All posts by greydogtales

John Linwood Grant writes occult detective and dark fantasy stories, in between running his beloved lurchers and baking far too many kinds of bread. Apart from that, he enjoys growing unusual fruit and reading rejection slips. He is six foot tall, ageing at an alarming rate, and has his own beard.

Vodun Child

2 Comments

My dear readers will already know that, as a writer in these harsh and competitive times, I have a number of ethical rules which guide my literary career:

  • Hide or lie about my sources, especially if I’ve stolen heavily from them,
  • Keep my ideas to myself until the money’s in, and
  • Never point out that all my plots have been better handled by someone else.

These rules have been invaluable to me, and account for why I’m a penniless agoraphobic who relies on discount artisan ale to get him through even the shortest blog entries. Note the artisan bit, though. I have very high standards of moral and physical bankruptcy.

As a lover of the weird and wild, on the other hand, I like sharing everything and to hell with it. So I’m letting the longdogs loose. Instead, I want to mention two authors you may not yet have come across (or across whom you may not yet have come, if you prefer), Henry S Whitehead and E G Swain. The first I discovered only a couple of years ago, but my little Bone to His Bone collection by Swain has been a prized possession for over twenty years.

I would have described both their recurring protagonists as occult or psychic investigators in their own ways. Sadly, one of them, Swain’s Mr Batchel, has already been kicked out of the club by the writer Tim Prasil, who produced the excellent A Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives (you don’t come across that phrase very often) on his website. Do look him up, and check out his stories, because I always get the hyperlinks wrong.

So this blog entry will introduce the argument for Henry S Whitehead’s occult investigator, Gerald Canevin, a man of leisure living in the Virgin Islands in the first quarter of last century.

15955889

Just for the trivia-lovers, Whitehead (1882–1932) was a minister of the American Episcopal Church and a friend of H P Lovercraft. He had, at times, church responsibilities in the Virgin Islands, and obviously picked up a lot of local lore. His stories are, for the most part, set in the Caribbean, and a large number include Gerald Canevin’s exposure to curses, entities and events which stem from West African beliefs:

“At last it came, the clue; in a childish, piping treble; the clear-cut word, Jumbee. I had it now. The screaming woman believed, and the crowd about her believed, that some evil witchery was afoot. Some enemy had enlisted the services of the dreaded witch-doctor – the papaloi…”
(Black Terror)

Jumbees are usually malevolent, possessing spirits, and papaloi is one name for a male voodoo priest. As opposed to the mamaloi. Don’t make me explain it. Whitehead drew heavily on the fact that before a chunk of the Virgin Islands was bought by the US, it was actually the Danish West Indies, with a history of plantations, slavery and mixed race populations, creole etc. I have to confess that I didn’t even know that there was a Danish West Indies, so that was a discovery in itself.

The argument which others will raise is that Canevin isn’t enough of an investigator. He does get involved and he does seek out answers, but an awful lot of scary things happen whether or not he does anything. Still, an interesting read. My caveat to interested parties is that very occasionally Whitehead seems to become obsessed with lost Atlantis and ancient Mayan races living under the earth. These (thankfully) few excursions don’t work half as well as some of his creepy, atmospheric stories of the West Indies people and their beliefs.

I was going to end there, but thinking about voodoo, related systems of belief and their African sources reminded me of an even more tenuous claim. Sanders of the River. Edgar Wallace was, I guess, a man of his time *cough*. His Sanders stories can be very dubious, but every so often they’re leavened with a peculiar respect for African people and spiritual systems. And I can now remember at least three which involved ghosts/psychic events which he could not disprove.

Sanders, Occult Colonial Administrator – a new series coming soon.

Next time, in Part Two – Nice People: Mr Batchel and a bit of M R James. Maybe.

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

Rawhead and Bloody Bones

1 Comment

I had two grandfathers (I though it was neater that way). One was a quiet East Yorkshire house-builder whose regiment was virtually wiped out in the Great War. I would have said decimated, but if you follow the Roman way, that only means one in ten being killed, which would have been quite light. Grandpa’s lot suffered more like nine in ten losses – wounded, missing or killed – and I think they had to be dispersed or disbanded afterwards.

Grandpa2The author and his grandfather (I’m the smaller of the two)

He was supposed to be a very nice man. Apart from a few details of that action, lodged in the family vaults, I have some letters from a German POW camp, and then a picture of him in the uniform of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders. I have no idea why he re-enlisted, and Grandma must have been very annoyed, having to build brick walls on her own for years.

My other grandfather was a master-butcher in North Yorkshire.

So I was in one of the local shops a while back, saying I could bone the joint myself, why didn’t more people sell proper mutton instead of lamb, and could they lend me any more sausage skins? And I told them at length about Grandpa Two, in case his background added to my credentials. We had to befriend a butcher, you see, because of the longdogs.

There are times when the house looks like an abattoir. I don’t say this lightly. We can have huge pans of liver on the stove, bowls of raw chicken and chicken carcasses on the floor, and fresh bones all over the carpet, which is distinctly blood-stained in parts. During these times I might also be shoving Django away and trying to dismember a sheep’s back leg.

I was a vegetarian once, and so was my partner. Yes, we’re lapsed, but we still like meat-free breaks. The dogs don’t.

When we took on our two longdogs, we found out that they’d been brought up on bones and raw food for some time. It’s also called the BARF diet, which is what some people might do when they see it. Our previous lurcher had been on standard fare and a lot of scraps. But we wanted the longdogs to be at home, and so we decided to try converting our aged chocolate labrador to BARF as well. We half-expected rampant diarrhoea, choking dogs, problems keeping the new arrivals fed properly and so on.

The actual result was that we became acolytes of the raw food diet. Our old dog loved her new meals, becoming more lively and alert. She queued up for her minced flesh with a distinct drool. Instead of toilet problems, we had three dogs who did compact, low-odour dry poos which you could kick around the room like golfballs. If you were quite bored. I even considered putting the poos in paper bags and offering them to the next lot of Hallowe’en callers. I consider children fair game. Can’t live with ’em, can’t mince ’em up for the dogs. Bah.

I looked at the success of the experiment. I read the labels on canned dog-food and saw how little meat there was in there. I considered the general pointlessness of kibble, which seemed to be mostly ash. And that was that.

So I beg bones from the butcher in quantities which I can barely carry and we lug them back for the pack. Django, the worst offender, eats a large sheep femur in about one and half minutes. In addition we have 40+ kilos of raw minced chicken carcass sent to us every few weeks. It’s like a serial killer version of Interflora. Add a bit of shredded carrot, apple, mushy peas, and there you are. BARF.

We don’t proselytize or preach the raw diet, but it certainly can be done, and can work.

And to end this tale of dismemberment, I’ll mention that Yorkshire is also one of the earliest locations for the Rawhead and Bloody Bones legend. No, I didn’t choose my title at random. I love collecting old legends, especially if I can nick the idea for a story. The best legends are really obscure ones, like local oddities which you can borrow without readers even knowing. The readers, when they finally find out, call it “Not making your own stuff up like a proper writer”. I call it introducing fascinating myths to a new and vibrant audience…

Rawhead and Bloody Bones has a long history. He may be one monster, sometimes two. The story of a bloody creature which lurks ready for unpleasant or misbehaving children seems to have been common in the North of England, and transferred long ago to parts of the United States. It dates back to at least the sixteenth century.

Rawhead and Bloody Bones
Steals naughty children from their homes,
Takes them to his dirty den,
And they are never seen again.

(I was also pleased when I came upon across biographical notes on Sir Thomas Lunsford, a Royalist commander during the English Civil War. Present at the sieges of Parliamentarian Hull (1642/43), he was sometimes known as Bloodybones Lunsford. His opponents and detractors claimed that he was a cannibal, and ate children.)

Anyway, back to Rawhead. This charming humanoid fellow may be found hiding under the stairs, gristle and raw flesh hanging from his bare skull, waiting for little miscreants to tear apart. His long pale hands reach up and grab them. Game Over. Sometimes he dwells in dank pools or other haunted places, crouching on a heap of human and animal bones, but he’s always waiting for the children. And I thoroughly approve. If Rawhead had occupied our house, then our son might be a lot better at hanging up wet towels, washing-up and paying over his housekeeping.

But life is not so kind, and alas for poor Rawhead, let’s be honest. The longdogs would surely have eaten him by now.

Crunch.

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

Good News from the Spiritualist Telegraph

4 Comments

You do not talk of him. You try not to think or dream of him. You turn your face from that column in the morning edition of The Times, and forget the body found last night in St James’ Park. But you know that he was there, and your appetite for those devilled kidneys has gone.

There are things that you have done, people who you have crossed… You push your breakfast plate away and ring for the maid. It is time to visit your aunt, far away to the north in Cumbria. A sudden whim, of course, no particular reason.

London is not as it was last week. Mr Dry is in town.

 

This is an unashamed entry about my psychic detective stories, because I’m pleased to say that The Intrusion, a short story featuring Edwin Dry, is now available to download.

covdry5

It’s free, and in a number of formats, but I think the Kindle .mobi layout looks best. If you fancy a read, go to:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/564814

A substantial number of my stories and novels are part of Tales of the Last Edwardian. They tend to be complete in themselves, but are linked by a series of characters. About which, more later.

The series currently includes two draft novels (one of which was finished, but I lost the middle section when moving house!), and a number of short stories. Some of the latter are being published in ebook form as I work my way through the piles of paper around my computer, and some are awaiting US decisions. Yes, I did say paper. I started writing on an electric typewriter, for goodness sake. And my early Amstrad PCW green-screen files are mostly lost or corrupt. The lovely days of Locoscript, when a megabyte of memory would have been the size of a fridge…

Almost all of the tales include aspects of spiritualism, the occult or other psychic phenomena, especially at their late Victorian and Edwardian height. They reflect the work of the early psychic detectives, and thus cross into crime fiction in the process. A world of gas-light and lobotomies, electric pentacles and the garotte.

The timeline runs from around the Second Boer War (1899 – 1902), through the Edwardian age and into the horrors of the Great War and its aftermath. It continues in and after World War Two, until it reaches the present day. The phrase The Last Edwardian will explain itself in the later stories.

They are, discounting any whimsical touches I might use in writing them, fairly dark tales of murder, possession, fanaticism, abuse and suchlike. More blood than ectoplasm, let’s put it that way.

Here are a few of the characters which crop up more than once:

Henry Dodgson. One of the four regulars who took dinner with Thomas Carnacki, the Ghost Finder, at Cheyne Walk. A veteran of the Transvaal and certain episodes in South Africa that he would like to forget. After Carnacki’s death, reluctantly drawn into the field of the psychic investigator.

Abigail Jessop. Niece of one of the other chaps who visited Cheyne Walk. Strong-minded and sensitive to many forms of psychic disturbance, human or otherwise. Far more gifted, and better read, than Dodgson, but not as good a shot. A progressive and occasionally difficult woman (according to some of the men she meets, of course).

Dr Alice Urquhart. Resident alienist at High Helmsley Asylum. Trained in Europe where women had more opportunities in the field, familiar with Freud and others, now practising in Great Britain.

Mr Dry. A small, inoffensive figure with pale eyes and a waist-size slightly too large for his liking. If he has a background of note, or any training, no-one knows. He kills people. He has little interest in psychic matters, and even less interest in the people he kills. Everyone should have a trade.

Catherine Weatherley. A powerful and experienced Yorkshire spiritualist, quite capable of conning people by telling them what they want to hear. Also quite capable of identifying major disturbances of the soul.

Captain Redvers Blake. An officer in Military Intelligence, a minor sensitive. Involved in identifying agents of the Kaiser, Bolsheviks, Anarchists and Fenians – anyone who might compromise Britain’s military security. And deciding on their disposal, if required. Special Branch, freedom, or the noose.

For those of a geographical disposition, the stories are set in London, Yorkshire and various other nooks and crannies around Great Britain. My use of the Yorkshire setting is, surprisingly, not to do with it being the land of my birth. It’s because Keighley in West Yorkshire was where Britain’s first spiritualist newspaper was started – The Yorkshire Spiritualist Telegraph.

So, if you like that sort of thing, try reading The Intrusion, and if you want more, sign up to greydogtales.com with your email address to be notified when the next story is available. All comments gratefully received.

That should be enough for now. Or even too much. Ah, that far-off Edwardian world where you could send a postcard and receive the reply in the same day. Who needed email?

Share this article with friends - or enemies...

Fifty Shades of Ankle

2 Comments

or  “Writing Edwardian Female Detectives – Do You Feel Lucky, Common Person?”

I’m a guilty fan of the Murdoch Mysteries. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. It’s a Canadian TV detective programme, set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Very inventive, often amusing, and packed with guest appearances by real historical figures, including Tesla, Edison, Conan Doyle, Houdini and H G Wells. Based (rather loosely) on Maureen Jennings’ Murdoch novels, it’s up to at least Series Seven by now.

Its relevance to this blog entry is the fact that it has female police pathologists, two intelligent women determined to make their mark. The first one eventually goes off to become a psychiatrist (I like the early term alienist better). Her successor is just as thorough and talented, though a bit more of a laugh. And they have aspects to their lives which do not involve husbands/boyfriends, including their work on female suffrage. I quite like them.

So many of my favourite collections, late Victorian and Edwardian detective stories, have no women in them in any meaningful role. Plenty of background wronged wives, jilted fiancees and unfortunate female victims, but the brainwork is almost always done by men. Boring.

There are exceptions. Andrew Forester’s Mrs Gladden, a police agent, for one, but not all of the late Victorian stuff is easy to read nowadays. The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (Catherine Pirkis) is also worth a look.

3656023

Quite readable, for the most part, is the Edwardian Lady Molly of Scotland Yard, by Baroness Orczy. Not only did the Baroness produce a whole book of Lady Molly stories in about 1910, but she also wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel a few years earlier. But you knew that.

I won’t mention any more of them because this is a blog entry, not a study group. However, they had an impact on me, and when I first began to pastiche, and then build on, the casework of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder, I knew that I had to bite the bullet.

In the original stories, WHH’s psychic detective has four regular male friends who come to his house on the Embankment and listen to his adventures. He has no known contact with the other sex. Or women. So that had to be explored. It may have suited the readership at the time, but I don’t believe that he knew no women. And he must have had feelings, be they secret longings, a failed love affair, or at least a rumpus in the trousers now and again…

I didn’t want to contrive it so that Carnacki was a Uranian, suppressing his urge to date his chums, although a gay psychic detective in 1908 might have been a change. I wanted to move on from the past and explore it at the same time. As most of my stories are set after the Ghost Finder’s death, I wanted a rounded set of female characters to be included, even to be pivotal, with maybe a few retrospective revelations about the “real” Thomas Merton Carnacki.

(Uranians, if you haven’t tripped over them, was a term adopted by some homosexuals of the period in question, supposedly named after Aphrodite Urania who sprang from Uranus’ testicles without an icky girl being involved. I think I prefer the traditional method.)

And as I built up my female characters, I found myself enjoying two particular aspects of writing fiction set in Victorian and Edwardian times:

Whipping away the cloak of invisibility. So many women in history were enablers, catalysts, and quiet movers, not to mention those who finally gave up because men kept shoving them to one side, and those who never had their work noticed at the time. If you open things up to these women, you can fill the stage easily, and even find yourself with new lead actors.

Indulging in the delight of firsts. This was a period, with the odd historical liberty, which saw the first recognised female doctors, psychologists, lawyers, engineers and more. Some of these women graduated with first class degrees but had to wait years to be allowed to practice. For the writer, this allows exploration of the impact women had when they entered the professions.

So it’s fun, if hard work at times. I like writing interesting characters. Some of them are women, and most of those women are resourceful, with a working brain and real feelings. If they don’t have one or more of those attributes, there has to be a point to why they don’t. I have to able to justify it in the story– and live with it.

Finally, a question I hear at conventions and see regularly on the net. How do you write a female character when you’ve been a man all your life?

Well, you do your best. There are guides that inform men how to write good female characters, but there’s something going wrong there already. Surely this isn’t a paint-by-numbers thing? I’ve actually seen “guides” which tell you how to add a character flaw that a woman might have, put in a bit of vulnerability, remember women bear children and so on. Gosh.

I’m a guy who can’t stand football, has no interest in cars, can multi-task, likes shopping and gossip and is interested in soft furnishings etc. I even want to talk to my friends about relationships and real feelings. According to a lot of checklists I should at least be a gay man in someone’s novel. But I’m just a person. Male, and a mess. Many of my own characters are female and a mess. That shouldn’t make us weak or stereotypes.

My suggestion to male writers is to get to know (and read about) some real women, find out what they feel, think and do, and then write. That would be a good start.

Coming soon to greydogtales.com: A free short story to download, set in the story cycle The Last Edwardian. Mr Dry encounters some strangers…

Share this article with friends - or enemies...