Eugene Ascher - To Kill A Corpse

[dem bones]

Eugene Ascher (Harold Ernest Kelly) - To Kill A Corpse (World Distributors, 1959. First published as There Were No Asper Ladies, 1944).

Edgar Hodges

Blurb:
A grim and terrifying Nemesis hung over the lovely Lady Adela. Nothing in science or the known forces of this world could help her. But could aid come from beyond the grave?

Lucian Carolus, Professor of Archaeology, great scholar and student of the supernatural, investigates. He makes some amazing discoveries and meets some amazing people. Who or what was Hilary Asper? For three hundred years there had been no woman of the Asper family. But if there had been no woman, no mother, no grandmother, how - or - when - had Hilary Asper come into being?

Until the closing page the weird suspense of this story will hold you enthralled, caught up into an atmosphere that vibrates with all the powers of the supernatural.

You will remember and wonder about this book long after you have finished reading it.

At odds with the exuberant blurb, Brian J. Frost is of the opinion that To Kill A Corpse/ There Were No Asper Ladies is demonstrative of a decline in weird fiction during the 'forties and "deservedly forgotten." I first read this during vampire phase when it evidently washed over me, but deservedly forgotten or otherwise, am in the mood for a novel that gets its business done inside a slick 160 pages so let's see how it does second time around.

Lucian Carolus, former Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge turned investigator into the unknown, receives a letter from Adela, his favourite niece, inviting him to investigate Chesley Manor, which she believes to be haunted by the ghosts of its mistresses past. Adela has recently married Count Vivian Chesley, and is nervous that these formidable women resent her presence. Carolus graciously accepts and if his PR is to be believed - "I can tell if a house is haunted merely by entering it. I know if a vampire is present or enters any company I am in" - he's the man for the job. He's especially big on vampires and believes the medical profession is unwittingly responsible for their proliferation.

"The personality vibrations set up in a person who has received transfusions tend to resemble very closely the presence-vibrations of after-death vampires. I cannot ... entirely free my mind of the fear that this wonderful development in restorative therapy may be dooming thousands to become vampires."

Adela and Vivian share the house with his sister, Patricia, an aloof fifty-something whose airs and graces intimidate the young bride. A regular guest is their neighbour, Hilary Asper, a man, apparently, one either loves or loathes on sight. Lord Chesley is a big fan, his wife, not so. Carolus' finely-tuned radar tells him there's something shady about this fellow and marks him down as requiring further investigation. That Hilary is familiar with his work suggests he may have leanings toward black sorcery.

As Carolus retires for the night he meets a lugubrious old woman in black on the stairs who warns him against poking his nose into the mysteries surrounding the house, because that's how her mistress, Lady Frances, came to grief. "Do nothing. Lady Frances tried, but after rosemary night she began to die ... she was young - and beautiful. At the end she was still beautiful. It was only her life that drained away. And only because she meddled with the secret ..."

At breakfast the following morning, Carolus learns from Adela that he spoke to a ghost. The woman in black was the housekeeper. She died during the night following a long illness that kept her bedridden for months ....

To be continued ...

[dem bones]

Adela finally tells Carolus all she knows about the mystery. It doesn't amount to much. What once served as the drawing room is now the library, and:

"Round the fireplace there is an enormous carved mantel with a small shelf in the centre at the top of the carving, and during the night of every 17th June a sprig of rosemary mysteriously appears on the shelf."

The seventeenth of June? Why, that's tomorrow!

As incentive to the phantom, Carolus replaces the crossed daggers nailed in the alcove with a portrait of the very beautiful Seventeenth Century Countess Chesley.

Carolus prepares for his vigil in the library with a stroll through the fields. In his meditative state, he blunders into Tallyford, the home of Hilary Aster, where he's intercepted by Linton, the regulation sinister butler. Asper, delighted to see him, explains that his man is a congenital idiot and Carolus should take bo notice of his surly behaviour. Carolus accepts Asper's desperate invitation to join him again shortly.

That night in the library, Carolus senses rather than sees the presence, which is probably just as well: "If I could see it it might be so horrible as to unbalance my reason". The entity confirms - in a cockney accent with a dash of Elizabethan -Jacobian posh - that the woman in the painting was his wife, he loves her, hates everyone else, in particular women: "I kill the young, the beautiful." Just as he's shaping up to turn ugly, Carolus's threat to destroy the portrait reduces the spectre to a quivering jelly. Nevertheless, it chuckles horribly as it takes its leave.

Lucian Carolus, in truth, gets a bit much. The stuff about how, thanks to blood transfusions, we could be sitting on a vampire time bomb is great, but when he gets to droning on for page after page about the "malignity of extra-normal vibrations" and so on, it negates the suspense. Still, early days yet ...

[dem bones]

"He pointed with his stick and I saw the carcass of a pheasant. The head had been bitten off it and the shoulders partly eaten. It ended in a round of raw, bloodied flesh. It seemed a strange thing to have drawn a man's attention so raptly as Asper's had been when I first saw him."

Things have picked up again. On the morning after the anniversary, Lady Adela sleeps through until almost midday which is unheard of. She complains to Carolus of a dreadful lassitude, that her sleep was plagued by nightmares. "I feel as though I have been wallowing in - in - some filth. I dreamed and dreamed. I don't remember a thing about any of it, but I do know that it was all - vile - obscene. It seems to have soiled me - made me unclean." Carolus explains that they share a psychic link and therefore, what he encountered in the library also visited her in dreams. He consoles her that, now the anniversary is done, there'll be no more trouble for another year, then has the butler burn the portrait.

Shortly afterward, Lady Patricia is touched by something cold and clammy in Adela's room.

Carolus is called back to London for six weeks to address an International Society for Psychical Enquiry conference. The ISPR are "without doubt, the most important body of its kind in the world" and Lucian has been nominated for the chairmanship though, of course, he'll have to decline as it would cut into his valuable time. Another fortnight is swallowed up by lecture engagements, so he's away from Chesley for two months, leaving his neice exposed to what vile menace?

On his way to the manor house, Carolus takes a detour through the woods where he spots Hilary Asper peering down a fox hole. Asper is clearly angry at the interruption but composes himself and repeats his invitation to dinner whenever Lucian can find a gap in his busy schedule. Carolus can't help but notice that Asper is the very picture of health and vitality, all ruddy-cheeked and rosy, whereas his niece is quite the reverse, and where once they shared a connection that bordered on the telepathic, now Adela is a closed book. On occasion he even catches her fixing him a glare of pure malice. "I have never seen anything which struck me as so pitifully sad, as that spectacle of Adela, with her head cocked over to one side, her eyes side-glancing and sly, her mouth leering, and her finger wagging at me in a gesture that an old, painted trollop, trying to be playful, might have used."

Has her Ladyship become a Bride of Dracula?

[helrunar]

Nice to find this thread.  I learned of the existence of this book, and a slew of others--including a whole clutch of occult thrillers by Mrs Violet van der Elst who sounds as if she was a remarkable lady (a true English eccentric)--thanks to a site to which Squire James Doig referred me.  I just adore this darling Vault of Evil and the twisted, insidious beings who are its dreaded denizens!

Notes on the life of Violet van der Elst from this site:

www.granthammatters.co.uk/van-der-elst-violet/

Violet was 17-years-old when she married engineer Henry Nathan, who died in 1927.

After working as a scullery maid and a brief stage career, she made cosmetics in her kitchen, before making a fortune by developing Shavex – the first brushless shaving cream. ...

She collected books on the occult and hid money under carpets to test her maids’ honesty. ... An imposing figure, weighing 15 stone and always dressed in black, her highly visual and well organised protests [in favor of the abolition of the death penalty] saw planes trailing black flags and hordes of sandwich-men on the ground, all accompanied by a brass band playing the Dead March in Saul. ... As she once told a Picture Post reporter: “I have made three fortunes and lost five.”

cheers, H.