Sapper: Ghost and horror shorts

[dem bones]

We've not had any Wordsworth suggestions for a while and i'm not even sure if this is one yet, but i don't think there's ever been a complete collection of Sapper's Ghost & Horror stories? It could be there aren't enough of them, but the early signs are encouraging. i know pulphack mentioned that Jack Adrian included some in his Sapper: The Best Short Stories (J M Dent, 1984) but the only one i'd read, or even knew of up 'til today was The House On The Headland, and i'm now so curious about the bloke i thought i'd try track down some more. It was worth the effort for this macabre offering which packs a horrible twist and wouldn't be out of place in one of the Creeps

Touch And Go from When Carruthers Laughed (1934): Jack Morgan and his bride to be can't believe their luck at finding a charming little house at Sunningdale available at a very modest price. Why so? Three years earlier, a gruesome murder took place there - a maniac cut off his wife's head. Another couple moved in afterward but the place has been vacant for nine months on account of it being impossible to find any local servants willing to work there, "Silly, hysterical girls - swearing that they saw things and heard noises: you know the sort of thing.' The one exception is the sombre-eyed housekeeper and terrible cook, Mrs. Gulliver, and she's hardly reassuring. Mrs. Gulliver comes from a family blessed/ cursed with the second sight, and warns Morgan of dire consequences should he move in. 'There's something, Mr. Morgan, that threatens this house. Don't ask me what it is, for that I can't tell you. I don't know myself. But it's there-it's always there. That I do know.'

The happy couple move in, except Mrs Morgan isn't happy for long. A friend, Marjorie Thurston, drops by and fills her in on all the salacious details of the murder and she begins to sense an evil presence about the place.

Jack is detained overnight in London, leaving his terrified wife to spend the night alone. A creak on the stairs. Footsteps. The door handle turns and she hears a hoarse chuckle as the gibbering fiend enters the room carrying his dreadful bundle ....

on the L C Currey site we also learn of;

The Finger Of Fate (1930) "collects fourteen stories. The Black Monk is a ghost story; Green Death is an English country house party murder committed by an exotic man-eating tree. Idol's Eye features murder by carbon monoxide, and has similarities to Wilkie Collins' A Terribly Strange Bed."

another with potential;

The Saving Clause (1927) "Includes The Horror at Staveley Grange a murder mystery solved by Ronald Standish, a Holmes-like private detective. McNeile considered this to be his best story."

If you don't mind reading from a screen, all of the above bar The House On The Headland, can be downloaded free from Project Gutenberg

any more suggestions welcome.

Unfortunately, during the same trawl, i also found out what awaits Jim Maitland and the evil dwarf on The Island Of Terror and it's not really my thing although i suppose he might throw in a cannibal tribe or maybe even another man-eating tree to surprise us.

[Craig Herbertson]

I'll get on to my brother. He's been collecting Sapper for some time. Back later...

[dem bones]

The Old Dining Room: A group of old school friends and their wives descend on Jack Drages' house in Kent for a pheasant shoot. In the grand old dining room hangs a portrait of a previous occupant, Sir James Wrothley, a fanatical Protestant who made an enemy of Cardinal Wolsley during the reign of Henry VIII. Wrothley's fellow conspirators were butchered during a raid in which he committed suicide by throwing himself from the musicians gallery. It's not clear who betrayed the plotters - some even believe it was Wrothley himself.

Among the guests is Bill Sibton who bears an uncanny resemblance to the fellow in the portrait. On his first night at the Drages', Sibton sleepwalks to the old dining room where our narrator catches him denouncing Sir Henry Brayton as a liar, just as Wrothley had on the night of the bloodbath ....

The Old Dining Room can be found in Richard Dalby's The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories: Volume 1 (Robinson 1990) and i'm so glad about that, because it's so long since i read it, it's like having a new book and should keep me going til Christmas.

while we're about it;

Touch And Go is in Jack Adrian (ed.) - Strange Tales from the Strand (Oxford University Press, 1991)

The House By The Headland is included in both R. Chetwynd-Hayes (ed.) 15th Fontana Book Of Great Ghost Stories and Peter C. Smith (ed.) - Undesirable Properties (William Kimber, 1977)

[dem bones]

Sapper - The Dinner Club (Hodder & Stoughton, 1923)

The Actor's Story, being The Patch On The Quilt
The Barrister's Story, being The Decision of Sir Edward Shoreham
The Doctor's Story, being Sentence Of Death
The Ordinary Man's Story, being The Pipes Of Death
The Soldier's Story, being A Bit Of Orange Peel
The Writer's Story, being The House At Appledore
The Old Dining Room
When Greek Meets Greek
Jimmy Lethbridge's Temptation
Lady Cynthia And The Hermit
A Glass Of Whisky
The Man Who Could Not Get Drunk.

Foreword:
ON a certain day in the year of grace 1920, there came into being a special and very select club. There was no entrance fee and no sub­scription, in which respect it differed from all other clubs. Its membership was limited to six : the Actor, the Barrister, the Doctor, the Ordinary Man, the Soldier, and the Writer. And since each in his own particular trade had achieved what the world calls fame, except the Ordinary Man, who was only ordinary, it was decided that for purposes of convenience they should be entered in the list of members alphabetically according to their trade, and further that they should carry out the only rule of the club in the order of that entry. And the only rule of the club was, that on certain nights, to be mutually agreed on, the member whose turn it was should give to the remaining members an exceedingly good dinner, after which he should tell them a story connected with his own trade, that should be of sufficient interest to keep them awake.

And the only penalty of the club was that if the story was not of sufficient interest to keep the audience awake, the offending member should pay a sum of ten pounds to a deserving charity.

No rule was deemed necessary as to the quality of the dinner: the members had elected them­selves with discretion.

The so-called "penalty" is disappointingly mediocre to those of us familiar with the Club of the Damned in Robert Muller & friends' Supernatural but to finally land a Sapper short story collection containing at least one apiece of his horror and ghost stories. Works for me.

we've already paid a visit to The Old Dining Room, but the 'ordinary man', Mr. Walton's story, The Pipes Of Death, is perhaps a lesser known item. Rupert Morrison, prone to moroseness and drinking, was considered a bad egg even before his arrival in Burma, and four years have done nothing to change the public's perception of the man. There are things said about him, "stories which are not good to hear about a white man", the gist of which, that he's good as gone native, picked up some of the locals' devil's trickery and is nothing loath to practice same on any who cross him. So when Morrison learns that his long term fiancée, Molly Felsted, has fallen for dashing Jack Manderby, he unleashes powerful black sorcery on his rival. Seven blasts on the 'pipes of death' summon a massive bloodsucking poisonous spider to hunt down the intended victim. Walton and a gnarled old Scot, McAndrew, hear a cry from Manderby's quarters and burst in to find the terrible black mass squatting on his pillow .....

The Actor's Story, as told by the celebrated thespian Mr. Trayne, is a tragedy centring around starving paupers Harry and Kitty. Harry is dying of consumption, his only comfort the belief that the devoted Kitty is the next Sarah Bernard and if only Mr. Trayne were to witness her in action he would realise the truth. Trayne, suitably moved, forgives them for luring him to their slum under false pretences, and grants her an audition. Sure enough, Kitty is unique. She gives what is without doubt the worst performance Trayne has ever seen. How to let them down gently?

[valdemar]

Sapper is one of the few writers of this genre that I must admit to not knowing anything about, and indeed, more shamefully, not having read anything by. Having read the various summaries in the preceding entries, I must admit to liking what I've seen. Are there any collections of his work extant that I might be able to obtain, in order to get up to speed with his work? ;D

[dem bones]

Wordsworth have issued four of the Sapper Bulldog Drummond novels in one 750+ page volume - not horror fiction per se, but seeped in nastiness and at under £3 .....

i've not yet landed a copy of Jack Adrian's The Best Stories Of (Dent, 2004) but am given to understand it samples at least some of the ghost fiction. As yet, and i'm sure somebody will correct me if i'm wrong, there's doesn't seem to have been a supernatural/ horror specific collection? The intention behind this thread, (notebooks out, plagiarists - again) is to try and find enough of them to bridge that gap, compile as near a definitive list as we're capable, approach Wordsworth with the results. I even have someone in mind to write the introduction but haven't told him yet! If you fancy a taster, and don't mind reading off a screen, you could do a lot worse than try Touch And Go.

[dem bones]

Sapper - The Man in Ratcatcher (Hodder & Stoughton, no date [1921?])

The Man In Ratcatcher
"An Arrow Ar A Venture"
The House By The Headland
The Man Who Would Not Play Cards
A Question Of Personality
The Unbroken Line
The Real Test
"Good Hunting, Old Chap "
The Man With His Hand In His Pocket
A Payment On Account
The Poser


Contains at least one first rate ghost story, and am hopeful there will be a surprise in store among the rest, all of them unknown to me.

The House By The Headland: (The Sovereign Magazine, March 1920): Our pub-crawling narrator in Harris Tweeds is caught in a fierce thunderstorm on the South Western moors and seeks shelter at a remote, seemingly derelict house. It's a splendidly gloomy place - all cobwebs, dust and darkness - and the same might be said of the cadaverous host, Rupert Carlingham, who creeps up on him as if from nowhere. Carlingham, clearly mad, has come home early to catch his far younger, pretty wife Mary at it with her lover, John Trelawnay. Our narrator is powerless to intervene as an afternoon of real-life melodrama, murder and suicide is replayed before his horrified eyes ...

This next doesn't qualify as a ghost or horror fiction, it's just a very good story addressing the issue: should those bereaved by war remarry, or is that a betrayal of the partner they lost?

The Poser: During the last days of WWI, Ruth Seaton returns to the golf course at Portadown-on-Sea where she first met her husband, Jimmy, killed in the Battle of the Somme. There will never be another man like Jimmy, and she'll not entertain the idea of entering into another relationship. Three days into her stay, widower Hugh Ralton arrives. He survived the trenches, but through no fault of his own. After learning of his wife's death back home, Hugh did everything in his power to get himself shot, but the enemies' bullets didn't want to know him. His increasingly reckless behaviour lead to the tragic loss of a colleague. And that's why Hugh thinks Ruth, for all her grief, is a mere poser.

Sapper can't resist a swipe at the days Hooray Henry's and Henrietta's, whooping it up while the less privileged of their generation are obliterated in the trenches.

"The Get-Rich-Quick brigade, whose horizon was bounded by half-crown cigars and champagne at every hour of the day, found Portadown slow. There was no band and there was no theatre, and there is but little use in drinking champagne at eleven in the morning unless less fortunate beings - professional men with a small income, or wounded officers - can see the deed and gnash their teeth with envy."

Peter Gurney, secretary of the golf club, is not alone in his contempt of the pampered few, and wishes the war would end yesterday.

"We'll be getting the old lot back ... Men as is men, and can bathe and play tennis and golf - not them diseases in fancy dress we've had the last year or two."

[dem bones]

The Real Test: Peter Benton is branded a coward by the insufferably up herself Miss Madge Saunderson when, after giving the matter due consideration, he declines to risk his neck jumping in the river to save her doggie, Toots, universally despised as a vicious pest. As a result, Toots suffers a ghastly death, dragged under the water-mill and mangled.

Madge and her cronies connive with dashing young flying ace Captain Seymour to play a cruel trick on he who stood by and did nothing. The fearless aviator will climb the chimney of the rickety Mill Tower and pretend to lose his nerve halfway, obliging Peter - who is terrified of heights - to attempt a rescue. But Seymour freezes for real. Will Benton overcome his phobia and shimmy up to save him, or will he merely shrug "not my problem, old bean"?

The Celebrated Actor, Rising Barrister, Great Doctor and Well-Known Soldier from The Dining Club feature prominently. It's another fine tale, just not what we're looking for, but this next, from his 1930 collection, The Finger Of Fate, sees us back on track.

The Black Monk : "our destination was an old ruined Priory some forty miles away which was reputed to be haunted. The ghost was said to be the black cowled figure of a monk, and if it came to a man it meant death. There was a good deal of ragging and chaff, and one of the men, I remember, covered himself with a tablecloth and stalked about amongst the ruins."

Jack Tennant and Mary are loved up and counting the days until they are married. Laurence Trent , Jack's friend and rival for Mary's affections, takes the news with good grace, which is unlike him as he's a notoriously sore loser at tennis and golf. But Trent also has a flair for amateur dramatics and and puts it to good use on a day out to the local ruins. Of course, he's as crestfallen as anyone when, a week before the wedding, Jack plunges to his death off the disused chalk quarry at Draxton, but, as he confides to our narrator, he feared as much when he developed his spirit photograph. Look, there plain as day, a cowled figure draping his arm over the groom's shoulder!

Has the Black Monk claimed another victim? The dead man's brother suspects not, and conspires with Monica Greyson, a young clairvoyante, to establish the truth.

[clarence]

Thanks demonik for the post.

I was unaware that Sapper had written anything other than his Bulldog Drummond stories. These were 'demolished' in Colin Watson's book 'Snobbery with violence' - a survey of detective stories first published circa 1980.

Seems like there is plenty to look out for !!!!

Clarence