Christopher Blayre - The Purple Sapphire

[dem bones]

Christopher Blayre (Edward Heron-Allen) - The Purple Sapphire and other Posthumous Papers (Philip Allan, 1921)

The Purple Sapphire
Aalila
Pupura Lapillus
The Thing that Smelt
The Blue Cockroach
The Demon
The Book
The Cosmic Dust
The Cheetah Girl

First Philip Allen book I've turned up in aeons - thank you Spitalfields market! - and an especially interesting one at that. Although nine stories are listed on the contents page, only eight make it into the book as when we reach the final novella;

Seems that The Cheetah Girl - concerning a hybrid creature born of artificial insemination - was deemed too risqué for the day, and would likely never have seen print had not Heron-Allen resorted to vanity publishing a very limited edition (20 copies) two years later. An extended The Purple Sapphire, still lacking The Cheetah Girl, was published as The Strange Papers of Dr. Blayre, again by Philip Allan in 1932 as part of the Creeps series. George Hay got his mitts on a copy of the offending story in the sixties and Tartarus have since resurrected it as a competitively priced (one spleen) limited edition, which currently changes hands at around the $550 mark, so we suggest Wordsworth counter with a budget 'Collected Blayre' just to spite them.

[dem bones]

couldn't resist a quick delve. not quite sure what to make of him yet.

The Thing That Smelt: Tulse Hill. Augustus Black ia a phony medium with a touch of the Madam Orloff's about him in that despite himself, he has recently developed genuine psychic abilities. This unnerves Black and he takes to holding proper seances once he's finished fleecing today's quota of wealthy gullibles. At the culmination of one such session Black is killed, slashed to ribbons by a malevolent feline entity, one of his cronies is committed to a lunatic asylum, and the other, Sheldon, is haunted to the brink of suicide by an ever present, abominable stench reminiscent of "the small cat house at the zoo."

The Demon: Dr. Erasmus Quayle is a charlatan with a mail order degree who plays on the terminally ill. Despite his quackery, he has an impressive success rate, improving the health and extending the life span of his patients way beyond expectation provided, of course, they've money enough to pay his extortionate fees. The effervescent Cynthia Carlton, dying of cancer, is the latest to benefit from his services after Quayle persuaded her to dispense with the services of proper Doctor Sir George Anboyne. Those closest to her notice an appalling change in her behaviour. It's almost as if she were demoniacally possessed!

He's rarely centre stage as it were, but Max Carlton, Cynthia's "blackguard" of a husband, is the star of this one, spending the entire story drunk out of his mind. A cursory browse reveals that both he and Sir George resurface in what looks to be a black magic story later in book.

[humgoo]

Edward Heron-Allen - The Complete Shorter Fiction (Snuggly Books, 2019)

A Note on the Texts
A Chronology of the Stories

KISSES OF FATE
 Dedication / In Memoriam
 Forward by Way of Explanation
 The Suicide of Sylvester Gray
 The Story of a Younger Son
 The Silence of Mrs. Chariton's Children

A FATAL FIDDLE
 A Fatal Fiddle
 The Lute Girl's Charm
 An Atlantic Tragedy
 An Eternal Expiation
 My First Love
 An Induced Dream (?)
 A Desperate Remedy
 My Breach of Trust
 The Heresy of Spencer Carlyon
 Autobiography of a Disembodied Spirit

THE STRANGE PAPERS OF DR. BLAYRE
 Antescript
 The Purple Sapphire
 The House on the Way to Hell
 Aalila
 The Mirror that Remembered
 Purpura Lapillus
 Mano Pantea
 The Thing that Smelt
 The Blue Cockroach
 The Man Who Killed the Jew
 The Demon
 The Book
 The Cosmic Dust

THE CHEETAH-GIRL
 Note of Explanation
 The Cheetah-Girl

SOME WOMEN OF THE UNIVERSITY
 "Zum Wilbad"
 The Boots
 Another Squaw?
 Passiflora Vindica
 A Few Words in Explanation of the "The Cheetah-Girl"

Blurb:

Presented here for the first time in a single volume, is the entire corpus of short fiction by Edward Heron-Allen, one of England's most intriguing, and unnecessarily obscure, authors. From "The Suicide of Sylvester Gray," the novella which was an inspiration for The Portrait of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, a friend of Heron-Allen's, to "The Cheetah Girl," an outrageous masterpiece of biological science fiction, the present collection is a tour de force of the elegant, the bizarre, and the unmentionable.

With a total of thirty tales, the five volumes contained herein, many of which have previously only been obtainable for exorbitant prices, are now finally available in a proper format for connoisseurs, and the unafraid.

At 574 pages, this is quite a door-stopper.