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.
The world is made of sand. And rocks. And the North Sea. Here you can observe many fascinating species of wildlife, and omigod, there are two terrible, long-legged creatures charging out of the fog! Baring great white fangs, salivating and heading straight for us…
Woof.
Oh, it’s you lot. What have you been up to?
DJANGO:I peed on many stuffs. Salty stuffs.
CHILLI:Had a drink. This water still tastes icky.
we is off up the ‘cliffs’
Our recent trip to my home territory on the Yorkshire coast involved a lot of the North Sea. Much of it was hanging in the sky, as we spent four days in fogbanks, mists, sea-frets and other suspended wetnesses. It felt very much like November. Which made no difference to the lurchers. So we braved the mists and icy winds, never quite sure what was around the next headland – or where the other person was.
Occasionally other brave souls would loom from the grey curtain, muttering “Now then,” which is a greeting of wild and ecstatic companionship in East Yorkshire. And one fellow walker paused to explain out she hadn’t brought her dog’s ball. “Pointless,” she said. “Neither I nor the dog can see where the hell it goes.” It really was that dense at times.
a moment of almost visibility
The wild coast always has an effect on the little donkeys. Energy levels go up, especially with the older dog, Chilli, who only usually agrees to one walk a day (one and half if she’s feeling generous). Take her near the sea, and suddenly she is booming about in huge circles on the sands. She loves it. Django sees more opportunities to bumble about, and goes into his normal sniffing and peeing routine with added enthusiasm. Why stay at home peeing on daffodils when you can come here and pee on a dead lobster?
(Our previous lurcher, Jade, took a very different view of the coast. Being a very neurotic rescue, poor soul, she would mostly stand in the middle of the flat sands and bark, distinctly unsure about all this wettery. Small rivers and streams she liked; a whole sea was far too much, thank you.)
run, chilli, run
During the times when we could see anything, I played ‘fetch’. It was great. I would throw a stick or a piece of kelp, the mighty lurchers would chase it, and then… I would go and fetch it. As usual, Django and Chilli viewed my persistence with interest. They were all for having a run, but once a stick stopped moving, it was on its own. Seeing that I looked disappointed, Chilli did bite some of the kelp in half, but then wandered off again. So no change there.
if you want that stick, YOU go get it
Of course, we went once more to the village of Auburn, because it isn’t there any more. The sea took it, long ago. But there is a wonderful stretch of sands there, mile upon mile.
the earl’s dyke
Between Auburn Beck and the The Earl’s Dyke, there is little but sand and the low crumbling cliffs, not chalk but muddy clay. Ideal for a lurcher who wants to do some rock-climbing without having to carry ropes and pitons.
more exciting mist
And this time we did see seals what had got sick of them surging waves and did want a kip. Full of concern about stranded marine mammals and so on, we went closer and were greeted with a lot of sharp teeth and growling barks of “Can’t a chap have a lie down on his own beach these days?” A Marine Rescue guy had been called out already by some previous walker, and we stood on a long, deserted beach as he demonstrated responsiveness in young seals. He waved a piece of cloth near one, and it bit it. Hard. “Put you in hospital, that would,” he said cheerfully. “Blood poisoning in a day.”
Most curiously (and to our relief), our lurchers had no interest whatsoever in the seal. Chilli had run off up a beck to see if she could find drinkable water, and Django was busy peeing on stuff. Water in; water out. And the fog rolled over all of us.
There is only one drawback to these visits. The sofa at the place where we stay is small, as are the armchairs. Every evening consists of major battle manoeuvres to get on the sofa first, and then the Oppression of the Hierarchy. Or in other words, Chilli is the Boss.
If she gets on first and claims it, Django paces around the house, moaning, until he abandons hope and lies down on the rug with a dissatisfied Whumppfle.
hell hounds on sofa
If he gets on first, Chilli pokes me with a sharp set of claws a few times to see if I’m going to do anything about it, and then hops on next to him, shoving him to one side. His eyes roll, and he squishes into the corner of the sofa, trying to find somewhere to put his sixteen legs.
A shorter and more sombre piece today, specifically to mark the centenary of the death of writer William Hope Hodgson(15th November 1877 – 17th April 1918). Many listeners will know that Hope Hodgson was a huge influence on me in my teens, and continues to be so as I write these days. Without family or collegiate precedents, Hope Hodgson embarked on a literary career which produced some of the most striking weird fiction of his time, work which still has a powerful impact today.
“…In (his) three novels, in The Night Land, and in some of his short stories, he showed a mastery of the bizarre, the mysterious, the terrible that has not often been equalised outside the pages of Edgar Allan Poe.”
Arthur St. John Adcock, journalist, poet and later editor of The Bookman
Coming before H P Lovecraft and the Weird Tales circle, he produced tales of both cosmic and maritime horror, along with brooding poetry and, unexpectedly, perhaps the first ‘true’ occult detective in literature, Carnacki the Ghost Finder. His work has been re-published many times and in many languages; occasional ‘lost’ poems have been found over the years, and we have frequently featured contemporary writers who have been inspired by Hope Hodgson, drawn directly on his themes, or produced skillful pastiches to expand his worlds.
As this is the 17th April, and thus the anniversary of the day he fell during a bombardment, we’re not going to drift into lengthy commentary here. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be running a number of Hope Hodgson pieces on greydogtales.com, but today we simply remember him. This edited entry from Great War Lives Lost summarises the man:
Wednesday 17th April 1918
Lieutenant William Hope Hodgson (Royal Field Artillery) is killed by a mortar shell at age 40. He is the son of the late Reverend Samuel Hodgson and is a… writer and author. He produced a large body of work, consisting mostly of short stories and novels, spanning several overlapping genres including horror, fantastic fiction and science fiction. Early in his writing career he dedicated effort to poetry, although few of his poems were published during his lifetime. He also attracted some notice as a photographer. Born 15th November 1877 in Blackmore End, Essex Hodgson ran away to sea at the age of thirteen and eventually served in the Merchant Marine. In 1898 he was awarded the Royal Humane Society medal for saving another sailor who had fallen overboard in shark-infested waters After a bodybuilding business venture failed he decided to support himself by writing. Two of his most noted works, “The Voice in the Night” and “The Boats of the Glen Carrig”, are based on his experiences at sea, and much of his work is set aboard ships or features seafaring characters.
And I, am I guiltless? What shall I cry When the Trumpets thunder across the sky To know what soul I have caused to die; Ah, then, O People, then must I Bring out my Dead! Bring out my Dead!
So today we remember him, and all of those who have drawn on his work as writers or artists, and who have marvelled at his work as readers. Out you go, old fellow.
A brooding man from Oregon comes closer, his gaze fixed on yours. He places a red-stained hand on your shoulder, and says… “It’s OK, this is only paint. Want to do some writing with me? It’s about Whitechapel and 1888.” To which the answer should be No, because I usually have little time for Jack the Ripper and the occasionally distasteful mythologising around him – or her.
But this man from Oregon is author and award-winning artist Alan M Clark, who did something very different with the Autumn of Terror in his series of intricate novels about the women who were killed, and their often tragic lives. And I had foolishly let one little thing slip concerning Mr Dry, the infamous Deptford Assassin, and those particular events. So I said Yes, instead. Alan is excellent to work with, and the project has proved very interesting.
Here’s Alan himself on the issues, the process and the state of this dark affair so far…
Shadows of Whitechapel
Is the image above a picture of Jack the Ripper’s last victim, Mary Jane Kelly? No, probably not. The woman in the photo is an attractive woman from the late Victorian period. Based on her clothing, makeup, and hair style, I’d say she might have been a prostitute. I placed the picture in this post to give a face to Mary Jane Kelly. Miss Kelly was a 19th century prostitute, a ladybird, she might have said. As far as I know, there are no pictures of her face.
I have been collaborating with author, John Linwood Grant in the past few months on two novels involving Mary Jane Kelly. They are related pieces with linked storylines, but written separately—he’s writing, The Assassin’s Coin, concerning the professional beginnings of his wonderful character, Mr. Dry, the Deptford Assassin, and I’m writing, The Prostitute’s Price, the fifth novel in my Jack the Ripper Victims Series. The links between the two stories are plot elements involving some characters, with the time period, and the environment common to both works. Some scenes occur in both novels, written from the POV of my main character in my story, his main character in his. The goal is to have two novels that, when read together, intertwined as we’re calling it, give the reader a broader understanding and a larger experience of each story. When published, the book will have chapters alternating between his novel and mine. The novels will possibly also both be published independently because each one is designed to be a complete standalone story.
The Jack the Ripper Victims Series
My Jack the Ripper Victims Series is about the lives of the murderer’s victims, depicting what we know about each of the women in dramas that are fiction, but well-researched and meant to give readers a sense of what life might have been like for them in London of the time. There are five canonical victims of the Whitechapel Murderer. Before I started this project with John, I’d written novels about the first four: A Brutal Chill in August, about Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Apologies to the Cat’s Meat Man, about Annie Chapman, Say Anything but Your Prayers, about Elizabeth Stride, and Of Thimble and Threat, about Catherine Eddowes. The fifth book in the series is The Prostitute’s Price.
Although I’d intended to write the novel about Mary Jane Kelly, the Ripper’s last victim, I found myself shying away from the effort and then avoiding the work entirely for a time.
If you’ve seen the crime scene photos, perhaps you’ll understand why. At least two exist, one that is perhaps the primary taking in the whole scene, the other a close up. Much of the “trash” in the photographs exists because the images now available are from photographic products that have deteriorated with age. Those materials would be going on 130 years old. They have what looks like dust and scratches or perhaps water damage that led to mold, mildew, fungus. Whatever the cause, the deterioration has a very dirty look, making what is a disgusting scene, usually seen in a brown sepia-tone, look even worse. Taken in London’s East End in 1888, the images seem to speak accurately of what was a very filthy part of the world in the late Victorian period, indeed a place and time with some of the most impoverished people the world has known. Yet when the photos were first created, they probably had much less trash in them, and would have provided a clearer view of the victim, Mary Jane Kelly.
I considered showing the grimy photos here, but decided that those who haven’t seen them are better off. Unfortunately, these words may pique the curiosity of some who will look for the photographs.
Here is a photograph of the outside of 13 Miller’s Court, to give you an idea of what the photography of the time looked like.
Photograph of the exterior of 13 Miller’s Court taken around the time of Mary Jane Kelly’s murder.
The mutilation of the corpse in the photo is so extreme that it somehow wounds my sense of human worth and dignity. The outrage of the wasted humanity is bad enough, but seeing those pitiful remains on a bed in a small, squalid single-room dwelling, I also suffer an odd claustrophobia, a feeling of being trapped in that tight space at 13 Miller’s Court, where true horror took place. That gives me such a cold, dreadful feeling, I didn’t want to begin the work on the novel about Mary Jane Kelly.
Despite my revulsion, having written novels about the first four victims, I had to complete the project with the fifth.
In the midst of considering how best to start, John Linwood Grant asked me to write an introduction for, A Persistence of Geraniums and Other Worrying Tales, a wonderful collection of his short fiction that he calls Tales of the Last Edwardian.
A PERSISTENCE OF GERANIUMS by John Linwood Grant
The Edwardian period begins after the end of the Victorian period. We were both writing stories that take place in similar eras, and each of us enjoyed the other’s work. Several of the stories in A Persistence of Geraniums and Other Worrying Tales are about his character, Mr. Dry, the Deptford Assassin. I’d read at least three stories involving the character already, but loved them enough to read them again. In one, John gives a brief backstory for the assassin in which Mr. Dry has dealings with Jack the Ripper during the Autumn of Terror. Brief though it is, knowing quite a bit about the crimes and investigation, I found the backstory quite plausible and that gave me an idea of how to approach my novel about Mary Jane Kelly. I asked John to collaborate, and he accepted the challenge.
Here is a representation by artist Walter Sickert of Miller’s Court from very close to the time of the murder.
Illustration by Walter Sickert that appeared in the Penny Illustrated Paper about a week after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly.
I won’t say more about the backstory of Mr. Dry here, because that is at the heart of the two novels we’re writing and I don’t want to give anything away.
I’ve always loved discovery in creative endeavor. Collaboration, with two or more imaginations coming together, is chocked full of it. This collaboration of intertwined novels is truly a strange one. Our assumptions about it have evolved. At the beginning, we intended to write one novel and work on that together. I presumed we’d both contribute to each chapter. Then we decided, that since we each had our own POV characters to deal with, John would write every other chapter and I’d write the rest. I’d done that with Jeremy Robert Johnson in our collaborative novel, Siren Promised. The approach worked well. Our different writing voices gave our characters distinctly different personalities. Then I proposed to John the idea of writing the separate, but related novels that could be intertwined.
Here’s why: Over the years I’d learned that frequently readers shy away from collaborations because they might know the work of one author of a collaborative novel, but not both. If they like the work of one of the authors, and don’t know the other, they sometimes think that if they buy the book, they’ll get a piece of writing by the author they do know that is watered down by the contribution of the author they don’t know.
With what were doing, one can read the novels together or separately, read one and not the other, and still have a whole experience. Of course I suggest readers enjoy both.
Writing separate novels, we are truly only consulting with one another about how to address the elements common to both works. That has taken some doing, and has been a fun process, involving much consultation via email, chat, and skyping, with an eight hour time difference between us, as John lives in Yorkshire, UK, and I’m in Eugene, Oregon in the United States.
The second image in this post is an expanded view of Miller’s Court, part photo manipulation, part drawing. If you click on it, you can see it larger and in greater detail. It is the core image in the short animated film, I did titled “13 Miller’s Court.” The broken window belongs to the room I spoke of in this post, 13 Miller’s Court, where Mary Jane Kelly was murdered. The image is derived from the black and white image with this post titled ”Miller’s Court,” and photographs of the actual Miller’s Court, also posted here, taken in the 19th century. The drawing is my reimagining of he illustration by the artist, Walter Sickert, that appeared in the Penny Illustrated Paper about a week after the murder. It is colored pencil on gray paper.
Because of my background as a horror illustrator, many who have not read the novels in the Jack the Ripper Victims Series presume they are horror novels. They are not, though they certainly have horrific elements. They are tales of survival within a harsh environment, dramas with strong female leads. They are, in fact, written for women, yet not exclusively so. Men like them too. Each one is from the singular POV of one of the victims. As a male author, it has been a great challenge to write from these feminine POVs, one that I’ve enjoyed immensely, and has helped me to love women all the more.
Thanks to John Linwood Grant for helping me enlarge the series with his own amazing contribution.
The novels The Assassin’s Coin, by John Linwood Grant, and The Prostitute’s Price, the fifth novel in my Jack the Ripper Victims Series will come out later this year in a book tentatively titled 13 Miller’s Court.
—Alan M. Clark
Eugene, Oregon
On the subject of Whitechapel and the Autumn of Terror, whilst I do steer clear of most interpretations I can at least recommend Sam Gafford’s novel Whitechapel (2017). This excellent book takes the whole matter in a somewhat different direction, with a complex interwining of classic author Arthur Machen, the London of the time and cosmic horror. Great read – available in print or Kindle formats on Amazon UK and Amazon US.
There’s no doubt that I’m a product of the seventies. Mostly the nineteen seventies, though the eighteen seventies do have their influence. And I doubt there will be many more people of my year of manufacture entering the weird and strange fiction fields so late. It’s two years now since I was first published, a peculiarity due to the fact that I was persuaded to enter the Interweb world and inter-web-act with the writing world. So I did, and decided to write short stories. At the age of 57.
Being an older, later writer is odd for many reasons:
You don’t have a (visible) pedigree of ten or twenty years of attempted or actual publication on which to fall back in discussions, self-promotion or marketing.
You can’t rely on a ten year plan, or whatever people have. You have to do it now, and get it out there. You might keel over before that time is out, and thus…
You have to be immediately identifiable, to come to people’s attention as someone whose work people might want to follow.
The people you work with, and your writing peers, can be thirty or more years younger than you. Their influences and their styles are so much more current, or period-savvy, than your own.
You don’t have a professional network of writing, editing and publishing people. You don’t really know anyone who might be useful to you.
I’d written before at length, done a lot of writing, and some editing and indexing, in technical fields. I’d also produced a few inexplicable novels, which I mostly sat on due to the day job, and the inordinate time it used to take to post things back and forth. Most curiously, I came close to have a novel published in the late eighties/early nineties, by chance, as I corresponded with a publisher about an Edwardian horror novel. They loved it, but in the end, the bosses felt the whole concept was too uncommercial. So I gave in and didn’t hawk it around. I stopped hawking anything around.
Until the Grand Re-emergence. The concepts in that novel became my series Tales of the Last Edwardian, almost thirty years later. And there are quite a few published stories in the series now, with more to come. At the moment it runs from 1886 (yes, that is Victorian) to 1940 (yes, that’s whatever you want to call it). The Last Edwardian is centred around a number of linked characters, some of them born in the mid to late Victorian period, whose actions and legacies continue through to the present day.
(The key to the series is Henry Dodgson, an illegitimate son of Lewis Carroll who ends up being one of the circle attracted to Carnacki, author William Hope Hodgson’s occult detective. Dodgson is often the least important character, if he appears at all, but everyone else links to him in some way. And he is the only one still alive in 2018. I’ll explain that one day, if I’m fortunate to last long enough.)
Older writers might be advised to write what they know, or in fields with which they are familiar. And to tap into what few links they have. But I have a grasshopper mind, and get bored easily. So the first story I submitted, in late 2015 I think, was a sort of young adult myth reworking about ogres to a US market I’d never heard of. They took it straight away, and published it in April/May 2016.
The second thing I wrote was a military spy-spiritualist-mystery novella set in 1908, which even dragged in an ageing and sceptical Sherlock Holmes. The third thing I wrote was the story of a mother and daughter serving Nyarlathotep in his millennia-long plan against the source of all cosmic horror. Those sold on submission as well – but you couldn’t exactly say I was following a pattern.
I have no advice for older writers. It’s exhausting, you don’t make enough money, marketing is a nightmare, and almost everything I’ve had published has been through contacts made in North America, not the UK. You can expect publishers to fold on you before you blink, and when you’re 60, waiting a year to see if something sells is a hell of a long wait. Also surprisingly pertinent, a single set of health problems can cut you out for a month or two at just the wrong time, and the world moves on whether you’re there or not. In some cases, especially where older people are running the small independent presses with whom you might work, you can be left wondering whether you or the publisher will go into hospital first.
(I might also mumble about the aches, the stress on ancient neck, back, fingers and wrists, and the tiredness when trying to deal with the huge time differences between continents and publishers. But loads of people have to deal with those, anyway.)
It’s been worth it, yes, but sustaining the piston strokes is hard work. This year I should have the following published (leaving out things I can’t yet announce), with once again no discernible connection between most of them:
On Abydos, Dreaming. The story of a scarred and bitter golem operative searching for death or redemption on a planet where an incomprehensible alien artefact dictates telempathic storms. Short story in the Survivors anthology from Lethe Press.
Death Among the Marigolds. During the Second World War, actress Margaret Rutherford gets confused with her stage role as Madame Arcati by a young woman who believes she is haunted. Novelette in the Silver Sleuths anthology from 18thWall Productions.
Sanctuary. A girl of the Finnfolk seeks shelter in a village where the old ways of the Cunning Folk still hold, and a community is under threat. Short story in Weirdbook magazine/anthology.
In the Hour of the Pale Dog. An old woman employed as a leatherworker in a dusty, unimportant village must draw on her own past to face the plains reavers who come to cleanse the area. Short story in Skelos magazine.
Songs of the Burning Men. A sombre tale of the horror of the trenches in World War One, and the baleful influence of a record left behind by dead French troops. Short story in the Chromatic Court anthology from 18thWall Productions.
Those Who Stay. The manager of a strange and isolated hotel on the cliffs recounts the tale of three visitors and their fate at the Langton. Short story in the Voices in the Darkness anthology from Ulthar Press.
The Assassin’s Coin. Being the details of how Mr Edwin Dry became known as the Deptford Assassin, and how he decided that the Whitechapel Murderer was a nuisance who needed removing. Novel from IFD Publishing.
So there you are. You’re never to old to do something stupid, basically.
