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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 7, 2010 8:16:09 GMT
That all three should also be included in Mr. Pelan's A Haunted Beauty which, to these eyes, looks like an attempted greatest hits collection, suggests they are among his most popular stories and a good place for the novice to start. If you don't find them to your taste, chances are, you won't like Birkin. I'd agree with that. What I have found disappointing with the Midnight House volume is the number of typos, which I find rather odd seeing as the stories in the paperbacks we read were typo free, so I guess maybe they used his original manuscripts? Anyway:
A Haunting Beauty - Jealous Jacqueline, living the highlife as a dancer, is furious to discover that her ex-boyfriend Eugen de Couliere (they've all got names like that in this one) is to be married to gorgeous American socialite Shirley Stewart. Jacqui engineers her death, Eugen gets upset, and this doesn't end at all like you might be expecting, with Jacqui's homemade jewellery and Shirley's head (decapitated by express train if you please) all playing a part. Oh all right I suppose it IS a Birkinesque ending - I'm just getting more evil in my old age  This is by no means the best story in the book, but it does illustrate nicely Birkin's understanding of women, or at least a certain type of woman. The casual asides regarding the Parisian high life, as well as mention of things like Lebanese dentists with perverse sexual interests, are far more suggestive that he was familiar with all these sorts of people, as it doesn't feel as if these things are mentioned to shock or titillate but to add authenticity. |
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Post by dem on Aug 7, 2010 9:13:49 GMT
John Pelan has been known to pay the odd fleeting visit to Vault, so hopefully this recent burst of Birkin activity will act as a distress flare as he is best positioned to answer a number of questions. Both A Haunting Beauty and Lords Of The Refuge are from So Pale, So Cold, So Fair (Tandem, 1970: dedication: For my wife, Janet, who is allergic to all 'unpleasantness'), the last of his collections to be published in the UK. Anyhow, the title story was adapted for radio as Meeting in Athens ( The Price Of Fear, 1973) and can be downloaded for free from Fear You Can Hear (you'll probably want, among several others, the adaptation of R. Chetwynd-Hayes' The Ninth Removal while you're there!) |
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Post by marksamuels on Aug 7, 2010 12:27:55 GMT
Yes, it's a fine radio adaptation: I suppose Vincent Price (as himself) is the central character in all the episodes of the series? I don't know, having only listened to the Birkin one.
Mark S.
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Post by noose on Aug 7, 2010 14:00:28 GMT
i'm sure someone will be able to improve on this, but my "research" has so far turned up only three Birkin magazine appearances, all of them reprints. As mentioned, 'Some New Pleasures Prove' showed up in the doomed Ghoul (and most likely helped kill it) in 1976. As a brief aside on Ghoul - the last few weeks have seen me get in touch with about 5 designers, art editors and in-house artists who worked at NEL during this period - and they all agree across the board that the real reason the magazine folded is that nobody was interested in working on a horror magazine - they were all more into the Science Fiction mag and felt it more challenging than working on creeps and ghouls. So while it was easy to snaffle the odd paperback cover for a magazine cover or special poster - no-one was wanting to commit t doing the illustrations that would run alongside articles, stories etc... Hope this helps - and the interviews I'm gathering will all be appearing in forthcoming editions of The Paperback Fanatic. |
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Post by dem on Aug 7, 2010 14:27:41 GMT
Thanks for that Johnny. I think this was one occasion where NEL were too slow out of the blocks. Peter Haining was most likely devoting all his time to his MEWS side project in 1976 - ideally, you'd have wanted his weight behind the project. if they'd launched a similar horror mag five years earlier, i'm sure it would have survived beyond the pilot.
Good luck with the interviews/ articles!
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Post by Johnlprobert on Aug 29, 2010 7:45:14 GMT
It's Birkin time again at Probert Towers as we press on with selections from the second Midnight House volume! The Harlem Horror - Nasty pulp fiction at its best. Michael & Penelope Harwood set off for New York with little daughter June in tow. When June goes missing it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the other small children who've vanished could it? Or that famous British surgeon that disappeared a few years ago? Or the fact that the freak show on Coney island is now getting a regular supply of new little additions? This one almost falls over itself to get to the nasties, with the set up of the above done in a few scant paragraphs. But Birkin decides that it's not nasty enough. Read the last couple of paragraphs to find out why we think Birkin was probably either the jolliest soul at a dinner party, or the kind of person who never, ever got invited to them. The Godsend - Gerald and Hayley Poulsen have to meet Gerald's potential new boss for dinner. But there's no-one to babysit baby Martin. Surely he'll be safe with mad old Moira Bishopsgate who's just wandered into the building having escaped from the asylum where she was incarcerated after losing her own baby under hideous circumstances? Won't he? WONT'T HE? 
A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts - This has been discussed elsewhere, and I still love it - proper horrible horror with a horrible setting, horrible villains and a horrible outcome. Well done Sir Charles! The Kiss of Death - A bit drawn out this one but once again we get Birkin's disdain for money-grabbing high society widows who deserve nothing less than to end up in bed with an ex-lover suffering from the terminal stages of leprosy. Did Birkin not have ANY good relationships with women? |
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Post by dem on Aug 30, 2010 21:01:22 GMT
As far as i can make out, The Last Night, as revived in Pan Horror #3 was the first story he had published (it might well have been the first he ever wrote), closely followed by The Harlem Horror so i guess you could say he set his stall out early - "This one almost falls over itself to get to the nasties" just about sums it up. As he gets the hang of it, Birkin begins to pay more attention to atmosphere and suspense, but The Harlem Horror is sheer Not At Night punk lit. - "here's a fucken horror story for you, kids!". By my hopeless-at-maths calculations, he's 26 when he includes it in Shivers in 1936. Shortly afterward he writes "The Happy Dancers" and you start wishing he'd go back to being the genial, life-affirming old Charles of The Harlem Horror days. There's the germ in The Happy Dancers that will eventually, three decades later, be taken to its extreme in A Lovely Bunch Of Coconuts and Waiting For Trains. I'll bet he never once won an award for his services to the genre as either author or editor, but i'm equally certain he'll never be forgotten while the chimneys of Probert Towers point their blasphemous fingers at the sky. He was a bit good, wasn't he?
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Post by Johnlprobert on Sept 1, 2010 10:48:17 GMT
A Poem and a Bunch of Roses - Birkin seems to reserve his very nastiest fates for stupid people. I mean, if you were a young gorgeous girl who had an affair with a married man who was now dead, would you accept an invitation from his widow to spend a week at her remote French castle complete with dungeon and a 7 foot simpleton-cum-drunken sex maniac servant? Honestly, some people...
Don't Ever Leave Me - If you were an immensely rich Italian architect destined to become even richer by the imminent marriage to an heiress but you had an inconvenient mistress whom you were planning to bump off by burying in a recently unearthed underground chamber, wouldn't you make sure that huge pile of earth at its entrance wasn't in imminent danger of being bulldozed across it while you were in there with her, thus delivering a rather poetic if inconvenient and somewhat fatal justice? Honestly, some people...
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Post by dem on Sept 1, 2010 13:35:02 GMT
i don't know about "stupid" - isn't he pointing out, rather forlornly, that naivete and an unshakable childlike belief in the goodwill of others will get you killed in this rotten world? Then again, there's a big appreciation of the Grand Guignol going on and that was never shy of indulging sadism for sadism's sake ....
There's a bit in Mike Ashley's Who's Who ... where he refers to one of Birkin's last stories A Low Profile in The 10th Fontana Book Of Great Horror Stories (for some reason, he resorted to his old 'Charles Lloyd' pseudonym for the occasion). The story is based on Birkins experience of being bombed out during the 1974 Cyprus conflict. He seems to have had a knack of being in the right wrong place at the right wrong time to find inspiration for his fiction!
One of my most returned to non-fiction books is Patrick Pringles's Stand And Deliver: The History Of The Highwaymen (Museum, 1950), a book i fluked from a library sale on the strength that "it might be interesting". It's miles better than that. He's hardly into his introduction when:
"We all know now that I am only writing about highwaymen for the gratification of my own base, society-thwarted lusts for adventure, cruelty, murder, plunder, rapine (and rape) - and that you are reading this book for the same unworthy motives. So much the better. This means that I don't have to keep on telling you that I don't enjoy it when I do, and you haven't got to pretend to be shocked."
It is a wonderful piece of research but, at the same time, it's far more generous on belly-laughs than any book i know of marketed as "humour". And in approach, it is similar - for me, if few/ no others - to how Birkin approached his horrors. "This is what I'm going to be doing in this book - I'm just warning you so you can put it down now and save yourself being "appalled" ". But you can't, can you?"
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Post by Johnlprobert on Sept 3, 2010 18:18:28 GMT
Then again, there's a big appreciation of the Grand Guignol going on and that was never shy of indulging sadism for sadism's sake .... how Birkin approached his horrors. "This is what I'm going to be doing in this book - I'm just warning you so you can put it down now and save yourself being "appalled" ". But you can't, can you?" I'd agree with all of that, and I DO think it's important that a book that claims to be horror does what it says on the tin, which Mr Birkin achieves admirably: The Belt - The old 'possessed item of clothing routine' undergoes a particularly nasty makeover with this French tale (I think Birkin must have spent a lot of time there) of a belt possessed by the spirit of a wife and child-murdering alcoholic. Scarcely has mild-mannered Clive put it on than he's beating a pussy cat to death and splattering its blood all over his poor wife Nina, for whom the worst is yet to come. Really nasty. Old Mrs. Strathers - She's had a stroke. Can't move, can't talk, and most of all can't tell her son Ronnie that his wife's having it off with Big Charlie. It all ends in tears of course. Well, with Mrs Strathers' face burnt off actually, and Ronnie dead and the other two facing the hangman in a typically jolly tale of everyday 'common folk' The Beautiful People - A bit of a mis-step here with a LONG and unremarkable crime story featuring poor little richkid Ray who contrives to organise his own kidnapping so his mum will pay the ransom. There's a moment towards the end that's almost 'Coconut' worthy, but it's all too little, too late. T-I-M - Much better! Five year old Jimmy's mother collapses and tells him to telephone for the doctor. As she lies there slowly expiring little Jimmy does his best to explain to the speaking clock that his mummy is dying. Sheer class. The Hitch - Caspar & Honor Wend are back from their Bavarian holiday with gifts aplenty, including a lovely lampshade made from what looks like parchment with some lovely seahorses on it. Their maid, ex-concentration camp victim Gretel has a lovely picture of her brother-in-law who was always proud of the marine-themed tattoo he had across his chest. Oh dear... |
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 3, 2010 19:56:42 GMT
The Hitch - Caspar & Honor Wend are back from their Bavarian holiday with gifts aplenty, including a lovely lampshade made from what looks like parchment with some lovely seahorses on it. Their maid, ex-concentration camp victim Gretel has a lovely picture of her brother-in-law who was always proud of the marine-themed tattoo he had across his chest. Oh dear... Is there not a somewhat similarly-themed story by Roald Dahl? |
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Post by dem on Sept 3, 2010 20:03:23 GMT
i found The Hitch unbearable - that's when i thought i'd take a break from him as he was making me too depressed and upset! Imagine!
i'm almost certain that The Belt is an extended version of Henri Larne which first appeared back in the 'thirties in yet another Creeps volume, Thrills. He rewrote a few of the early ones, most likely to trowel on the atmosphere of dread with plenty of build up, but i'm not sure it always worked. i certainly preferred the short and brutal stab at The Cockroach over the later remodelled version.
i've a review - make that savaging! - of The Harlem Horror some place where the author sneeringly points out that nobody on earth speaks like the characters in The Beautiful People but i'm not so sure he's right. Imagine Birkin's intimate circle of affluent friends attempting to talk like hippies and drop outs to shock mumsie and daddy and they probably would get it that wrong. I'd agree it doesn't show Charles at his best, though. It takes such a bloody age to get going.
Not yet had the pleasure of T-I-M but it sounds gloriously, unmissably horrible from that teaser!
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Post by Johnlprobert on Sept 6, 2010 11:05:36 GMT
And to finish...
Special Diet - A Birkin classic. Should mad fat psychotic homicidal potential child-murdering old lady be kept at home? Or not? Possibly even more relevant now than in its day, Birkin actually plays nicely on the daughter's feelings of guilt as barmy old mum pleads not to be put away while keeping her eye on her little eight year old grand-daughter's throat....
Shelter - Lost in a storm? Found an old farm? With a farmer and two beautiful women in it? A terse lesson in leaving the light on and keeping your hands to yourself when you go to bed, unless you want the phrase 'dropping off' to refer to something other than the onset of sleepy time.
And that's it, which makes us very sad as we've now exhausted our Birkin collection. Any potential donations / loans of Spawn of Satan, So Pale So Cold So Fair or The Smell of Evil would be gratefully entertained.
In the meantime we're off to Edogawa Rampo land!
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 6, 2010 11:34:29 GMT
In the meantime we're off to Edogawa Rampo land! Oh good! I shall be interested to learn what you think of Rampo. |
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Post by Dr Terror on Sept 7, 2010 10:40:59 GMT
a 7 foot simpleton-cum-drunken sex maniac servant?  As your sometime editor, I think you should think about what you've written there, Lord P... |
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