Charles Birkin: Bibliography in progress

[allthingshorror]

May 7, 2009 11:36:40 GMT jamesdoig said:

An entertaining read in a similar vein is Frank Walford's Twisted Clay, first published in 1922 and banned here in Australia for 30 years. It was reprinted a few times by Horwitz in the 1960s. It's about a precocious 15 year old lesbian who murders her father when she learns he wants to take her to Europe to undergo experimental hormone treatment to cure her. She suffers bouts of insanity during which she is compelled by the ghost of her father to dig him up and plug the hole in the back of his head (he complains his brains are falling out, you see). When she's caught digging him up for the second time she's committed to an asylum. When she escapes she takes to prostitution and acquires a taste for murdering her clients Jill-the-Ripper style. After that it gets silly...

Werner Laurie (1933 UK.1st)

Has been on my hitlist for years, but have never found a copy in a bookshop. One day....

He did do a collection called The Ghost and Albert and Other Stories - which is cracking. I tihnk it's one of those books up in the loft, may have to take a trip up there at some point...

[Johnlprobert]

Well I love Birkin (as has been well documented) and it sounds as if I'd love RR Ryan as well. Dem - the photo of Sir C on the Midnight House books IS rather dashing & I've taken to wearing a simliar style of three-piece black suit with fobwatch getup as a break from the velvet and before the weather turns too warm.

I've had no luck getting a reply from Mr Pelan in my attempts to buy his Brennan book but at last I think I have it on order from elsewhere.

[dem]

The only photo I have of him is this one. Well pleased with the way it came out 'cause it's dead tiny on the back of Where Terror Stalked.

Legend

Thanks for letting us in on the finer details of your summer range, your Lordship. Not going for the 'boating on the Thames' look this year, then? I'm thinking maybe it's time i moved on from my lipstick street-drinker phase after what happened last week when I was sitting on a bench outside the newsagent minding my own, when some good-natured, pony-tailed fellow, wearing a colossally oversized pair of shorts, shook his head at me sadly and plonked a fucking quid in my hand.

[thebluelizard]

So many great new posts to respond to on this thread.

David A. Riley -- Thank you for the Pelan and Midnight House update and links. Much appreciated.

James Doig -- I'm a relative newcomer here myself. I'm particularly happy to see you have joined since I came across your name not long ago on the Wikipedia entry for R.R. Ryan and learned about your upcoming contribution about Ryan to The Ghost Story Society's next All Hallows. It piqued my interest enough to join the Society so I could get a copy! Very much looking forward to reading your article when it comes out. Also, your tastes seem right up my alley -- thanks for the tip about TWISTED CLAY which sounds wonderful. I have purchased a couple of the Ramble House editions -- their Tod Robbins collection and TENEBRAE. I see they've also done a combo of Robbins' MYSTERIOUS MARTIN and THE MASTER OF MURDER, unfortunately after I paid handsomely for copies of the originals.

Demonik, thank you for the FINGERS OF FEAR recommendation. Will you come visit me in the poorhouse after I've ordered it and the Wordsworth goodies you have turned me onto? At least the Wordsworth editions don't cost an arm and a leg. I will add requests for DEVIL'S SPAWN and the Ryan (and pseudonyms) books and, yes, TWISTED CLAY too to your Wordsworth link.

Great to meet all of you on here. Best, Dennis

[jamesdoig]

Yes, and it's nice to see so many many others with an interest in pre-war supernatural thrillers - half the fun is just tracking them down!

R.R. Ryan piqued my interest because so little was known about him. Another British thriller who is still completely unknown is Mark Hansom who wrote for Wright & Brown in the 1930s. Unfortunately the W&B offices were destroyd in the blitz, so publishing records can't help in this case.

By the way, I'm trying to figure out how to insert images here - I take it I need to put them onto a web server first and then insert a link? Excuse the ignorance....

[dem]

May 8, 2009 6:10:16 GMT jamesdoig said:

By the way, I'm trying to figure out how to insert images here - I take it I need to put them onto a web server first and then insert a link? Excuse the ignorance....

Hope this link helps, James:

Vault Guide to Posting Images.

Tod Robbins is about the only person mentioned over the past few days whose work i'm vaguely familiar with thanks to Birkin recycling much of Silent, White & Beautiful over the early Creeps books when he was still using name authors and the series was still sensible. He's yet another fellow worthy of Wordsworth's attention though if i'm selfish, i'd go for the novel The Unholy Three over a best short stories collection 'cause all i've seen of it is a cover scan, but both are deserving cases.

[jamesdoig]

Thanks, the link is just what I wanted.

As for possible Wordsworth authors, I notice elsewhere you summarise some Hume Nisbet stories - he's surely worth a collection - there are more supernatural tales in The Haunted Station and Stories Weird and Wonderful, though they're mostly occult romance things. Perhaps Guy Boothby too, though previous efforts to collect him have coming to nothing.

I see Mark Valentine has done some themed anthologies - werewolves and occult detectives. What about geographical themes? The Mysterious East; Darkest Africa; The Frozen North etc etc

[marksamuels]

Love that photo of Birkin, Dem.

I’ve sometimes seen Sir Charles's work slated for its “excesses”, and he does have a penchant for certain recurring themes that are disturbing to say the least; Nazi Concentration Camps, children killing or being killed, murderous lunatics on the loose, vengeful sideshow “freaks”, homosexuals killing straights, or vice versa. To date, I’ve read four of his collections, A Haunting Beauty, The Harlem Horror, My Name is Death and The Smell of Evil. What he’s doing is working in the tradition of the Conte Cruel, straight from the Villiers de Isle Adam school (and, by the way, some of Poe’s tales) as well as the theatre of The Grand Guignol, which he frequented in Montmartre during his youth. His goal is simply to present the worst examples of human cruelty his imagination can come up with (and, sometimes from personal experience, as in “Waiting for Trains”).

So when someone comes up with a tirade of self-righteous contempt for Birkin’s work, you can be sure that the objection is based on the choice of subject matter and not on stylistic grounds: because Birkin, at his best, can write prose of a quality that stands comparison with any of the greats in weird fiction. He’s marvellous at characterisation, the telling detail, and for sheer horror and suspense, he can’t be topped.

Without Dem and the Vault, I'd not have got onto this whole Birkin jag, and not now be feverishly trying to complete my collection of his tales.

Mark S.

[dem]

The first criticism of Birkin i ever read was T. E. D. Klein's entry on him in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror & The Supernatural which begins "British author specialising in tales of cruelty... " and concludes " ... for many readers this genteelly tricked up sadism is what horror is all about." I'm not sure if Klein meant the latter as a compliment, but Birkin's work is certainly "what horror is all about" to me, though i can see why so many people genuinely find him off-putting (For a pro versus anti thread see Dennis Wheatley's Shafts Of Fear) . For all that he wrote as many laugh out loud funny - albeit sick - stories as he did sombre reflections on war crimes, not long after we started Vault i tried reading everything i'd collected of his in one splurge, from the Creeps contributions through to his final pieces for Hugh Lamb ... and had to give up somewhere around So Pale, So Cold, So Fair (nice mushroom cloud cover!) because it was getting to be really depressing. There are moments of melancholy beauty, but ultimately it's the fiction of no hope, no redemption and i found it very difficult to take your average horror story as anything other than nice, silly escapist entertainment after him.

It would be great to see him back in print and widely available for a whole new audience to love and hate.

[marksamuels]

TED Klein's entry on Birkin for the Penguin Encyclopedia strikes me as being wrongheaded. (I read it earlier today.)

For example TED says "Birkin's stories range in style from the chatty to the trite...but what most marks his tales is the predictable nastiness of their conclusions."

Well, I suppose "chatty" is one way of describing an author with an acute ear for characterisation right across the social spectrum, and "trite" is one way of describing an author who can take your breath away with an atmosphere of menacing suspense.

And I'm not really sure that "nastiness" comes into it: after all, horror stories are best ended in a horrible fashion rather than merrily. Berkin's by no means an illiterate splatter-merchant who drips his pen in gore on every page and can scarcely string a grammatical sentence together. On the contrary, he's a polished stylist. His horrors are often so nasty because they trip light switches in the darkest depths of the human psyche. And those sudden flashes are a legitimate artistic end.

I think TED is way off mark with his "genteelly ticked up sadism" remark. "Sadism" implies that Birkin derives some form of pleasure from the horrible events he writes about. Really? And did Lovecraft get his kicks out of imagining scholars being eaten by cosmic octopi? And was Poe slavering with delight as he imagined the guillotine descending?

Bottom line: you can't request that an author censor his own imagination, he has to go wherever it takes him. It's true that sometimes he may leave readers behind, shaking a disapproving finger, but that's the price you pay.

I'm ranting aren't I? I'll shut up.

Mark S.

[dem]

May 8, 2009 21:06:20 GMT marksamuels said:

Berkin's by no means an illiterate splatter-merchant who drips his pen in gore on every page and can scarcely string a grammatical sentence together.

Nowt wrong with being an illiterate splatter merchant in my book, Mr. S. As long as the story entertains on some level, that will do me. It's the self-consciously 'literate' stuff that does my head in.

I could never work out who that "genteelly ticked up sadism" remark was directed at. I'm sure it's as you say, Klein was inferring that Birkin was getting a cheap thrill from his writing, but i took it that he was, if you like, accusing him of pandering to the sado-masochistic tendencies of his readers? I've certainly read far more rabid criticisms of his work. Klein just damns him with faint praise, but i agree, he's way off with the "chatty and trite" line.

[jamesdoig]

[/center]

Here's the Horwitz edition of Twisted Clay. They reprinted it in 1960 after it was removed from the banned list, and reprinted it again in 1962. You can sometimes pick up cheap copies from ebay and abebooks. The cover shows a tantalising Jean Deslines, serial killer and general nutter.

[marksamuels]

Not sure that shouldn't be "dips his pen" rather than "drips his pen". Hmmm....

Nowt wrong with being an illiterate splatter merchant in my book, Mr. S. As long as the story entertains on some level, that will do me. It's the self-consciously 'literate' stuff that does my head in.

Well, for me, an illiterate splatter merchant's work might conceivably be entertaining, but probably for all the wrong reasons---if it's really, really awful. I'm trying to think of a term that might more accurately reflect what I mean (not sure that "splatter merchant" quite does the job). Perhaps after a night's sleep

Mark S.

[thebluelizard]

May 8, 2009 11:57:20 GMT marksamuels said:

So when someone comes up with a tirade of self-righteous contempt for Birkin’s work, you can be sure that the objection is based on the choice of subject matter and not on stylistic grounds: because Birkin, at his best, can write prose of a quality that stands comparison with any of the greats in weird fiction. He’s marvellous at characterisation, the telling detail, and for sheer horror and suspense, he can’t be topped.

Mark S.

Mark -- I couldn't have said it better. You have very beautifully stated why I love Birkin's work so much. And he is the only horror writer I've read as an adult who has actually scared me!

Dennis

[dem]

Hard to credit it, but another Birkin magazine appearance - Some New Pleasures Prove featured in the solitary issue of NEL's doomed, Chetwynd-Hayes edited Ghoul magazine in 1976. I shouldn't think the readers were capable of too many "ghastly giggles" by the time they'd finished reading that one.