Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle - Terror & Mystery

[dem]

Just as H. G. Wells conceived one of the all-time nastiest revenge stories in The Cone, Conan-Doyle came up with a shocker of his own, the Poe-esque The New Catacombs, which seems to have slipped below the radar of most anthologists who prefer ... well, the other stories in this book (and The Brown Hand).

Tales Of Terror And Mystery (Pan, 1978) isn't the best example of his horror and supernatural stories, but it does include The New Catacomb, The Leather Funnel, The Case Of Lady Sannox, The Brazilian Cat, The Horror Of The Heights and the (very dated, IMO) The Terror Of Blue John Gap. My main reason for reproducing it here is , of course, Alan Lee's excellent watercolor.

Alan Lee

Tales Of Terror:

The Horror of the Heights
The Leather Funnel
The New Catacomb
The Case of Lady Sannox
The Terror of Blue John Gap
The Brazillian Cat

Tales Of Mystery:

The Lost Special
The Beetle-Hunter
The Man with the Watches
The Japanned Box
The Black Doctor
The Jew's Breastplate
The Nightmare Room

Other minor masterpieces are the novella's The Captain Of The Pole Star, The Parasite and John Barrington Cowles, all featuring men driven to their dooms or thereabouts by dead or undead women, the famous Mummy story Lot 142 and The Silver Hatchet.

E. F. Bleiler collected the majority of these in:

The Best Supernatural Tales Of Arthur Conan Doyle - Selected and Introduced by E. F. Bleiler (Dover, 1979)

Photograph: Lida Moser

E. F. Bleiler - Arthur Conan Doyle And His Supernatural Fiction

The Bully Of Brocas Court
The Captain Of The Polestar
The Brown Hand
The Leather Funnel
Lot No. 249
J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement
The Great Keinplatz Experiment
A Literary Mosaic
Playing With Fire
The Ring Of Thoth
The Los Amigos Fiasco
The Silver Hatchet
John Barrington Cowles
Selecting A Ghost
The American's Tale

The Horror Of The Heights: And then there was Myrtle's head. Do you really believe - does anybody really believe - that a man's head could be driven clean into his body by the force of a fall?"

Gallant aviator Joyce-Armstrong believes that the "mysterious" deaths of several pilots were caused by malevolent entities that haunt the skies 30,000 feet above Wiltshire. Taking to the air in his trusty monoplane, he seeks out the beauty and horror of the heights! Fortunately for us, Joyce-Armstrong belongs to that commendable breed who keep scribbling away in their journal right up to the moment of doom. His final entry is priceless.

The Leather Funnel: Lionel Dacre is an occultist and collector of macabre artifacts, one of which is the inscribed funnel. To test his theory that one can divine in sleep something of the history of a given relic, he persuades the narrator to bed down with it. Our man duly witnesses the ordeal of a murderess who was put to the extraordinary question in a bid to get her to name accomplices. This involves her being tied to a wooden horse while gallons of water are poured down her throat. Unsurprisingly, the narrator wakes up screaming and his host comes rushing to his bed. On being told of his dreadful nightmare, Dacre enquires:
"Did you stand it to the end?"
"No, thank God. I awoke before it really began"
"Ah, it is just as well for you. I held out to the third bucket".

Hugh Lamb has written of The Leather Funnel: " ... the torture of a 17th century woman is observed by the narrator in a dream, in a story almost pointless other than parading this cruelty." Yes, it really is that good.

The Brazilian Cat: Greylands, Clipton-On-The-Marshes, Suffolk. Amiable loafer Marshall King stands to gain a fortune and a title when his uncle, Lord Southerton, dies, but the old boy's proving to be a tenacious bastard so he's thinking of tapping up his wealthy cousin Everard who is not short of a few bob. Everard has just returned from Brazil with a wife and menagerie and is reputedly the most decent fellow on earth, so Marshall has little hesitation in accepting his invitation to stay with him in the country. Mrs. King proves to be a fly in the ointment, she's openly hostile to Marshall from the first, but Everard - he really is a lovely bloke - explains that this is just another example of her obsessive jealousy. To make up for her rudeness, Everard treats him to a meeting with his pride and joy, Tommy the Brazilian cat, a puma-like monstrosity who, should it ever develop a taste for humans, will become "the most absolutely treacherous and bloodthirsty creature upon earth". Thank goodness that Everard is such a wonderful fellow and not some psycho who'd lock you up with this beast to get his hands on Lord Southerton's inheritance, eh?

The Adventure Of The Sussex Vampire: Holmes is asked to investigate when Ferguson's second wife, a Peruvian, is twice discovered looming over their newborn child, sucking from a wound in her neck. On the face of it, a classic case of a vampire caught red handed (and fanged), but as the super-rationalist scoffs to his ever-bamboozled sidekick: "What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their graves by stakes driven through their hearts? It's pure lunacy."

The New Catacomb: Rome. Under a grilling from his friend and colleague, the brilliant young archaeologist Kennedy admits to Burger that the reason he ran away with Miss Saunderson wasn't because he loved her - he didn't - but for the sheer thrill of thing. The fact that she was reputedly engaged to another fellow added extra spice. Whoever this loser was, his feelings and those of the ruined Miss Saunderson are no concern of his. In his turn, Burger shares with Kennedy the location of a vast catacomb which predates those excavated thus far. It's really not the place you'd want to be stranded in the dark by a wronged love rival as it expands for miles. A man could be stuck down there for decades without finding his way out ....

The Case Of Lady Sannox: Her loose behaviour scandalises polite society and drives her husband to distraction. The latest to share her bed is the brilliant young surgeon Dr. Douglas Stone, renowned for his prowess between the sheets as much as his cool handling of the scalpel. How can his Lordship make the baggage less lippy and ruin Stone into the bargain?

Playing With Fire: A seance where ordinary, intelligent people unleash a zany, evil force - with terrifying results ..... London. The small party at 17 Badderley Gardens will never again realise the same success they enjoyed the night M. Paul de Duc joined them for a seance. M de Duc believes that "when you imagine a thing you make a thing" - a terrifying concept when you think about it - and on this evidence he's right. First, via medium Mrs. Delamere, a chatty spirit gives the assembled invaluable insight into the afterlife, then the Frenchman rather foolishly conducts his experiment ... and materialises a unicorn. Which promptly goes berserk.

The American's Tale: Montana. After being humiliated by quiet English bloke Tom Scott in Simpsons Bar, roughneck Alabama Joe Hawkins sets out to ambush him at midnight in Flytrap Gulch. Come the following morning, Scott is still hale and hearty but there's no sign of Hawkins. The American contingent decide that Scott must have murdered him, and lead him out to the Gulch to be lynched. The British lie in wait by a huge flytrap and it looks like things are going to kick off until the monster plant grosses everyone out by parting it's leaves and showing off the remnants of its last meal ...

[dem]

Arthur Conan Doyle - Tales Of Unease (Wordsworth Editions, 2008)

Nathan Clair

The Ring Of Thoth
The Lord Of Chateau Noir
The New Catacomb
The Case Of Lady Sannox
The Brazilian Cat
The Brown Hand
The Horror Of The Heights
The Terror Of Blue John Gap
The Captain Of The Polestar
How It Happened
Playing With Fire
The Leather Funnel
Lot No. 249
The Los Amigos Fiasco
The Nightmare Room

Blurb:
Selected and with an introduction by David Stuart Davies.

This gripping set of tales by the master storyteller Arthur Conan Doyle is bound both to thrill and unnerve you.

In these twilight excursions, Doyle's vivid imagination for the strange, the grotesque and the frightening is given full rein. We move from the mysteries of Egypt and the strange powers granted by The Ring of Thoth to the isolated ghostlands of the Arctic in The Captain of the Polestar; we encounter a monstrous creature in The Terror of Blue John Gap and the beings that live above our heads in The Brazilian Cat and The Leather Funnel; and we shudder at the thing in the next room in Lot 249.

i'm not so sure the blurb is quite as accurate as it might be - "the beings that live above our heads in The Brazilian Cat and The Leather Funnel"? - but good to see Mr. Davis has included some excellent, non-'supernatural' material which means that, even if you have the Bleiler/ Dover collection you'll still want this.

[dem]

The Captain Of The Polestar: Captain Nicholas Craigie is a brave and capable fellow but he is also a man driven by a death wish. Holding his own life so cheaply and prone to fly into mad rages at the slightest provocation, his loyal crew fear the worst when, in appalling weather conditions and with rations running low, he insists on steering the whaler Pole Star further into the treacherous Arctic ice floes. Their concerns that he's finally lost his sanity are surely confirmed by his insistence that his dead wife is calling to him from the ice wastes. Eventually he jumps ship to join his lost love and the search party find him dead in the snow, a contented smile on his face as "little crystals of ice and petals of snow" assume the shape of a woman who, leaning over, plants a kiss on the lips of the corpse.

told in journal form by a young Doctor to whom the Captain is, for the most part, unusually cordial, even friendly. first time i read this i thought it was his best ghost story; maybe not so much now, but the bit where Craigie goes charging off across the ice to almost certain doom still strikes a chord; very Frankenstein.

Lot No. 249: Oxford student Edward Bellingham, a learned Egyptologist and specialist in Oriental languages, is unpopular with fellow students Monkhouse Lee, Peterson and Smith ("a decent Christian" and therefore, our hero) although none of them could sat why they dislike the corpulent, smug, sneaky git. Among Bellingham's prize possessions is a hideous mummy he bought at auction which, unknown to the others, he's succeeded in reanimating for use against those who earn his displeasure. Bellingham's is not the familiar plodding-man-in-rotting-bandages but a black and shrivelled thing that fair jogs around the University in pursuit of it's victims. Monkton Lee is fortunate to escape with his life after the grim relic effortlessly picks him up and throws him in the river and before long the mystery assailant has the entire University in the grip of panic. Where will it strike next? Up until now, it's a cracking, if not particularly frightening horror story (lack of death's), but the climax is so lame you can't help but wonder if Conan-Doyle had lost interest and just wanted it wrapped up.

it probably doesn't read like it, but i enjoyed revisiting both.

[lemming13]

Just finished trawling through Sir Arthur's Round the Fire Stories in ebook format (prepared atrociously, I may say, by Feedbooks; found a much better version on horrormasters, without the repeated typos). First published in 1908, it contains a few old favourites and some I hadn't come across before (not that I remember, anyway). Some would have made excellent Holmes stories, but all of them were very readable, unlike the collection The Green Flag, most of which were on the dull side.
The Leather Funnel - probably don't have to tell a single Vault member that this concerns a curious visionary experience based around a nondescript relic. No-one expects the French Inquisition...
The Beetle Hunter - a doctor with an interest in beetles is lured to the mansion of a madman on a strange errand.
The Man With the Watches - a nifty little mystery tale that Sherlock would have relished. When the 5 o'clock train for Manchester leaves London on 18th March, 1892, it carries in one compartment a stocky, bearded chap; and in the neighbouring one, a notably tall man and a female companion. When it reaches Rugby the door of one compartment is found open, and on checking, all three original passengers have disappeared. In their place is the body of a completely different man...
The Pot of Caviare - bit of a potboiler, but good Victorian melodrama, as a party of Europeans under siege during the Boxer Rebellion contemplate their fate; will the relief force reach them first, or will it be the rebels?
The Japanned Box - A man who in his youth was a notorious drunkard and debaucher, now appears to be a person of eminent respectability. But does he hide a guilty secret in the japanned box he guards so zealously - and whose is the female voice that cries out in his private chamber?
The Black Doctor - a popular country doctor is apparently the victim of a motiveless murder.
Playing With Fire - anthologised elsewhere, this one concerns a seance that goes wrong.
The Jew's Breastplate - again this one is a mystery, and has appeared in other collections. A prize exhibit in a small museum is repeatedly subjected to apparently mindless vandalism.
The Lost Special - neat little mystery about the dramatic vanishing of a specially commissioned train carrying an extremely paranoid VIP.
The Club-Footed Grocer - a thriller about a miser with a shady past, seeking help from his neglected nephew to fend off a band of villains.
The Sealed Room - a young man living in penurious circumstances in what was once a luxurious house, is burdened with a strange legacy; one room is sealed up, and he may not sell up or open it till he comes of age.
The Brazilian Cat - another popular anthology piece, telling the tale of two cousins and a large jungle cat.
The Usher of Lea House School - somewhat predictable, the story of a gentle, scholarly headmaster evidently being blackmailed by a thuggish master.
The Brown Hand - well-known yarn of a haunted medico and a phantom with one hand.
The Fiend of the Cooperage - classic yarn about the weird disappearances of watchmen from a cooperage on a tropic island.
Jelland's Voyage - a bit abrupt and unsatisfying, this short fragment concerns two clerks running a business overseas, and what arises from their inveterate gambling.
B24 - quite well-known, this one is the plea of a man who claims he was wrongly convicted of murder.
Not a bad lot, and there are some of his best horror stories here. Worth a look.

[dem]

Hey lemmy, hope you don't mind that I surgically removed the above post and grafted it on here for continuity purposes as a number of the stories also show up in Tales Of Mystery & Terror. The Sherlock Holmes tales have often been compiled into omnibus editions, but don't think there's ever been a complete Conan-Doyle's Mystery, Horror & Supernatural stories edition which is a bit of a shame? It's true he wrote his share of what E. F. Bleiler would ever dismissively refer to as 'routine commercial fiction', and from your review it seems that Round The Fire Stories carries some bloat, but when he's at the top of his game he's brilliant and, in the cases of The Leather Funnel, The Case Of Lady Sannox and The New Catacomb, surprisingly spiteful.

[cw67q]

Dec 17, 2010 20:33:50 GMT dem said:

The Sherlock Holmes tales have often been compiled into omnibus editions, but i don't think there's ever been a complete Conan-Doyle's Mystery, Horror & Supernatural stories edition which is a bit of a shame.

Hey Dem, not a budget collections, but a fine and very hefty volume from Ash-Tree Press:

www.ash-tree.bc.ca/atp105captainofthepolestar.htm

BTW I know i'm in the wrong thread for this but I'm in a bit of a rush: thanks again for the advent calendar entries (and also to all contributing authors) I'm way behind in reading them but will catch up some day. I have read Mark's story in Glyphotech and agree with the recommendation for this collection. The story Mark donated is great fun.

- Chris

[lemming13]

No objections to the move, dem, and I would have said so earlier if our locale hadn't been subjected to alternating power outs and loss of broadband services over the last few days. Clapped out wiring and braindead vandals, I'm afraid, are in abundance here. Still, at least my Kindle has a built-in light and could be recharged while the power was on. And some books are just better by candlelight.

[galleytrot]

A great anthology. My choice for favourite story is split between Lot 249 (which invented the walking mummy theme so profitable for Universal and Hammer) and the Horror of the Heights, which I always think is the best H.G. Wells story that Wells never wrote. I suspect it also gave Arthur C. Clarke part of the inspiration for A Meeting with Medusa.

[dem]

The Lord Of Chateau Noir: (The Strand, July 1894). The Franco-Prussian war. Captain Baumgarten of the 24th Posen Regiment falls into the clutches of Eustace, the mad Count of Chateau Noir. His is not an enviable position. The Count's wife died of grief when their brave son was captured, blinded and humiliated by a sadistic German Officer, and Eustace is a firm believer in "an eye for an eye."

How It Happened: (Strand, Sept. 1913). Communicated via a writing medium, the last moments of the master, who loses control of his shiny new thirty-horse-power roadster on treacherous Claystall Hill.

The Nightmare Room: (Strand, Dec. 1921). An anti-horror story, in that all the right ingredients are present and correct, but ...

Archie Mason learns that his beautiful wife, Lucille, who sacrificed her film career to marry him, has been carrying on with his best chum, Captain Jack Campbell. Worse still, she is planning to poison him! Archie puts her in a position where she must choose between them by condemning one or the other to an agonising death.

[clarence]

Just received my copy of this.
Looking forward to reading this book - the nights are starting to draw in again, so I can read them after dark.

Thanks for the summary demonic.

Clarence

[dem]

Which one did you get, Clarence? Tales of Unease? If so, I think you are in for a treat.

[Michael Connolly]

Feb 17, 2010 22:02:09 GMT dem said:

Arthur Conan Doyle - Tales Of Unease (Wordsworth Editions, 2008)

Nathan Clair

The Ring Of Thoth
The Lord Of Chateau Noir
The New Catacomb
The Case Of Lady Sannox
The Brazilian Cat
The Brown Hand
The Horror Of The Heights
The Terror Of Blue John Gap
The Captain Of The Polestar
How It Happened
Playing With Fire
The Leather Funnel
Lot No. 249
The Los Amigos Fiasco
The Nightmare Room

Blurb:
Selected and with an introduction by David Stuart Davies.

This gripping set of tales by the master storyteller Arthur Conan Doyle is bound both to thrill and unnerve you.

In these twilight excursions, Doyle's vivid imagination for the strange, the grotesque and the frightening is given full rein. We move from the mysteries of Egypt and the strange powers granted by The Ring of Thoth to the isolated ghostlands of the Arctic in The Captain of the Polestar; we encounter a monstrous creature in The Terror of Blue John Gap and the beings that live above our heads in The Brazilian Cat and The Leather Funnel; and we shudder at the thing in the next room in Lot 249.

i'm not so sure the blurb is quite as accurate as it might be - "the beings that live above our heads in The Brazilian Cat and The Leather Funnel"? - but good to see Mr. Davis has included some excellent, non-'supernatural' material which means that, even if you have the Bleiler/ Dover collection you'll still want this.

In this 1906 French illustration for "Lot no 249", the mummy is clearly Wilfred Brambell (who strangely wasn't born until 1912!).