Aleister Crowley - The Simon Iff Stories

[dem bones]

... and here's the gel on the latest Wordsworth edition.

Aleister Crowley - The Simon Iff Stories & Other Works (Wordsworth Editions, March 2012)

Robert Mathias

William Breeze - Introduction

The Scrutinies of Simon Iff
Big Game
The Artistic Temperament
Outside the Bank’s Routine
The Conduct of John Briggs
Not Good Enough
Ineligible

Simon Iff in America
What’s in a Name?
A Sense of Incongruity
The Ox and the Wheel
An Old Head on Young Shoulders
The Pasquaney Puzzle
The Monkey and the Buzz-Saw
A Dangerous Safe Trick
The Biter Bit
Nebuchadnezzar
Suffer the Little Children
Who Gets the Diamonds?
The Natural Thing To do

Simon Iff Abroad
Desert Justice
In The Swamp
The Haunted Sea Captain

Simon Iff, Psychoanalyst
Psychic Compensation
Sterilized Stephen

Golden Twigs
The King Of The Wheel
The Stone Of Cybele
The Oracle Of The Corycian Cave
The Burning Of Melcath
The Hearth
The Old Man Of The Peepul-Tree
The Mass Of St. Secaire
The God Of Ibreez

Notes & Sources.

After last year's exhaustion-inducing The Drug, another 550 pages of Crowley fiction, this time compiling the surviving adventures of his occult detective, Simon Iff. No sooner had I bought a copy, than I tripped leaving the shop and dropped it in a puddle. An unpleasant chuckle from the bowels of Bloomsbury only curtailed when Great Beast realised it is still in better shape than most of my "collection".

[ripper]

I've generally steered away from anything by Crowley after reading a couple of his stories quite a while ago and not really getting on with them very well. However, I am tempted by the Simon Iff anthology as I do enjoy tales of occult detectives penned in earlier times. Are the Simon Iff adventures similar in style or type of story to any other occult detective, such as Norton Vyse, Aylmer Vance etc?

[dem bones]

Can't help you there Rip, as have yet to make a start on it. God bless Wordsworth for their generosity, but this is another daunting prospect. Put Simon Iff ... and The Drug together and that's way over a thousand pages of Crowley's fiction. Got on well with the little of his short fiction I've read via Peter Haining and Michel Parry anthologies, but did they cherry-pick the very best?

[Craig Herbertson]

Feb 20, 2013 21:22:20 GMT ripper said:

I've generally steered away from anything by Crowley after reading a couple of his stories quite a while ago and not really getting on with them very well. However, I am tempted by the Simon Iff anthology as I do enjoy tales of occult detectives penned in earlier times. Are the Simon Iff adventures similar in style or type of story to any other occult detective, such as Norton Vyse, Aylmer Vance etc?

If you didn't like Crowley generally, Simon Iff is proabaly going to go down like a lead balloon. Moonchild was really tedious. He has been compared to Dr. John Silence, Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Taverner but I'm not really sure its a valid comparison in terms of entertainment value.

[David A. Riley]

Feb 21, 2013 11:24:21 GMT Craig Herbertson said:

Feb 20, 2013 21:22:20 GMT ripper said:

I've generally steered away from anything by Crowley after reading a couple of his stories quite a while ago and not really getting on with them very well. However, I am tempted by the Simon Iff anthology as I do enjoy tales of occult detectives penned in earlier times. Are the Simon Iff adventures similar in style or type of story to any other occult detective, such as Norton Vyse, Aylmer Vance etc?

If you didn't like Crowley generally, Simon Iff is proabaly going to go down like a lead balloon. Moonchild was really tedious. He has been compared to Dr. John Silence, Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Taverner but I'm not really sure its a valid comparison in terms of entertainment value.

I've rarely come across a more pompous or tedious writer. I tried to read Moonchild but gave up on it. There were just far too many other, much more tempting things to read! For all his reputation he was so boring to read.

[Craig Herbertson]

See if you like them first here:

hermetic.com/crowley/simon-iff/

[ripper]

Thanks very much for your comments, chaps, and I shall check out the stories on the site :-).

[dem bones]

I apologise in advance

Here's one of the non-Simon Iff stories, as reprinted by Michel Parry in 1st Mayflower Book of Black Magic Stories with the warning/ come-on; "A story that the Marquis de Sade would surely have relished ... representative of a semi-serious desire on Crowley's part to shock and outrage less questing souls."

Aleister Crowley - The Vixen.pdf (33.18 KB)

[ozgurumuth]

Hi everyone,



Firstly I am a big fan of Crowley. And I have translated the Moondchild in Turkish. I know it is a really old post, but I did really wanted to take my chance. I am writing an article about Simon Iff. I have the older pdf version of the book of “The Simon Iff Stories & Other Works”. And I mostly do not understand what I read exactly because the footnotes are missing. And as you know Crowley is really a hard-to-read writer. All I need is the footnotes of “Simon Iff is in America” part. Can anyone send me the footnotes of that part as a photo/s if it is possible. Scanning may be difficult. Thank you very much in advance. By the way it takes about 20 days for the book to reach here in Turkey. And I really don’t have that much time till the deadline. 

Umut