and powerful magnet, and generous amounts of fake blood. He outwits and out-cons the con artist - a forbidding voodoo priest who turns out to be powerless compared to Shell's ingenuity. It's the best sequence in a very entertaining crime novel.

I've read that the later Shell Scott books tend to get fanciful. That's putting it mildly. Apart from the heavy emphasis on voodoo rites and rituals, the murder method employed (and those mysterious deaths are indeed murders) is something out of the world of weird menace pulps. Anyone well versed in those magazines may know that Anthony Rud's five part serialized detective novel The Rose Bath Riddle which appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly (Sept – Oct 1933) employs the very same method. This is only the second time I have encountered it in any crime fiction of any period. In Rud's story I thought the method was more like science fiction and probably impossible to pull off. As Prather describes the use of this specific means of killing people it seems more feasible. And more psychopathic. It gave me chills reading the villain's dialog as he gleefully described administering his weapon of choice and how he managed to leave no trace of it on their bodies. Fanciful is not the word here. Fiendish is the proper adjective.

I like Shell's oddball sense of humor and Prather's eccentric way of conveying it. Here's a good example from late in the book:

That was she. My gal. The gal I'd swept off her feet. Ah, you Romeo, you, I thought. Wherefore art thou, Romeo? Casanova was a piker. Just wiggle your little finger and they land all over you. Clunk! I've got to quit believing everything these babes tell me. Maybe I'd better give up babes entirely. No, I'd rather die.

I got you, babe. He also calls women "tomatoes."

And his troubles and mishaps and set-backs?

"This is some pickle, eh?"

"…an indication of the depth of the pickle I was in."

I have to dig up the rest of my Shell Scott books. I've only found Kill Him Twice and Three's a Shroud. I was positive I had more than that. In any case, I know I'll be adding to my Shell Scott collection on a regular basis.This is some damn good crime writing.