John Howard [ed] - Ghosts & Scholars #41

[dem bones]

Arrived this morning, comments to follow over coming days.

John Howard [ed.] - Ghosts & Scholars #41 (Haunted Library, Nov. 2021).

Jim Pitts

Editorial
Jamesian News
Rick Kennett - Jamesian Podcasts
Rosemary Pardoe - Lady Wardrops Notes
Duncan J. Rule - M.R. James, Stoke Poges, and the Penn-Gray Society
Carl Lavoie - Didactical Spectral: The Use of Parables in R.H. Malden's Nine Ghosts.
Jim Bryant - In the Tracks of M.R. James 4: Return to Denmark

Fiction
Gail-Nina Anderson - These Unreverent Robes
Victoria Day - Mr Carter's Tale, or Two Christmas Eves
Sam Derby - The Hunting of the Masu’wa

Jamesian Notes & Queries
Dennis Lien - The Case of the Reverend Mr Toomey
Norman Darwen - A Lancashire Place of Safety?

Reviews

Robert lloyd Parry [ed], Ghosts of the Chit-Chat Club, reviewed by Mat Joiner
Rosemary Pardoe [ed], The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Mazes, reviewed by Patrick Petterson
Paul Finch [ed.], Terror Tales of the Home Counties, reviewed by David Harris
Helen Grant Too Near the Dead, reviewed by Dan McGachey

And a very special special booklet.

Darroll Pardoe - The Life of St. Cubby

© Arlen Pardoe

Rosemary Pardoe - Preface

Incipit Vita Sancti Cubiani
How St. Cubby met the Wandering Jews
How St. Cubby Performed a Miracle of Levitation
How St. Cubby Assisted at the Corporeal Assumption of a Peasant into Heaven
How St. Cubby Witnessed a Miraculous Burst of Speed
How St. Cubby Lost His Holy Reputation


Subs: £10 (UK), £18 or $25 Overseas (USA and ROW). This includes postage. For this you will receive 2 issues of the journal.

For further details & Co., please email Mark at lostclubATbtopenworld.com (replace AT with @ )

Thank you Jo, Mark, and Ro.

[helrunar]

What beautiful art. Ravishing, really.

H.

[ropardoe]

Thanks Kev.  Just a very minor correction.  The artwork on the front of the St Cubby booklet isn’t by Arlen Pardoe.  It’s from the stained glass catalogue of Darroll's and Arlen’s Dad Bill, who was a professional stained glass artist.  Bill being long gone, now Arlen has the copyright.

[dem bones]

Nov 5, 2021 19:03:19 GMT ropardoe said:

Thanks Kev.  Just a very minor correction.  The artwork on the front of the St Cubby booklet isn’t by Arlen Pardoe.  It’s from the stained glass catalogue of Darroll's and Arlen’s Dad Bill, who was a professional stained glass artist.  Bill being long gone, now Arlen has the copyright.

Hi Ro. Thanks for the correction, I really do prefer to get these things right. Read Vicky Day's story earlier, very cheering. Love the hermit!

[dem bones]

Made a start over weekend.

Gail Nina Anderson - These Unreverent Robes: "So Laura, where do you suggest we provide adequate parking space for our working pundits?"
"You might demolish some of those expensive, unoccupied office blocks your favourite contractors were mysteriously paid to erect."

With a proposal to construct a car park on the site of St. Dunstanbury cemetery defeated, Colin, 'the Town Hall poster boy,' is volunteered to adopt a grave as an example of the council's unwavering commitment to preservation, conservation issues or whatever it is the bloody bolshie public are up in arms about these days. Colin is tasked with maintaining the shrine to Katherine 'Soricia' Minall (1908-1959), a poet of repute, equally famed as a staunch ally of the controversial Rev. Capulet Winter, a Pagan-leaning Christian folklorist and author of Vampires - A Family Tree. While tending the grave, Colin pricks his finger dripping blood into the soil. Thereafter, his dreams take a turn for the erotic horror as something he first takes to be a friendly dog slips in beside him under the sheets ...

Victoria Day - Mr Carter's Tale, or Two Christmas Eves: George Carter entertains Russell Club members at 'the Fox and Grapes,' Plumston, with another Christmas ghost story, this one via Lady Elizabeth Wardrop. The young owner of a cottage built on the site of a former Abbey comes under attack from a phantom hermit doomed to haunt his grotto in perpetuity "that he might be cleansed of the sin gluttony." Among his demands, the ghosts insists the poor fellow tell those in the fancy houses to keep their curtains drawn on Christmas Eve unless they are prepared to entertain particularly unpleasant gatecrashers.

[dem bones]

Sam Derby - The Hunting of the Masu’wa: Augustus Molyneaux, self-styled brilliant student of historical gastronomy, is flattered, if hardly surprised, to be honoured with an invitation to a rarely witnessed secret ceremony at St. Ethelbert's college. He really should have noted the significance of the date. A very michievous Jamesian take on George Hitchcock's splendid conte cruel, Invitation to the Hunt. As is invariably the case, the fiction in this issue is exemplary.

Selective non-fiction.

Rosemary Pardoe - Lady Wardrops Notes. Prickly subject of MRJ and women. Her Ladyship takes Darryl Jones to task over a statement in his introduction to the OUP Collected Ghost Stories. MRJ's alleged terror of physical contact (esp. with women) refuted; also; Why so many Mary's in MRJ's ghost stories?

Duncan J. Rule - M.R. James, Stoke Poges, and the Penn-Gray Society. How, from 1930-4, MRJ led a successful fund-raising campaign to purchase the ancient Stokes Poges churchyard and prevent it falling into the clutches of developers keen to erect the days equivalent of "luxury houses." Truly inspirational, which goes also for Mr. Rule's technology-enabled but, in the main, old-school detective work.

Carl Lavoie - Didactical Spectral: The Use of Parables in R.H. Malden's Nine Ghosts. Would need to bone up on author's work to comment as seems I've only met two of the nine, and that so long ago they no longer register.

Norman Darwen - A Lancashire Place of Safety?: E. G. Swain, The Place of Safety and the 'true' haunting — by ghostly Monk — of Headless Cross, Horwich.