It is Valentine’s Day, dear listener, and so on this special day, we explain the true meaning of the event, and share once more the delights of the little village of St Botolph-in-the-Wolds, where ‘imbecile’ is not an insult, but a mark of respect and high social status.

Below we offer three – yes, THREE – snippets on the theme of love, including a brand new Mr Bubbles story in the middle, and a sliver of Bottles the lurcher with which to finish. Astonishing, yes? If you learned how we did it, we would have to kill you. If we could be bothered…

PRELUDE: MR BUBBLES IN LOVE

A short, heart-warming tale of romance

No one was actually dead. The police and ambulance crews had dragged the badly-injured walking party well away from the scene of crime, and were in the process of counting limbs, many of which were still attached. Thick spatters of blood, now congealing under the midday sun, decorated the hedgerows; someone’s ear hung off a yew tree. It had a nice ear-ring in it – the ear, not the tree.

“It’s a public footpath,” said Sandra, frowning as she fished a torn woolly hat out of the horse trough. The hat, almost bitten through, had an animal welfare badge on it. Sandra wondered if that was what writers called irony.

Mr Bubbles moved his weight uneasily from hoof to hoof.

“They looked at my turnip.” A pitch-black fire danced in the pony’s great eyes.

“They were passing by! They’re on a walking tour.” She noticed two policewoman trying to construct temporary stretchers out of runner-bean poles. “Well, they were on a walking tour.”

The pony glared at the nearest conscious rambler, and rolled a large, mottled root vegetable lovingly back into the shade of the barn. He sighed, admiring the plump curves of the vegetable’s sides, the almost coy blush of purple near the top…

“MY turnip,” muttered Mr Bubbles.

MAIN MOVEMENT: THE CARROT WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

A new tale of equine eccentricities

Sandra’s cousin Mary had come to stay once more, and the farmhouse above St Botolph’s was a cheerful hive of activity. Except with no bees, or honey, or waxy cells from which small, blind grubs were waiting to emerge. So nothing like a hive, really. Sandra’s mother was unconscious under the large pine table, a consequence of confusing cough sweets with sheep tranquillisers, but the two teenagers had plenty to keep them occupied…

“Right, I think I’ve got it,” said Mary, putting down his utterly useless child-safe scissors, borrowed from St Botolph’s Mixed Infants, “A Roman Emperor fell out with a Christian priest over theology, and had the chap beaten to death and beheaded, as a warning to people who disagreed with Rome’s policies on ecumenical matters.

“Also, before he died, the priest wrote a letter to a lot of people’s daughters, saying that he might not be able to go for that drink after all, but it was nothing personal. And that’s how we ended up with Valentine’s Day.”

“Exactly,” said Sandra, trying to remove a bottle of glue from one of the less competent sheep which were milling round the farmhouse kitchen. “And so we send heart-shaped cards to those we love on February the Fourteenth each year. That one simple act completely makes up for the three hundred and sixty four days when we didn’t pay enough attention to them, do anything useful, or remember to iron the cat.”

“Like going to confession just after hacking seventeen people to death with a chainsaw, and saying five Hail Marys to make up for it?”

Sandra nodded. “The organised Church is a bit of a mystery, if you ask me.”

Her cousin stood up and brushed glitter off his pleated skirt. “These tights have had it. This glue goes everywhere – and it smells a bit, too.”

“Mrs Gayamurthi makes it from fish-heads.”

“Lovely.” Mary wiped his hands on a passing sheep. “Still, I’m done.” He held up a piece of red cardboard which resembled the results of a drunken, short-sighted junior surgeon conducting a major operation after three consecutive shifts on call. More a wholesale evisceration than an organ of love.

“I thought Deborah Buntling still hated you?”

“She does,” said Mary. “That’s why I’ve made a jolly rotten job of it. Maybe this year she won’t go on so much about me borrowing her lipstick.”

“You don’t wear lipstick.”

“No, but I use it to write threatening messages to the Latin Master at college. It makes him feel wanted.”

“That’s nice.” Sandra abandoned her own card, meant for her mother. Mother would have to make do with out-of-date chocolates from the village shop.

A sudden crash and a spray of broken glass announced that Mr Bubbles, Sandra’s beloved but slightly psychotic pony, had rammed his large head through the kitchen window again.

Sandra sighed. “Hello, boy. No, you don’t need to start complaining. We’re finished here, and have all afternoon to join you on a risky, ill-conceived adventure across the moors, seeking out unutterably evil abominations and barely managing to survive.”

“Bored with that,” said Mr Bubbles. “Want carrots.”

“I have sugar cubes,” Mary offered.

The pony gave him a look which strongly suggested the presentation of a sugar cube might result in a hoof in the face.

“Or we could look for some carrots,” said Mary hastily.

And so the three chums set off down to the little village of St Botolph-in-the-Wolds, often described as ‘picturesque’ by people who liked Hieronymous Bosch and Goya’s Disasters of War.

All was remarkable quiet on the few functional streets of the quaint hamlet. This year’s Valentine’s Day Bake-Off between the Womens’ Institute and the Esoteric Order of Dagon had been cancelled, due to an unexpected outbreak of yellow jack, whilst the highly feral Girl Guides were raiding elsewhere that day.

“They’ve gone to pillage the towns on the coast, topping up their Brasso supplies,” Sandra explained. “And to throw stones at herring gulls. I think the ducks on the village pond put them up to that part.”

A nearby duck stubbed out its cigarette and tried to assume a nonchalant air. No one was fooled..

Only Mr Quilling, the Village Pervert, had made any public attempt to celebrate the unjust murder of an over-religious Roman, but the ornate display he’d constructed in his front garden was neither nice nor clever. Probably its only direct relevance to affairs of the heart was that it might induce a coronary in anyone less broad-minded (or indifferent) than the locals.

Mary stared, then looked away. “I shall never eat broccoli again, that’s for sure.”

“Carrots,” said Mr Bubbles.

Alas, the village shops were not forthcoming – the root vegetable in question was in short supply that day. The sort of short supply that means when you ask ‘Can I buy a carrot, please?’, the answer is distinctly in the negative. The general store had none, though this was hardly unusual – its owner concentrated more on the ‘general’ aspect than the ‘store’ part. The Post Office had just sold out, and Mrs Gayamurthi’s could only offer large Indian radishes.

“We could paint it orange, boy,” said Sandra, stroking her pony’s black mane.

Mr Bubbles tried the end of one, and spat the chunk out through the shop’s open door, stunning a passing pedestrian. “Not the same.”

Mary gave his cousin a sidelong glance. “Look, Mr Bubbles, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but how about we go up to Grimspire Water, and see if we can set fire to some hideous, gelatinous monstrosity. That might cheer you up.”

“Carrots.”

In the face of the pony’s obstinacy, their search continued, but even the Mobile Library, which had an unusually large vegetable section, was unable to loan them a single root. Sandra and Mary sat down on the old gibbet-stone which stood by the north road. Legend had it that long ago, possibly in the early fourteenth century, the villagers had built the foundations for an exciting new means of execution, and then couldn’t arsed to finish it off. Subsequent felons had been consigned to Gibbet Hill, which – rather confusingly – was a large hole in the ground, not far from Buttersmite Fell. The people of St Botolph’s didn’t believe in unnecessary effort.

“I suppose,” said Sandra, “That there’s nothing for it. We’ll have to ask Old Aggie. If anyone has any carrots left in the entire area, it’s her. She’ll have a clamp of them from last Autumn.”

It was a dire situation. Old Aggie was a perfectly pleasant woman, but she also collected potatoes in the shape of Queen Victoria, and insisted that all visitors examine her entire collection before they were offered a sit-down or a mug of gin. As Old Aggie had three extensive cellars packed full of the things, the experience could take hours.

“Look, boy,” said Sandra, as they trudged their the way up to Aggie’s farm. She pointed towards a tall stand of gloomy, putty-coloured trees not a hundred yards away. “Those shadows on the edge of Whateley Wood! Perhaps they represent some insidious, creeping evil that we should face right away. I could go and get my pump-action Remington, and-”

“Carrots.”

Mr Bubbles was known for his intractable moods, but Sandra couldn’t work out whey he was so particularly obsessed with carrots today, especially as he must have know they were hard to get. In fact, he probably knew that they would have to end up at Old Aggie’s, so what was going on?

“He’s not ill, is he?” asked Mary as they came in sight of Aggie’s farm, which would have had to be rebuilt and knocked down again before it could achieve the status of a ruin. Much of it consisted of cellars covered with sheets of corrugated iron and the more lethal types of asbestos (still widely used in St Botolph’s, due to the natural immunity which the villagers had developed).

“Don’t suppose so.” Sandra re-tied her long blonde hair, and checked to see if she had any money in her purse. “Maybe we can get away with the two-hour tour this time,” she said, eyeing one of the few standing structures. “I’ll go and–”

“In there,” said the pony, nudging her shoulder with his velvety muzzle. He pointed one hoof at a large ramshackle shed, just on the edge of the potato fields.

She shrugged. “If you say, boy, but I would have thought…”

There was no point in arguing with him. Sandra and Mary walked over to the shed, and eased back one of the double doors, peering into the gloom…

“Gosh!” said Mary.

There, on the shed floor, lay an astonishing range of mummified legs, withered arms, skeletal fragments, oozing tentacles, and confiscated occult paraphernalia, plus half a vampire and something extremely warped with no head – and no body. Forbidden books of knowledge, such as that vile and obscene tract The Book of the Deaf, lay next to the twisted parts of a police car and a set of amulets for protection against depressed ferrets. Many of the items – organic and inorganic – had very large teeth-marks in them. All had been trodden on quite a bit.

The presence of these horrors was perhaps not so important as the fact that the whole lot had been arranged on the trampled dirt in the unmistakable shape of a huge heart.

“We did all these, you and me,” said the pony. “Knackered the lot of them.”

If the exact sight before her was indescribable, the smell certainly wasn’t – but Sandra had a clue that her best friend was making a most unusual gesture. The single red rose the pony had tossed into the middle of the appalling mementos pretty much gave it away.

“We did,” she murmured. “And it was jolly hard work, but we always had each other’s backs.” She smiled, and leaned against the warm, powerful body. “It’s… it’s a lovely surprise,” she managed to say.

“Happy Dead Unwise Priest’s Day,” said Mr Bubbles.

Mary, too, was smiling, if a little puzzled. Quite what was the point of the author putting him in this narrative? He didn’t really seem to have any useful role at all. His discontented musing was soon ended, though, by the deep, determined voice of equine hungers.

“Still want carrots. Go look in field.”

Ah yes, that was why he was here. The grunt work. Valentine had a lot to answer for. Sighing, he picked up a spade and headed out into the mud…

CODA: BOTTLES THE LURCHER IN LOVE

A canine finds true romance

“What’s your dog doing with that stuffed draft-excluder?” asked Sandra, trying hard not to watch the excited behaviour next to the living room door.

“Nothing,” Mary reddened, and wonder if he could find a bucket of cold water very quickly.

“Woof!” said Bottles.

THE END

This programme was brought to you in conjunction with the  Bloody Valentine Bad Love Event on FB today, organised and hosted by writer Anita Stewart:

http://afstewartblog.blogspot.com/

There are also some giveaways here until the end of the day (not mine, because I’m too busy and disorganised):

https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/dUSHjp1eGvHe3Svt3Qqp?fbclid=IwAR2kwhmI3ZbV9GW-gklbyO-z0UqpHbMi7WfszzNchZvuQ7OMdkvBd1TmcZE

John Linwood Grant is often described as the rusty, badly painted tractor of modern weird fiction – he may occasionally plough a straight furrow, but will as often crash into neighbouring fields and spin his wheels just for pleasure. Or something like that. Today on greydogtales, as he fired questions about scary fiction and LGBTQ+ issue at so many innocent authors during January, he must now pay the price and give his own answers. It’s only fair. He even talks about writing in general – and a sort of life…

HIMSELF

greydog: Hi, John, and welcome to greydogtales. We have a feeling we’ve seen you before, but never mind. You can’t be anyone important, or we’d have heard of you. Obviously we’re going to ask about LGBTQ+ writers and characters in strange fiction, but maybe first you could tell the readers a bit about yourself, to set the scene. And if you wanted to share your personal identity in the context of this feature, how would you do so?

John: I’m from Yorkshire, UK, and I’m a working writer/editor – by which I mean that my partner pays most of the bills. The writing is mostly a pleasure; the editing mostly a horror, but as you get older, you don’t let opportunities pass. They may not come again.

As for my identity in LGBTQ+ terms, I’ve never known how to define myself, or worked out why I should, so I don’t bother. A ‘colourful past’ is the best I ever came up with, though I’m certainly male. And I’m all for older people being sexual animals, but with my lower back, well…

When I was at school, I had mad crushes at the same time on Juliet Harmer from the Adam Adamant TV series, and Mike Holoway from The Tomorrow People, which tells you how random I was. I’m not sure that sexual orientation is entirely static for some. I have friends whose orientation is constant and an integral part of their whole persona (straight or otherwise), and I respect that. I also know others whose feelings about their identity and choices have varied across a range over many years.

A number of my straight friends have (grown up) gay, bi or lesbian children, and they’re great kids – they make me feel more positive about our future as an inclusive society, and my place in it. My general view is that if you love them, stop trying to ram them into categories. They’ll say if they want.

greydog: How do you describe the bulk of your own work – horror, weird fiction, magical realism, speculative, or what? Would you find ‘horror’ an uncomfortable or inappropriate label?

John: I’ve no problems with some of my writing being called horror, but I’d say dark and weird are better descriptors. Horror fans might be disappointed by some pieces; non-horror fans would certainly be a bit worried (or appalled) by other stories. How someone turns their head, how they hold their hat or move a chess piece, can be far more interesting than the same old axe murderer crashing through the door and grunting threats at you.

I shift genres and styles when it suits, but ‘strange’ and ‘humane’ are two regular elements of my work. I find people fascinating, so I’m predominantly a character writer, rather than a tidy genre guy.

greydog: And what’s your preferred format and length as a writer – flash fiction, short story, novella, novel, or even book series?

John: Although I’ve written all of them, novelette to novella length is the comfy zone. An awful lot of my stories end up at seven to twelve thousand words, and then I have to chop a number of them for the markets. I have a tendency to to include observations and character interactions not strictly related to the plot, because for me, I’m watching them as human beings, with all their trivia. But I’ve been fortunate in having a number of editors and publishers who’ve let me get away with the longer versions.

Novels can be rewarding, but I find them a chore; I looked at an unpublished novel of mine the other day, and realised that it’s already three hundred pages long and not even tidily finished yet. The editing a novel needs is always more than you thought. Very short pieces, on the other hand, rarely give me room to let my characters breathe, so I don’t do commercial flash fiction. Vignettes I reserve for characters like Mr Bubbles, the slightly psychotic pony, and Mamma Lucy, the conjure-woman, because those pieces are really incidents, meditations, or jokes, related to a single, already established figure.

greydog: Were there key books and films that influenced and helped you develop as a creator? Did they include LGBTQ+ works and/or characters – and if not, did this bug you?

John: I was forged by writers like Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie; William Hope Hodgson, Conan Doyle and Shakespeare; Jane Austen, Michael Herr and James Thurber. And many more. I don’t mean that in a clever way – I was just a precocious kid with voracious and eclectic reading habits, so I’d pick any of those up and enjoy them.

In my teens I read enormous amounts of SFF (not so much horror) – Ursula LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness was probably my first fictional introduction to exploring gender identities. I subsequently devoured Samuel Delaney’s Dhalgren, and William Burroughs – Wild Boys, for example. It’s curious that Dhalgren, a very odd book, is still a favourite for both myself and my (female) partner.

Otherwise, there were few LGBTQ+ protagonists in what I read. I don’t think it bugged me as such, but there was a lot of denial going on in the society around me anyway, and I always had the feeling that change was coming. It did, mostly.

greydog: Being realistic, there are times when many of us compromise, and times when we lose our cool. Have you ever dialled down the queer aspects of a piece to try and draw in a wider audience? Or dialled it up on purpose, to hammer a point home?

John:  I’’m an egalitarian writer – whatever turns up in my head turns up, whether straight or queer. Straight characters probably predominate statistically (I’d have to count), but sometimes I just don’t indicate. Readers can make their own decisions. I have actually been asked to dial up the gay content on a couple of pieces, where I’d originally left matters as slightly ambiguous. I quite like ambiguous, because it gives you so much room with which to play, but I’ve cheerfully written (and had published) stories with most sexual identities and orientations.

My characters come to me with their own realities, so if they’re straight, gay or lesbian, for example, they just are. I find I can’t ‘make’ a character change their orientation, even if I wanted to. For example, I recently wrote a nineteen sixties carnival story for Planet X, and the protagonist was gay. But I wasn’t looking for a gay character for any overall purpose at all. He turned up in context, and stayed. Forcing him to be straight would have wrecked the story, and made me have to start again from scratch. One of my dark fantasy characters, Malyse anBaralte, turned out to be lesbian because I ‘saw’ her in her work as a magistrate, and knew she would fancy one of the female myrmidons used to enforce the law, a rangy blonde woman with a broken nose. To me it was obvious. And I conceived of Malyse about twenty five years ago.

greydog: When it comes to LGBTQ+ characters in your work, do you tend to depict particular identities – lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals – any primary group that comes up in your writing more often than others?

John: The answer’s above, really, apart from the fact that I’ve never written about transsexual individuals, purely because such a character hasn’t cropped up in my head yet. I spent a lot of time in the SF fan community in the UK during the eighties and nineties, where a number of transexual folk were both present and welcome, so I never thought of it as strange – but writing from their viewpoint is obviously a bit further outside my direct experience. I enjoy writing what I ‘don’t know’, but it requires a lot of sensitivity and sometimes a lot of research. Never take other people’s positions, difficulties and choices for granted.

greydog: We were at an interesting panel during the 2018 UK Fantasycon, which included discussion of asexuality in fiction as part of the diversity spectrum. Have you ever covered characters who specifically identified as asexual?

John: Yes, but in rather different ways. In my dark and complicated Os Penitens world of sarcomancers, I have a major character (Hereyl), who chooses quite deliberately to be stripped of the lot – all sexual identity, inclinations and identifiers – to escape their former existence in a warped gens. Their utter asexuality in every sense is the badge of their triumph over their past. And in a Lovecraftian story soon to be published, ‘Strange Perfumes of a Polar Sun’, the protagonist is an asexual woman, but the reader will have to decide if that’s from nature or nurture.

greydog: Which piece of your own work are you most proud of, and why?

John: Possibly my portrayal of Edwin Dry, the inexorable Deptford Assassin, in various stories and in my novel The Assassin’s Coin. He spans the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, and has been called “one of the most ghastly characters in modern strange fiction” and “one of the most evocative presences in modern dark fiction – precise, relentless, inexorable.” All of which is perhaps over-generous, but it is rather gratifying, taking such a character from conception to being a living, breathing figure who worries people.

As for individual pieces, I’m fairly proud of getting into the Vastarien journal with my story ‘For She is Falling’, primarily because when you write across genres like I do, it can be hard to get acceptance as a serious writer in any particular field. Especially as I also enjoy writing Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and have had a number published. Pastiches are popular, but if you’re not careful, you can get labelled with them quite quickly.

I suspect that some people don’t even know that I write modern weird fiction, but there I’m in a different head-space from my late Victorian and Edwardian tales. Maybe I should have created a number of unlikely pseudonyms for each branch before I started? Then people who like thrilling or scary Edwardian tales wouldn’t have to wonder what the hell the rest of my work is about.

LGBTQ+ FICTION & THE FIELD

greydog: The most common phrase you hear when people object to active movements which encourage diversity in fiction is “I don’t care about the sexuality, gender, colour, etc. of the writer. I only care about good stories”. How would you respond to that?

John: I would respond carefully, because I might have thought that way myself once, believing it to be an inclusive and positive statement. And I think it can be genuinely meant well by some people. Only as you age and learn do you begin to see the flaws in it – that it’s an easy statement if it comes from those who have a dominant or privileged position and can afford to see it that way. If you have a background of being or of feeling excluded – on the basis of gender, skin colour, sexual orientation etc – then it starts to look different.

We won’t ever hear some stories, some stunning and fascinating ones at that, if we don’t actively seek their creators out, if we don’t give a greater say to a broader and more diverse range of writers. And what we encourage and support now is what our kids, or our friends’ kids will be able to read. So maybe we have to care, until the genres are so richly endowed by voices from everywhere that we no longer need to be as concerned.

greydog: ‘Straight’ is a silly term in many ways, but we’ll use it for shorthand. A number of straight creators utilise LGBTQ+ characters in their work. Do you see any inherent problems with this, or is it a good way of getting audiences to broaden their minds and reading scope. Are there any common misconceptions which get transmitted by straight creators?

John: I’m all for more LGBTQ+ characters just being there in fiction. Anywhere. As leading protagonists, villains, love interests, mad scholars, helpful posties, and unimportant pedestrians on the street. The person who comes to read the gas meter. In any and every role in fiction. So I’m for it, basically. And I like to see such characters presented without it always being about their sexual orientation and/or problems in that area.

In a related way, I recently finished a story with a key character in a wheelchair. That was how I saw him – but there’s no explanation of how it came about, nor does it impact on the story particularly. He’s not there to explore ability and disability – he’s there because that’s who he was when I thought the story up one night. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all against stories which revolve around personal trauma and the impact of people’s prejudices, I just don’t think that’s always got to be the point.

Two aspects where I see slight problems are a) when an author tries use or explore areas such as gay communities/social networks, without understanding the nuances involved, and b) when an LGBTQ+ character has been parachuted in as PC eye-candy, or to be exploded late in the book for effect. “Goodness, the tough lesbian sacrificed herself for us. Now let’s get on with our lives.” That’s already been done quite enough, thank you, with so many poor bloody black characters who have died in films in order to let the white couple float to the surface and have a happy ending.

greydogtales: Do you think LGBTQ+ fiction is more acceptable to a lot of straight readers when it comes from ‘nice middle-class white people’, as opposed to when it comes from additionally marginalised groups such as queer black writers?

John: I suspect so. It makes me think of earlier British sitcoms, where there could be a loveable, funny gay guy (rarely a lesbian) – the ‘acceptable’ face of LGBTQ+. They were white, middle-class, and ‘not so different from you and me’, so they could come into the living room without mutters and awkward looks. Just a joke here and there, but no rancour. People are strange in how they absorb ‘the other’ into their own narratives.

greydog: How should the big publishers and larger independents be fostering LGBTQ+ fiction and portrayals? Or is it purely up to readers to express a demand?

John: Both – but for the right reasons. It should be part of the search for, and support for, strong fiction with great characters from authors who may have been or felt marginalised, not merely to tick the Ten Percent LGBTQ+ Content Box for Head Office and the PR Department.

greydogtales: There are a number of presses dedicated to LGBTQ+ fiction. Do you view these as a good thing, or do you think they risk perpetuating exclusion from mainstream presses?

John: I think they’re essential, and have many roles. In some cases they’re the starting point, where LGBTQ+ writers can safely explore what they want to communicate, or they’re presses which understand how to promote a work to a primary audience. They may also take the sort of risks which larger presses won’t. But I’m a great supporter of small and independent presses in general, because many of them actively seek out strange and different fiction in many areas which would otherwise be called ‘niche’. I’ve worked most often with Steve Berman‘s Lethe Press, which is very cool.

greydog: Do you have a favourite line or passage from your own work, or from that of another LGBTQ+ creator, that you’d like to share?

John: I’ve read some great stuff by LGBTQ+ creators in the last few years, but can’t think of a way of naming some and not others. Maybe a different time – although the LGBTQ+ January was designed to share some names and voices, in conjunction with Gingers Nuts of Horror, who psoted some fascinating articles, so you can check those out.

To make things easy for me, I’ll simply share a passage from a weird novelette of mine that hasn’t yet found a home, ‘These Pale and Fragile Shells’. I mention it because the story includes gay, lesbian, straight and fluid characters as a natural part of a social circle, not to make any sociopolitical point – unless you include any subtext that you can be whatever you want if you have money. The narrator is Justin Margrave, a gay art critic in the late nineteen seventies.

Paul Iscariot was an artist – or an artisan. The point was moot. None of us believed that Iscariot was his real name, of course. His supposed upbringing on the Sussex Downs seemed unlikely, and Oxford had no details of his graduation, though he had been admitted there; the St Martin School denied he had ever been with them.

We did believe his stories of India, on the other hand, because others had seen him. Iscariot went there to work in a village of artisan sculptors, of interest to him because they worked only with chalk. For over a year he had learned the finest techniques, carving devotional figurines and temple adornments alongside men who spoke no English.

We called Iscariot the Artist of the White Powder, for he ran on chalk and cocaine, a stranger to to sobriety. I met him for the first time in nineteen seventy three, when he was being thrown out of a Soho gallery. Recognising him from the magazines, I plied him with questions in a wine-bar, and we had sex at my flat that afternoon. Or we would have. His approach to lovemaking was as bedevilled with minutiae as his work – I abandoned ship after an hour and left him to finish himself off.

After that our contact was intermittent, though I wrote a couple of articles on his work. ‘The confused child of netsuke and scrimshaw,’ I called it in one journal. Iscariot, in a drunken rage, threw stones at their offices, yet the next day he invited me to lunch, during which he talked of nothing but Celtic knotwork…

greydog: And what have you planned in the way of work for 2019?

John: A second edition of my collection A Persistence of Geraniums, with considerable extra material; an audiobook of The Assassin’s Coin; the Hell’s Empire anthology from Ulthar Press; Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives from Belanger Books, and some more work for 18thWall Productions.… it’s all very confusing. And probably something – I have no idea what – to do with the wryly insane East Yorkshire village of St Botolph-in-the-Wolds.

greydog: John Linwood Grant, many thanks for taking part.

John: Who are you, and what are you doing in my living room?

THE ASSASSIN’S COIN

“With elegant, effortless prose, John Linwood Grant has created a compulsively readable work of eerie suspense. In his stark and sinister Victorian England, a resourceful heroine must pit her psychic gifts against the dangerous skills of a chilling assassin. Grant has achieved something altogether rare: a genuinely unique take on the Jack the Ripper murders, in which the famous killer is actually upstaged by the author’s original creations. With its compelling premise, memorable characters, and thrilling suspense, you’ll be haunted by The Assassin’s Coin for a long time to come.” —Amanda DeWees, author of A Haunting Reprise and The Last Serenade

So, are you interested in submitting a story to a new anthology? And will it be extraordinarily exciting, devilishly clever, cunningly mysterious, and have Sherlock Holmes teaming up with one or more occult detectives? Then read on, for today we have the serious details on pitches, pay and plans. And supernatural fiction historian (and writer) Tim Prasil calls by to suggest a few characters.

As we said in our last article, John Linwood Grant is editing the Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives anthology for Belanger Books. JLG is the author of both Holmes stories and occult detective stories – even the two at once occasionally, as part of his ‘Tales of the Last Edwardian’ series. And as a harassed writer, he also knows that what you really want to hear right now is How Long, How Much, and When. Let’s get those out of the way before we explain exactly what’s required.

Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives

Belanger Books

Core concept: A 5,000 – 10,000 word traditional Sherlock Holmes and occult detective “team up” story.

Payment: Authors shall receive a payment of $50 plus a percentage of the Kickstarter project profits (expected minimum payment of $100), and a paperback copy of the anthology.

Rights: Authors shall retain rights to their work. We only retain the rights to the story within the publication.

Pitch Deadline: March 15, 2019

Submission Deadline: July 15, 2019

Note: Kickstarter will run in November 2019 and publication of book will occur in December 2019.

What We Want

This bit is detailed, not because it’s a terribly complex idea, but because it all increases the chances of us taking your story. And it has a few hints. The more in tune with us you are, the more we’ll wag our tails when we read your submission. If you’re confident that you’ve already grasped the concept, or you’re an experienced writer, you might decide to use it just to double-check. We’d still prefer you read it through.

We want stories which have all the following – four straightforward key elements:

1. Sherlock Holmes (and/or Watson) as a key protagonist; a proper, authentic Conan Doyle-type Holmes, in full character.
2. One or more occult detectives, as the other key protagonist(s), ones who could have taken up a case at the same time as Holmes was alive and functioning. This means Public Domain figures from around 1875 – 1925* OR your own original character operating in the same time period. These are also encouraged.
   
3. A strong supernatural, paranormal, occult, psychic or other ab-natural element which is crucial to the story. As mentioned last time, you CAN try a ‘debunking’ tale, where a mundane explanation ensues, but we won’t take many of those.
4. An actual case/investigation – not Holmes and Carnacki happening to see a ghost pass by, whilst they argue about camera techniques over coffee.

We do not want time-travel stories or steampunk – or Lovecraftiana, unless the latter is very clever, subtle and original, in which case we might have a glance. Think Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, L T Meade and so on. Late Victorian, Edwardian and Twenties scariness.

* Do check the occult detective is in the Public Domain. Seventy years after the author’s death is the usual rule-of-thumb, except for some important characters where an Estate is still active and protecting its copyrights. Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, for example.

The Pitch

It’s possible to do this sort of thing and end up with blocks of similar stories, however well written they are. Seventeen cases where Holmes and Dr Hesselius prove that the apparition at Gruntling Hall was in fact the butler in a sheet (but that the family was genuinely cursed anyway, because a wicked ancestor ate cheese too late at night). Or ten cases of werewolves, phosphorescent pain and missing boots.

For this anthology, we would like short pitches – say a hundred to two hundred words or so (the paragraph above is seventy words, as an example) – telling us about your planned story:

1. The decade and general physical setting(s), e.g. London; a decaying Cornish farmhouse, before WWI; a fancy hotel in Paris.
2. The sort of supernatural threat/mystery, e.g. classic ghostly appearances; physical monstrosity on the loose; madman possessed by something; cursed item. Get us intrigued.
3. The occult detective(s) involved, e.g. Van Helsing late in his career; John Bell having decided spirits do exist; Carnacki at his wits end and needing a co-conspirator.
4. A hint of plot, to show you have a story broadly in mind.

If you’ve never pitched before, have a go at it, and we’ll tell you if you have something there which we think is worth pursuing. If you’ve done it before, you know the drill.

The authors of the pitches we like will be invited to write up a full submission for possible inclusion, so you’ll then have a further three months. No guarantees, but it means that you’re at least on the right lines, so your chances go up.

PITCHES ONLY TO occultholmes@virginmedia.com BY 15TH MARCH, PLEASE

The Occult Detectives (aka The Doomed Meddlers)

No, they’re not always doomed, we just like the term. They risk their lives, their sanity or their bank balances in the investigation of the dark and mysterious. Holmes you should already know, but what about the characters he will work with here? You have a wide range of possibilities open to you, and yes, we may well take more than one team-up with the same occult detectives (from different authors), if the stories are that good.

We hand over for a moment to Tim Prasil, a keen anthologist of early supernatural stories and the creator of Vera van Slyke, his own dauntless investigator…

Prasil on Paranormal Protagonists

Some fictional occult detectives contemporary with Sherlock Holmes are well-recognized: William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki and Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence lead the team with Arthur Machen’s Dyson and Richard Marsh’s Augustus Champnell close behind. However, there are lesser known characters who, were they to cross paths with Holmes, might result in an interesting adventure. Were one to ask me to name my Top Five Lesser-Known Occult Detectives Contemporary with Sherlock Holmes, I would gladly name them—even if the one asking had a chronic infatuation with a dog-deer crossbreed known as “lurchers.”

1. We start with the hazy and unnamed investigator in H.G. Wells’ “The Red Room” (1896). What brought him to Lorraine Castle to investigate its fearful Red Room? What is his relationship to the young Duke, the unfortunate fellow who “had begun his dying” after merely opening the door to the Red Room? We know Wells’ protagonist arrives as a skeptic (as do others on my list), so how does his experience change him?
2. While we’re on the subject of potentially converted skeptics, let’s consider Lady Julie Spinner, a promising character in a disappointing novella by an anonymous author. The piece is titled “Wanted—An Explanation” (1881), wherein Lady Julie says, “I have been a hunter of ghosts all my life, and have never been able even to meet with a single person who has seen one.” However, after being stymied by the strange events at Hunt House, does her view of the boundaries of reality expand?
3. From Lady Spinner, we move to Lord Syfret. The adventures of this serial character might be a bit tough to locate, but Arabella Kenealy’s series of short stories titled Some of Lord Syfret’s Experiences has been reprinted by Coachwhip Press. That is, seven of them appear in that reprint, and one source reports that eleven tales appeared in Ludgate magazine in 1896 and 1897. Here’s a borderline occult detective that’s awaiting a full resurrection by a literary detective, if not a creative writer.
4. Enough with the nobility—let’s look at a duo that beat Mulder and Scully by roughly a century. Miss Erristoun and Mr. Calder-Maxwell investigate the title room in Lettice Galbraith’s “The Blue Room” (1897). The story is remarkably Victorian in that Miss Erristoun is reduced from a gutsy rebel to a wilting maiden-in-distress (one who marries the man she earlier waved off as wanting to tame her). But what if that marriage crumbled quickly, and she rejoined the scholarly Calder-Maxwell to investigate other cases of ghosts-that-aren’t-really-ghosts-at-all?
5. I end with what would amount to a crossover of Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Conan Doyle. Dr. Hardacre, in ACD’s “The Brown Hand” (1899), is a doctor whose hobby is psychical research and who, upon solving his rich uncle’s otherworldly problem, winds up in a very nice position to make probing occult mysteries his full-time job. No doubt, he and Dr. Watson might have a jolly time debating diagnoses: demon possession or delirium tremens—lycanthropy or laryngitis?

Links to all of these stories—except the mildly elusive Lord Syfret ones—can be found on either the Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives or the Legacy of Ghost Hunter Fiction bibliographies at my Brom Bones Books website.

We have our own set of perhaps lesser known potential characters, such as:

• Gerald Canevin, of Henry S Whitehead’s Caribbean tales;
• Alice & Claude Askew’s Aylmer Vance
• The young woman of Ella Scrymsour’s stories – Shiela Crerar, Psychic Investigator;
• John Bell, the confirmed and determined sceptic of L T Meade & Robert Eustace**;
• Dr. Martin Hesselius created by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu;
• Flaxman Low, from the pen of ‘E & H Heron’.

** L T Meade & Robert Eustace also wrote three tales of a palmist, Diana Marburg.

And the pages of the magazine Occult Detective Quarterly might provide more general inspiration – there are great period tales therein of Aaron Vlek’s Geoffrey Vermillion (ODQ #4), Amanda DeWees’ Sybil Ingram (#1 & ODQ Presents), Joshua M Reynolds’ Charles St.Cyprian (# 1 & #4), Melanie Atheron Allen’s Simon Wake (#3), Aaron Smith’s Miss Mason (#3) and more. You can’t nick their characters, though.

NOTE: Ace storyteller Willie Meikle, who has chronicled Carnacki’s further adventures at length, even provided a supernatural Holmes story, ‘The Ghost Shirt’, in ODQ#3, and Brandon Barrows wrote a tale of Carnacki in his earlier years, ‘The Arcana of the Alleys’, for #2 .

Please note that we don’t want lots of laboured and archaic speech, or an excess of Cockney chimney-sweeps and ridiculously posh-talking nobility. Moderate and appropriate use of contractions and period slang, cant and vernacular, please.

A Note on Inclusivity and Discrimination

It was perfectly possible in late Victorian, Edwardian and 1920s Britain to be active and respected whilst being a feminist, being black, being gay or being restricted in physical ability (as just a few examples). Don’t limit the scope of your characters’ personal nature, situation or views. Whilst limited situational discrimination may occasionally be relevant in context of the period – in order to reflect characters’ life histories or traumas – sexism, racism etc. in general will not be accepted.

REPEAT REMINDER: PITCHES ONLY TO occultholmes@virginmedia.com BY 15TH MARCH, PLEASE.

General queries on the anthology for JLG (but NOT full submissions) can be sent to the same email address.

More news of other Belanger Books opportunities, strange fiction, supernatural stuff, and goodness knows what in a couple of days…

or ‘Ghosts May Apply’. Interested in flexing your fountain pen, dear listener? Today we give you some initial guidelines for submitting short stories to a brand new anthology, to be edited by John Linwood Grant, old greydog himself, and coming from Belanger Books, as part of their exciting ‘Great Detective Universe’ project. But you need some background first, for this anthology is no random, unplanned outing for sudden cold drafts and occult apparitions in the night…

Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives will be about detection, logic and technique, and will concern an authentic Sherlock Holmes, but with one simple twist. It will include a Holmes who was aware of potentially supernatural elements in the wider world, and as with ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’, felt the world was not ready for such knowledge. He preferred to leave the field of the ab-natural to others, but on occasion had recourse to work with some of those worthies, and was drawn beyond his usual world. Dr Watson was never allowed to include any such references when he wrote up his friend’s cases, but now these instances can be brought into the light.

Does this ruin the core of Holmes’ position? Not exactly, so don’t run off in a canonical panic. Do you remember ‘The Sussex Vampire’? That particular Conan Doyle story contains the famous lines, where Holmes tells Watson:

“This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

But as we have oft said before, Holmes’ most quoted comments on the supernatural are not quite as definitive as some think. In ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, what he actually states is that normal investigative techniques and logical deduction would be of no use in supernatural cases.

“If Dr. Mortimer’s surmise should be correct, and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.”

In a sense, we might say that Holmes’ fear was that none of his peculiar intellectual talents could be of value in a situation where normal logic was overthrown. If there were such cases, genuine ones, who did deal with them? More foolish, credulous or cash-hungry consulting detectives perhaps. Fraudulent psychics, mayhap. And here and there, the genuine occult detectives, those who had developed a different blend of investigative skills and a knowledge of matters apparently ‘outside the ordinary laws of Nature’…

Not so long ago, the ever-active Sherlockian writer and scholar David Marcum edited The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part VII: Eliminate the Impossible (MX Publishing), a grand idea which featured tales of Holmes’s encounters with seemingly impossible events – ghosts and hauntings, curses and mythical beasts, and more. Except… every case had to have a mundane explanation of some sort.

For a classic example of this approach, you could also turn to L T Meade and Robert Eustace, whose 1898 collection A Master of Mysteries contains a series of investigations into apparently supernatural events which have other explanations –

“To explain, by the application of science, phenomena attributed to spiritual agencies has been the work of my life.”

John Bell, in A Master of Mysteries

John Linwood Grant contributed ‘The Second Life of Jabez Salt’ to Eliminate the Impossible, with a slight additional conceit contained therein, the hint of another well-known detective:

“If,” he said at last, “You are convinced that this is a supernatural affair, then I can be of no use to you, Mrs Salt. I neither give credence to such things, nor do I investigate them.”

She sighed.

“I understand. Mr Carnacki said that you might not help.”

Holmes looked up sharply. “Carnacki? You have been to see him?”

“I have corresponded with him. He is presently otherwise engaged, and ventured that I might seek you out. ‘A sharper mind than mine,’ he said, ‘And one which might better discern if this is merely man’s devilry. He is a proud chap, though, averse to matters ab-natural, and may not help.’ After his latest letter, I took his advice and came down to beg assistance from that ‘sharper mind’.”

My friend’s face was a mixture of pleasure and disdain.

“Well, Holmes?” I prompted.

Of all the supernaturalists in London, Holmes had most time for young Thomas Carnacki, whose scientific methodologies had already proved a number of hauntings to be mere trickery. Holmes applauded the young man’s application of science and logic, and yet abhorred Carnacki’s conviction that the supernatural might still be in play at times. Knowingly or not, Mrs Salt had placed my friend in a dilemma. A certain degree of pride was at stake.

Carnacki (the Ghost Finder) being, of course, the occult detective created by William Hope Hodgson in Edwardian times. Crucially, anyone who has read Hope Hodgson will remember that about half Carnacki’s cases were proved in the end, by the use of investigative methods and equipment, to be quite mundane after all (although one was both natural and supernatural, just to up the stakes).

And JLG’s short novel A Study in Grey (18thWall productions), falls within the same universe, where a canonical Holmes joins forces with military intelligence expert Captain Redvers Blake. Here, the tale can be read as one of spies and dire deeds in Edwardian Britain, and/or as a possible occurrence of ab-natural influences. You’re free to choose and interpret events, as Holmes does in the tale (you don’t need to guess – the Great Detective chooses to take the non-supernatural approach, and stays within Conan Doyle’s boundaries).

Team Occult

What has this to do with the price of fish? Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives will be an anthology of new stories exploring some of the above points, but with free rein for those who wish to go completely supernatural whilst retaining some investigative element and rigour. We expect the preponderance of tales to have genuine psychic, paranormal or ab-natural aspects, but a well written ‘debunking’ might also sneak in.

Belanger Books and greydog will be looking for adventures which involve Holmes teaming up with an occult detective such as Carnacki, John Silence, or Professor Van Helsing. There are plenty of “public domain” occult or supernatural detectives to choose from, or you may already have your own. In our next article, in couple of days, we’ll even suggest some possible team-ups – and point out (this is Women in Horror Month, after all), that female protagonists are indeed encouraged. We have a few existing, period examples of women investigators you could use, but we know that a number of contemporary writers have created fine characters who might well fit.

The submitted stories, which will be in the range five to ten thousand words, must draw directly on the canonical Sherlock Holmes, not the BBC version of the character on Sherlock. For example, Watson should address Sherlock Holmes as “Holmes” not “Sherlock”. Go back to the original Conan Doyle, not TV or film adaptations. And no, we’re not after time-travelling Holmes, space Holmes, steampunk Holmes or any of those variants. Holmes and Watson (assuming you include the latter) must be the real thing.

The stories should also fit the time period for any public domain characters as well. Your detective story should make sense for the timeline of your characters, i.e. you shouldn’t have a Dupin/ Holmes story take place in 1930 as Dupin would be dead and Holmes getting on a bit (it is generally accepted that Holmes lived from 1854-1957* and that Watson lived from 1852 – 1929).

We imagine most tales will be set from the mid-1870s to perhaps as late as the early 1930s, though remember you have a Holmes in his seventies if you choose the latter.

*William Baring-Gould reckoned that, anyway.

The anthology will filled through a blend of encouraging words to some authors who already write in the area, and through open submissions. So anyone can have a shot, but they’ll have to make it good.

In Part Two, we’ll discuss some aspects in more detail, talk about how to pitch – we’d like brief pitches first, to help shape the book – and give you more formal detail on tone, word length, timescale and remuneration (yes, it’s a paying gig). We’ll also tell you about other Belanger Books submission opportunities which have arisen.

In the meantime, do crank up your thinking machine, dig out your mouldering research, and so forth. If you want to read more on this site, you can simply type Holmes into the Searchbox on greydogtales, or look at our range of articles on Carnacki and other occult detectives. A couple of relevant examples:

http://greydogtales.com/blog/shades-of-sherlock-holmes-pastiche-paranormal-or-piffle/

http://greydogtales.com/blog/carnacki-the-second-great-detective/

and

Casting the Prunes: Flaxman Low Triumphant!

The magazine Occult Detective Quarterly regularly contains a period story of supernatural investigation (or more than one), to add to your exposure.

And there’s an external piece by author James Lovegrove which covers some relevant Holmesian ground and crossovers here:

https://crimereads.com/sherlock-holmes-versus-the-supernatural/

NOTE: We mentioned not wanting steampunk this time, but you might like to know that this aspect has been covered by Belanger Books’ most recent outing on the Holmesian front, Sherlock Holmes: Adventures in the Realms of Steampunk, due out this Spring (2019).

If you want to be sure to read Part Two, you can either make a note to pop back here later this week, or subscribe to greydogtales.com for free via a little box in the top left corner somewhere. We are here for the pleasure, and tragically non-profitmaking, so it’s not one of those sites where you get bugged by strangers. Except us. But we’re not strangers – we’re nice.