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Post by dem bones on Oct 26, 2008 10:52:13 GMT
A. M. Burrage - Between The Minute And The Hour: Stories Of The Unseen (Herbert Jenkins, 1967) Anthony Skene - Preface
Between The Minute And The Hour The Hawthorn Tree Playmates The Affair At Paddock Cross The Waxwork The Ivory Cards The Green Scarf The Captain's Watch Smee The Oak Saplings One Who Saw The Gardener In Glenister Square The Gambler's Room A. M. Burrage (1889-1956) was an astonishingly prolific pulpster, specialising in juvenile fiction for popular boys magazines like The Gem (according to the not always reliable Penguin Encyclopedia Of Horror and the Supernatural we have him to thank for the Tufty club), insipid love and romance weepies for gurlies and, for the duration of the 'twenties when The London Magazine required an answer to E. F. Benson who was going great guns over at Hutchinsons with his ghost and horror stories. During his lifetime, the cream of these were collected in the scarce volumes Some Ghost Stories (Cecil Palmer, 1927) and, under the byline 'Ex Private-X', Someone In The Room (Jarrolds, 1931), the pseudonym having been adopted for his novel War Is War (Gollancz, 1930), by all accounts an embittered reflection on his experiences as a rifleman in the bloody trenches on the Western Front. The posthumous Between The Minute And The Hour (details above) samples both collections and adds previously uncollected stories, and Jack Adrian trumped this with Warning Whispers for the excellent Equation Chillers series in 1988, which exhumes a further seventeen ghost stories from the magazines and provides much need biographical detail. To my mind, Burrage's masterpiece is One Who Saw. It's among that small group of stories I am reluctant to re-read as I would hate for it not to affect me as strongly as when I first read it. So here are some of his other's, and the good news is, he had more than one classic in him! The Hawthorn Tree: Serringham, a chartered accountant recovering from a nervous breakdown due to overwork, removes himself to Maid's Rue, an Elizabethan cottage in Hazelsea ("one of the dullest holes on the East Coast"). He soon learns the legend of a local beauty whose flirtatious nature drove her suitors to despair, until she too fell victim to a fickle lover and ended her life with poison. As was the custom with suicides, her body was buried at the crossroads and a stake driven through her heart. On this spot stands the Hawthorn tree, cursed with a remarkable history: on several occasions it's been seen to wither alarmingly, only to revive when a death takes place among the immediate male population. After its fashion, the tree vampirises Serringham and drives him to his doom, haunted by the sweet-smelling spectre of the suicide. The Sweeper‘: Tessa Winyard, 22, is engaged as female companion to eighty-year-old Miss Ludgate of Billingdon Abbots. The old lady has a reputation for meanness which makes her extravagant gestures toward passing tramps and beggars all the more inexplicable. Miss Ludgate has her reasons. Eighteen years earlier an emaciated man called at the Abbots and after castigating him as a workshy scrounger she set him to work clearing all the leaves from the path. After a few sweeps he fell to the ground and with his dying breath promised to complete the job and “I’ll come for you, my lady, and we’ll feast together. Only see as you’re ready to be fetched when I come”. Since then his spectre has returned each autumn and with each passing year he draws closer to the house … ‘Smee’: At the Simpson’s Christmas party the twelve guests decide on a game of Smee (a superior variation of hide and seek) as the evening’s diversion. Mr. Simpson warns them to avoid the door leading to the back staircase as the descent is all but a sheer drop and eight years earlier young Brenda Ford broke her neck when she fell through in the dark. As the game gets underway it becomes clear that the group have been joined by an extra player … The Waxworks: Raymond Hewson, a journalist down on his luck, decides, for purposes of an article, to spend a night alone in the Murderers Den at the Waxworks. Among the replicas of such charmers as Crippen is a particular model, that of Dr. Bourdette, 'The French Jack The Ripper', which really disturbs him, and as the night drags on he can't help but be anxious that the cut throat was never captured ... The Captain's Watch: Would-be author Stella Colworth visits St. Fay intent on learning more about Cornish folklore from the natives. Sam Tuckey, landlord of The Lugger Inn tells her a ghost story involving a parrot, an exceptional mimic, who helps find a family heirloom after the death of his father. Benevolent spooks - humbug. Browndean Farm: The narrator and author friend Rudge rent the old farmhouse for the inevitable ridiculously low price, later to learn that it has remained unoccupied since previous occupant Stanley Stryde was hung for murder. Stryde, the village Romeo, maintained his innocence to the last, claiming the dead girl took her own life and he’d only buried her out of fear that the police wouldn’t believe him. Popular local opinion has it that he was telling the truth. Now the eighth anniversary of the “murder” is approaching and a ghostly presence makes itself known at Browndean Farm.
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Post by lobolover on Nov 4, 2008 20:11:22 GMT
Which of theese would you most recomend?
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Post by dem bones on Nov 7, 2008 9:13:01 GMT
Bearing in mind that I'm not exactly renowned for my good taste, One Who Saw would be the first choice. 'Smee', The Sweeper, Browndean Farm, Playmates and The Waxwork are all deserving of their reputation and if we move onto the Jack Adrian collection, The Attic, A Recurring Tragedy and the title story, Warning Whispers, are all top notch.
If you like E. F. Benson, chances are you'll like Burrage too. They both use similar themes and even, on occasion, plots, although I gather this was more by coincidence than design. Benson is probably the nastier. There are plenty of sadistic episodes in his supernatural & horror fiction and he's even been accused of not-so closet misogyny. It has to be said that he has also been very vociferously defended against this charge by Hugh Lamb, Cynthia Reavell and various Ghost Story Society luminaries!
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Post by lobolover on Nov 8, 2008 12:03:14 GMT
Oh I do like Benson,its just I read a very broad variety.
Now-ever tried Guy Boothby for instance?Read his short "A strange Goldfield" for instance and you wont be disapointed.
Ill try some of those.
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Post by monker on Jan 11, 2009 15:28:19 GMT
I hope you don't mind the late reply...
I'm pleased to see I'm not the only one who sees a lot of similarities between the two 'B's.
Having not read enough of Burrage for my liking, I tend to place a certain mystique about his material and it wouldn't surprise me if I came across a rare story that absolutely bowled me over. However, I could just as easily read ten others in a row that were merely well written tales worth reading with standard plots.
Benson's are nastier, bolder and virtually never benign but are laced with a certain intractability (for want of a better word) which would make it harder for them to surprise the reader.
Both writers do create a very similar mood when they are on song though.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 11, 2009 21:56:12 GMT
Yeah, would go along with Benson's having the edge when it came to nasty. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any instance of Burrage straying into the sadistic, all-out unpleasant realms of Benson in The Outcast/ The Face/ Wishing Well mode. If you like, Burrage's ghosts are only ever as malicious as they have to be to get the job done. When Benson's in a bad mood, he lets his spooks indulge their appetite for cruelty to the extreme on almost entirely innocent parties, which is something to be very grateful for. I mean, benign ghosts are maybe OK in very small doses but I'm glad he didn't make a habit of Macheon, The Friend In The Garden & Co.
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Post by lobolover on Feb 26, 2009 23:19:19 GMT
Anyone know a place has this cheap (please stop laughing ) ?
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Post by dem bones on Mar 26, 2010 18:39:31 GMT
A.M. Burrage - Warning Whispers (Equation, 1989) Selected and Introduced by Jack Adrian. The Acquittal For The Local Rag The Case Of Thissler And Baxter The Ticking Of The Clock The Imperturbable Tucker The Fourth Wall Warning Whispers The Little Blue Flames The Green Bungalow The Boy With Red Hair For One Night Only The Mystery Of The Sealed Garret Crookback The Recurring Tragedy The Attic The Garden Of Fancy Father Of The Man.
Bibliography and Acknowledgements.Blurb: "Always the images — the effects — Burrage works at are disturbing. Some are truly hair-raising ... An obsession with a figure seen in a moonlit garden ... The careless waving of a scarf from the upper window of an old house ... a child's footprints in the snow . . .' - from the Introduction
Alfred McLelland Burrage is one of the neglected masters of short supernatural fiction in the classic English tradition. Praised by such expert judges as M. R. James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the author of two of the most anthologized ghost stories of the past half century (`Smee' and 'The Sweeper'), Burrage's considerable output is now largely forgotten and unappreciated, even amongst habitual readers of weird fiction. This collection aims to put Burrage back where he belongs — at the forefront of the ghost story tradition in English. Jack Adrian presents 17 new tales, none of which appear in Burrage's Some Ghost Stories (1927), Someone in the Room (1931), or the posthumous Between the Minute and the Hour (1967).
These new stories span the period 1912 to 1930 and show both the range of Burrage's invention — from the genuinely horrific to the genuinely comic — and his accomplishments as a storyteller, making this a major publishing event for all ghost fiction enthusiasts.
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Post by jamesdoig on Mar 26, 2010 22:16:45 GMT
Jack Adrian is a pretty amazing researcher/anthologist. I think he lives in Oxford so he has the Bodleian at his fingertips - he must use it a lot because he's able to dig up stuff in the most obscure magazines. I think some of Burrage's stuff appeared in English pulps like Premier and the Red Magazine, which are now almost impossible to find outside a decent library.
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Post by dem bones on Mar 27, 2010 7:30:08 GMT
Went at Warning Whispers hammer and tongs when I got hold of a copy - and that was the problem. The stories are a blur to me now bar The Recurring Tragedy which utilises a similar idea to E. F. Benson's much nastier The Outcast. Read some 'Sapper' shorts quite recently and one that particularly works for me is the macabre gem Touch And Go (and if you're logged in, you should be able to download a pdf here). "someone really ought to have revived this by now!" Of course, someone already had. Jack Adrian in Strange Stories From The Strand. A few of us had Jack Adrian banged to rights as 'James Montague', author of the tremendous Worms until Justin spoilt our fun by pointing out it was most likely the work of Christopher Chowder. and then there was that unseemly spat in an early issue of The Ghost Story Society Newsletter. frightful business ....
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Post by jamesdoig on Mar 27, 2010 8:07:50 GMT
Spat? And what's a Ghost Story Society Newsletter?
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Post by dem bones on Mar 27, 2010 10:35:40 GMT
a typically striking Allen Koszowski cover illustration for The Ghost Story Society Newsletter #12 (Feb. 1992) The GSS was formed by Jeff Dempsey, Ro Pardoe, Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson and the first issue of the newsletter appeared in 1988. Don't know how long it lasted; I've numbers 2-12 inclusive but am sure they were still going after that. It was a bloody excellent read; along with the news, reviews, Notes & Queries and letters, regular items included The Ghost Story Gazeteer (usually the work of Mark Valentine although Ramsey Campbell gave us a guided tour of his favourite Mersey haunts in #7) and a look at 'Other Societies' (the ill-advised Vampire special caused plenty of grief ...). Anyway: Jack Adrian. It all started when Rosemary reviewed Mr. Adrian's book of E. F. Benson rarities, The Flint Knife in #2 (Jan. 1989). The following issue featured comments from Hugh Lamb and Cynthia Reavell, the former merely pointing out that EFB's The Countess Of Lowdnes Square contained four ghost stories, not three as Mr. Adrian insisted, while the latter took Jack to task over his allegedly "slapdash" introduction. Mrs. Reavell was particularly irked by his "obsessive presumption with what he interprets as Benson's hatred of women which is supposed to 'illuminate his secret leanings' ..." Well, in the following issue, Mr. Adrian responded with a splenetic attack on his critics - it really was worthy of Gerald Suster in mad dog mode - but i think that was the last the GSSN ever saw of him. A supremely unperturbed Hugh and Cynthia came back to his comments in #5 (Lamb reckoned that what JA was really shirty about was his review of Warning Whispers) and they appear to have had the readers' support in the dispute. the bride of demonik helpfully introduces lesbian vampires into the mix.
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Post by Steve on Mar 27, 2010 13:04:17 GMT
The GSS was formed by Jeff Dempsey, Ro Pardoe, Mark Valentine and Roger Dobson and the first issue of the newsletter appeared in 1988. i don't know how long it lasted; i've got numbers 2-12 inclusive but i'm sure they were still going after that. Going from the current Ghost Story Society website, The GSS Newsletter ran for 13 issues under Jeff Dempsey and Rosemary Pardoe alongside the annual Mark Valentine-edited All Hallows until Barbara and Christopher Roden took over around 1994, the newsletter being absorbed into All Hallows shortly afterwards. I notice that the October 1994 issue of All Hallows included a piece entitled "In Pursuit of The Countess of Lowndes Square" by Jack Adrian, which might suggest that either relations had improved by that point or, conversely, that Mr Adrian still didn't consider the matter settled.
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Post by jamesdoig on Mar 27, 2010 20:44:06 GMT
Thanks Dem, interesting stuff. JA sounds a bit sensitive - you should be able to take a bit of criticism in your stride.
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Post by jamesdoig on Mar 27, 2010 20:46:05 GMT
What about the Evertalsting Club (if I've got the name right)? That seems seems to include much the same membership as the old GSS.
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