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Post by dem bones on Oct 8, 2008 3:00:05 GMT
A. J. Alan has, with the coming of the broadcasting age, reintroduced the art of telling tales instead of writing them. his stories are taken down in shorthand as he stands at the microphone. The Diver, taken from his volume of short stories Good Evening Everyone is a good example of the new technique developed out of the contact between the story-teller and his invisible audience
J. M. Parrish & John R. Crossland introducing The Mammoth Book Of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries, Odhams Press, 1936.
Most musicians will tell you that the secret of improvisation is to have a pretty clear idea of what you're going to play and then run with it as opposed to knocking something out off the top of your head and hoping the audience thinks you're the second coming of John Coltrane. I've a feeling 'A. J. Alan' (Leslie H. Lambert, 1883 - 1940) used this technique in broadcasting his amiable, chatty and sometimes even mildly chilling stories for radio during the 'twenties. E. F. Bleiler quotes Kenelm Ross - editor of The Best Of A. J. Alan - as crediting Lambert with originating the BBC accent, "a class-conscious, mincing travesty of correct diction", and he reputedly insisted on wearing full evening dress for his recitals.
Alan was a fixture of the Mammoth anthologies published by Odhams, Daily Express & Co., during the 'thirties. Many were collected as Good Evening Everyone, (Hutchinson, 1928), A. J. Alan's Second Book (Hutchinson,1933) and The Best of A. J. Alan (Richards, 1954) none of which I've ever seen a copy of.
H2, etc: Alan's cat goes missing after dark and he goes to fetch it. He finds Moggles in a neighbour's garden and through the window of a downstairs room he sees a man sat in a chair with a bag tied over his head and a tube feeding into his mouth. Having rescued the old timer he remonstrates with his daughters who are blase about the incident. They explain that there's nothing to worry about, Dad suffers from melancholy and is always trying to gas himself which is why they always turn the tap off before retiring ....
One of his weaker efforts, or so it seems to me. There are so many ways this could have ended (the nastier the better being my preference), but I guess he didn't want to freak out the listeners.
The Dream: Alan relates the minutiae of his recurring dream in which he enters a room where some kind of get-together is taking place. All but one of those gathered are men. The single woman, evidently the hostess, is an elegant beauty and each time she’s engaged in conversation with a different bloke. Alan notes that whoever the lucky fellow is on a given night, he never reappears in the subsequent installments. And then there’s the empty chair. It’s always offered to him but he refuses, preferring to stand (he has his reasons). Comes the night he recognises one of the guests …
My Adventure In Norfolk: Alan checks on a bungalow that he and his wife will be renting as their holiday home come August. Being February (Mrs. Alan believes in planning ahead), it’s snowbound. During the night a young woman’s car breaks down outside and he gallantly goes to her assistance. Rather than being grateful the girl is surly and uncommunicative, even when a local truck driver stops and agrees to give her a lift to Norwich. Alan pushes the car into the garage … and notices a dead man propped up by the window. The next morning both car and corpse have vanished and our man is in for a surprise when he reports the incident to the police.
The Diver: Alan frequents a club with its own swimming pool and there he witnesses a man showing off on the diving board. The fellow has a dreadful scar down his chest but his most notable oddity that when he jumps in the water, there's barely a splash ... and he doesn't reappear. Month's later, having witnessed the spectral swimmer repeat his party piece three times, Alan is introduced to Mr. Melhuish ("with one exception, the most offensive blighter I've ever come across") who is travelling to Mexico with Alan's friends, the Pringles. He is the original of the ghostly diver down to the scar - he took a belly-flop onto a stake at the bottom of a river - and, fearing that dark forces are at work, Alan does his best to talk the couple out of accompanying Melhuish.
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Post by pulphack on Oct 8, 2008 13:47:06 GMT
hmm, that description of how his tales were taken down is a little suspect... during my years as a devout henry hall fan (no, i'm serious), i read a lot about broadcasting in the twenties and thirties. and the way i heard it was that mr alan - who was a fairly high ranking civil servant by day - would trun up at the bbc just before he was due to go on, place a carnation in a glass of water on the table where the microphone was set, and then start when the light when on. except that he had his script in a brief case by his side all the time. it was written and rehearsed beforehand specifically to sound as if spoken off the cuff (this making him one of the few writers to realise at that time that the spoken and the read word demanded a different syntax), and the script was there more for a sense of security than anything else.
he had a nice line in whimsy, too - The Cabmen's Shelter, in The Great Book Of Humour is a fine example of this. oddly, my copy has no publisher on the spine, and a couple of leaves are missing at the beginning, depriving me of publisher and date! spooky, eh? a phantom book... anyway, it also has phillip macdonald's brilliant short novel Glitter, which is post-modernism before that term was coined (although i suppose everything in books we call post-modern can be dated back to Sterne's Tristram Shandy anyway, and Glitter was also the same time as cameron mccabe's The Face On The Cutting Room Floor, which was another genre book playing games.
mr macdonald, of course, is no stranger to those who read between-the-wars thrillers, detective or horror stories, and was also a movie scriptwriter at one point in his career. sorry, just showing off there...
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Post by dem bones on Oct 8, 2008 14:11:09 GMT
I can see why A. J. Alan's 'The Dream' would have appealed to Aickman. The somewhat surreal quality that parts of it have, and there are some nice ideas contained within, but Alan's chatty and sometimes snobbish style irritated me more than anything else. Dem has this one down as Alan's 'masterpiece' but I couldn't really get on with it at all. The above from 'X's impeccable review of Fontana Ghost #3. Thanks for the info, pulps. The thing is, I do enjoy Alan's writing style, but had more or less guessed that his 'improvisations' were as tightly scripted as an M. R. James story! These sneaky authors! Do you know if the lapses into snobbery were a pose or was he a bit, erm, 'Dennis Wheatley'? I'd like to think he was satirising the social mores of the day's bourgeoisie although doubtless i'm talking a pile of as per usual. |
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Post by jkdunham on Oct 8, 2008 18:04:45 GMT
'The Diver' was my first scrape with A. J. Alan, in a cheap reprint of Odhams' Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries, and I still have fond memories of it (I'd quite forgotten about the 'B.B.C.' stuff at the beginning until I just dug it out to have another look). It's a great old-fashioned ghostly episode told in his usual jocular, conversational style but the telling never detracts from the tale (and his "patent table-tapper" at the seance is a hoot). Likewise 'My Adventure in Norfolk', in which he manages to be witty - no, funny ("Up to now I hadn't seriously considered the young woman. For one thing it had been dark, and there had been a seized engine to look at.") - charming you might even say, and still rattle off a good, if only mildly spooky, yarn. (Extra points too for using the expression "oo-er!" in a ghost story.) Also 'H2, etc.' although I agree with you about the ending being a let-down. 'The Hair' would probably be my choice for his best work. It's a more conventionally structured story with very little suggestion that the events related actually happened to him. At least I can't really imagine him confessing to multiple homicide on national radio. And even if he will have his little joke at the end, he did have some nice one-liners, I'll give him that ("I decided not to kill him more than I could help.") Have you read his 'Charles' about the strange death of Javorsky the violinist? ("I don't draw the line at many things, but I do draw it at absinthe - just as I do at jazz, thick ankles, and fish"). He's a bit sniffy in this one but it didn't bother me so much. Mind you, I might have enjoyed this one more because he takes the piss out of the Polish. Just a personal thing. I'm not sure why 'The Dream' annoyed me so much. As I say, told by somebody else in a less anecdotal style - and minus the occasional snotty asides - it could make a very effective story (maybe leave out the part about the old lady and the bicycle too, even though I really quite liked that bit). I've just had another look at it and it's not snobbish exactly - I don't know, there's just something about his tone, just ever so slightly superior, that for some reason gets right on my pendulous man-tits. It's probably just my inverted snobbery, and I'm nothing if not inconsistent as I love H. H. Munro, for example, and you could level exactly the same criticisms at him. Maybe I was just in a bolshy mood when I read it. he had a nice line in whimsy, too - The Cabmen's Shelter, in The Great Book Of Humour is a fine example of this. oddly, my copy has no publisher on the spine, and a couple of leaves are missing at the beginning, depriving me of publisher and date! was another Odhams job from 1935. |
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Post by pulphack on Oct 9, 2008 12:03:57 GMT
ah, a mystery solved. thanks, steve - er, i mean x...
i know exactly what you mean about the sniffy tone that sometimes gets on the tit, and then not... saki is a perfect example. i'm very fond of his stuff, but sometimes the tone - a more uptight oscar wilde, sort of - makes me bristle even though the story-telling is wonderful. i like all of his stuff that i've read; had that wordsworth complete collection at one time, though can't find it now (think it went west on a big clear out two moves ago). the reginald stories and even the alice in westminster sketches still had bite, despite the datedness of the subject. but i do think his 'novel' when willam came (included in moorcock's 'england invaded' anthology of pre-WW1 paranioa tales) is his best work. it's really more a novella in length, and not the kind of thing he's really remembered for, but it reads like a dream. (thinking about that, it may be the stilted tripe that sits alongside it that has that effect! much as i like the book, some it is the edwardian equivalent of plan 9, to half-steal a dem phrase)
this business of the authorial tone is an interesting one. for instance, i could happily read dornford yates for years, even though his snobbishness is appalling and insulting, just because of the that lovely pseudo-georgian turn of phrase. then one day i picked up a book i'd read before, an could no longer take it. HE hadn't changed, so it must have been something in me. but what? which perhaps says a lot about what we, as readers, bring to a book. i mention him here partly because he was distantly related to Saki, and parlayed that into a much closer (and made-up) association that he relied on heavily in his early career. as Doyle was a failing doctor, he was a failing solicitor. yet despite the spruious nature of the association, there are some similarities in style. if saki was couture, then yates was the dorothy perkins knock-off.
similarly, on matters of tone, i often wonder why i love JT Edson's rockabye county and company z books, even though his extremely right wing views (endless frothing at the mouth on anything liberal) and prurience (no swearing or sex, but a lot of dwelling on kinky matters like foxy boxing - which is in Bad Hombre or Run For The Border i think - i'm not looking it up right now as i'd have to find the bloody books! - but anyway it's a very NOTW 'this is disgusting... and now i'll tell you why' sort of dwelling) should have me running a mile.
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Post by jkdunham on Oct 9, 2008 14:16:39 GMT
This is what I love about Vault - how, in the course of just three short paragraphs, we can get from A. J. Alan, via Saki, Michael Moorcock, Dornford Yates and Arthur Conan Doyle, to J T Edson and foxy boxing. thanks, steve - er, i mean x... Ex-Steve will do fine, pulps. |
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Post by dem bones on Oct 10, 2008 21:05:31 GMT
Have you read his 'Charles' about the strange death of Javorsky the violinist? ("I don't draw the line at many things, but I do draw it at absinthe - just as I do at jazz, thick ankles, and fish"). He's a bit sniffy in this one but it didn't bother me so much. Mind you, I might have enjoyed this one more because he takes the piss out of the Polish. Just a personal thing. I dug out a copy in that 50 Masterpieces Book and within a few lines remembered Charles from whenever it was I first read it. A pretty straightforward crime story - I prefer him when he tackles the 'supernatural' - but more than made up for with his amusing spasms of xenophobic fun. "She told me his music was only a blind. His real job was with a certain undesirable foreign institution in the City. So I gave up the artificial respiration. Not that it was doing him any good - but you never knew. It didn't seem patriotic to go on." I'm guessing Javorsky wasn't a Conservative, then? Only having the stories to go on, I still can't make up my mind. Was he satirising the middle-class Englishman or did he really hold these opinions? |
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Post by lobolover on Nov 4, 2008 20:18:10 GMT
to "H2, etc"-oh lord,the potential is simply Morrow-esque,and im not just taking an easy joust at "The monster Maker".
Also,without spoiling,I hope "My Adventure In Norfolk" isnt the "shes dead for years!" type.
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sihope
New Face In Hell
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Post by sihope on May 27, 2011 11:44:07 GMT
I have copies of AJ Alans Good Evening Everyone and AJ Alans Second Book in what would appear to be their original editions. Saved by a friend from going to the jumble sale about 20 years ago. The first book is complete with clippings regarding his passing and the "revelation" of his true identity (Leslie Harrison Lambert) None include printed dates though one of them has 13.12.41 written in pencil.
The most comprehensive one is obviously from The Radio Times headed "Good Night Everyone!" If I get the chance I'll transcribe the text and post it for your perusal. Also included are some seperate short stories on pages taken from various periodicals: "Wottie" (Radio Times Aug 2 1929), A Tale of Four Cocktails (RT Dec 20 1929), The Girl they Kidnapped (To-Day June 4 1938) and A Shot in the Dark (Unknown periodical - No date)
In all honesty I havn't really read any of the stories. I started to back when I was first given the books but I found the style pretty dated and underwhelming in delivery. Perhaps that is their charm and I should have another go. What really interests me is the authors wartime occupation as a member of the Enigma codebreaking team as well as the books themselves as cultural artefacts. The first one is inscribed inside the front cover "F Wood, Stateroom C36, RMS Caronia" and my interest in merchant vessels of the period is leading me to develop a possible art project which references wartime nautical history to some degree (a major aspect of this investigation is family history regarding my grandfathers captivity as a Japanese POW on Java in 1942 and the MV Warwick Castle which was their transport to the Far East. Just vague coincidental elements I know but that’s usually how my projects start out!)
My online research led me to the Vault of Evil forum and it's really useful and interesting to know that AJ Alans stories are still being considered all these years later. As my project develops I'll be blogging research materials and I'll post a link sometime soon.
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Post by dem bones on May 27, 2011 18:26:19 GMT
absolutely fascinating. thank you so much for sharing all that juicy info, sihope, and i wish you every success with so worthy a project. please let us know how you get on. the only Lambert stories i've read are those commented upon above, and my guess is his chatty style would get wearying over an entire collection, but he's very suited to multiple author anthologies (or so it seems to me). i'm not in any great hurry to read, say, H2, etc again, but i share Robert Aickman's high opinion of the The Dream and My Adventure In Norfolk is a cute ghost story.
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