Hyperactivity and hecticness (?) this week, so today will be a quick medley. I’m ultra-busy working on an exciting new venture – a magazine called Occult Detective Quarterly – and writing weird stories as fast as I can. I’m also converting our dogs into Top Trumps cards for no obvious reason. And we have a pile of lurcher queries to answer for next week.
Lurchers briefly and first. One of the oddities of running greydogtales is that lots of people find us on the Internet when they type in lurcher and longdog queries. I suspect that some of those people are a bit surprised by what they get, especially if they’re looking for serious or even veterinary-level answers. The bulk of what we post is true, sometimes even useful, but we tend to spin and focus on the weirdness. So we’ll have a look at some of the queries that have brought people here, and see if we can give relatively sensible answers to some of them in due course. Continue reading Writer, Editor, Beggar-man, Lurcher→
Classic detectives are fun. And a bit weird. We love a stylish old mystery, and so today we enjoy ourselves and highlight three peculiar crime-solvers at once, with a serious nod to Sherlock Holmes in the process. Our tireless trio are Jacques Futrelle’sAugustus S F X Van Dusen, Edgar Wallace’sMr J G Reeder and Roy Vickers’Detective-Inspector Rason (in order of decreasing weirdness).
J G Reeder
bundesarchiv – edgar wallace
We’re going to start in the middle with our absolute favourite, Mr J G Reeder. It’s strange in a way that the character is so little known nowadays, as he stands out amongst his contemporaries in fiction. His creator Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) was already known for his thrillers, and was prolific, being described as being able to write a full novel in three to four days. Prior to Wallace, most British thrillers had featured amateur or private detectives as their main protagonists – Wallace almost single-handedly popularised the use of a police officer as the main investigator.
J G Reeder is a former police investigator with considerable experience in money-related crimes such as forgery, counterfeiting and bank heists. Taking up a position in the Department of Public Prosecutions, he is assigned a number of cases where officials are rather stumped. The character was first introduced in Edgar Wallace’s novel Room 13, but really took off in a series of short stories published in 1925.
This might be seen as a standard set of crime stories for the period, except for the nature of Reeder himself. In appearance and surface behaviour, Reeder is a mild-mannered civil servant of nineteen twenties fiction, polite and unassuming, described at one point as looking more like a rabbit than a officer of the law. He speaks gently and tries not to stand out. His mind, however, is extraordinary. He himself puts it down to being able to think precisely as his opponents do.
“I have that perversion,” he said. “It is a terrible misfortune, but it is true. I see evil in everything… in dying roses, in horseshoes – in poetry even. I have the mind of a criminal. It is deplorable!”
The Poetical Policeman
The end result of his ‘criminal’ mind is that whilst the investigator is orthodox in every visible way, his approach to investigations is often highly unorthodox. The mysteries themselves are novel and quite interesting, but Reeder’s character elevates every tale.
hugh burden as j g reeder
It’s difficult to cherry-pick, but for us one of the most enjoyable is The Green Mamba, originally entitled The Dangerous Reptile. An ‘uncrowned emperor of the underworld’, Mo Liski is persuaded that Reeder must be taken down. The story which follows is a wonderful exercise in subtlety as the investigator misleads and misdirects everyone around him, a non-criminal mastermind at his finest.
“The world is full of sin and trouble,” he said, shaking his head sadly; “Both in high and low places vice is triumphant, and virtue thrust, like the daisies, underfoot. You don’t keep chickens, do you, Mr Liski?”
The dangerous reptile is, naturally, J G Reeder. If you want our secret opinion, Mr Reeder could probably have out-manouevred even Sherlock Holmes, but we shall never know. Our recommended Sleuth of the Week.
Associated trivia – The stories were turned into a UK TV series between 1969 and 1971, and rather well done. Doing an excellent job as Reeder was the actor Hugh Burden, who conveniently also starred in Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb, one of our favourite mummy films.
Wallace links to our own writing, as well. As a young man in the army he ended up South Africa during the Second Boer War. In 1898 he left the army to become correspondent for Reuters, then correspondent for ‘The Daily Mail’. He wrote a series published as ‘Unofficial Dispatches’, but due to his viewpoint and criticisms, Lord Kitchener removed Wallace’s credentials. Wallace was therefore operating at the same time that Henry Dodgson and Redvers Blake, lead characters in our short novel A Study in Grey, became disenchanted with aspects of the war, especially the concentration camps. And yes, Wallace and one of our characters did meet, but that’s for another story…
Detective Inspector Rason
Our next detective, who has no first name, is not in J G Reeder’s class, but he and his cases are curious enough to deserve a mention today. His creator, William Edward Vickers (1889-1965) was an English mystery writer better known under his pen name Roy Vickers (he had five or six other pseudonyms as well).
The Rubber Trumpet, the first of Vicker’s thirty-seven stories featuring the fictitious Department of Dead Ends, appeared in Pearson’s Magazine in September 1934. Partial collections of the stories were later made in 1947, 1949, and 1978. We have the 1978 Dover Edition, introduced by E F Bleiler (who also edited science fiction and fantasy fiction anthologies).
The Department of Dead Ends is Scotland Yard’s dumping ground for unsolved mysteries – some serious, some mundane. It’s a classic cold case set-up, with the expectation that most will never be looked at again or ever solved. The set-up is described as:
“…that repository of files which were never completed, of investigations without a clue and clues which led nowhere. From time to time, quite illogically, Inspector Rason finds a connection between happenings in the outside world and the objects in his Scotland Yard museum, a rubber trumpet, maybe, or a bunch of red carnations. Then events move inexorably to their appointed end.”
The central investigator, Detective Inspector Rason, is not a character on whom to dwell for too long, although the stories are themselves interesting. He’s neither as clever nor as ruthless as Mr Reeder. Instead, he acts as a collector of trivia, one who sees tiny links between people and items. Some of his cases are solved entirely by accident, or via an afterthought.
These are not detailed forensic investigations where science and team effort prevail. Rason might hear something in a corridor, and remember an item on a shelf. And that’s it. It’s an unusual way of doing things, and Vickers emphasises the random nature of existence above all else. The most casual action or incident in one town on an unimportant day might easily link to an horrific crime elsewhere a week or a year later. The connections are sometimes ingenious, and might make you worry a little if you’re a career criminal. Did you leave a discarded ticket on a train three years ago?
Although Vickers wrote over 60 crime novels and 80 short stories, it was on the basis of the Department of Dead Ends that he developed a reputation in both the UK and the US as an accomplished writer of inverted mysteries. You’ll probably have to find this lot second-hand nowadays.
‘One of the half-dozen successful books of detective short stories published since the days of Sherlock Holmes.’ Manchester Evening News
The Thinking Machine
jacques futrelle
Finally, the earliest and most weird of our three sleuths. If there is a cold, calculating challenger to Holmes, one who shares his irascibility, his disdain for others, and his logical bent, then it is Professor August S F X Van Dusen – also known as The Thinking Machine and in the press, ‘the American Sherlock Holmes’.
Van Dusen was the creation of Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912), an American writer and journalist. Rather tragically, Futrelle died on the Titanic after insisting his wife take her place in one of the lifeboats. Despite having written a number of novels, he is best known for his tales of Van Dusen, who is in some ways a monstrous central character – Holmes with less redeeming features. Our sleuth this time is no Holmes in appearance, either:
“he was slender with the droop of the student in his thin shoulders and the pallour of a close, sedentary life on his clean-shaven face. His eyes wore a perpetual, forbidding squint – the squint of a man who studies little things – and when they could be seen at all through his thick spectacles, were mere slits of watery blue. But above his eyes was his most striking feature. This was a tall, broad brow, almost abnormal in height and width, crowned by a heavy shock of bushy, yellow hair.”
The Problem of Cell 13
Where Holmes had his Watson, Professor Van Dusen had journalist Hutchinson Hatch, perhaps drawn from Futrelle’s experience working for the Atlanta Journal.
1905 drawing of van dusen
Acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author Harlan Ellison says of Van Dusen, in his introduction to the 2003 collection of Thinking Machine stories:
“This irascible genius, this diminutive egghead scientist, known to the world as “The Thinking Machine,” is no less than the newly rediscovered literary link between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe: Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, who—with only the power of ratiocination—unravels problems of outrageous criminous activity in dazzlingly impossible settings.”
It’s tempting to think that Ellison, who is sometimes described as an irascible genius himself, felt a certain bond with Van Dusen.
Some of the short stories were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post and the Boston American. They’re a mixed bunch, and some are exercises in the most unlikely uses of logic, to the point of being rather unbelievable. If you ever questioned Holmes’ ability to make logical deductions from limited evidence, then you can have a field day here. The most widely anthologised tale, The Problem of Cell 13 (1905), relies on a chain of arrangements and events which stretch credibility about as far as you can go.
They’re still rather enjoyable, though. Because of their age, the full text of many of the stories can be found at:
Van Dusen is odd enough to have cropped up in other media a few times. The professor appeared in two episodes of the excellent 1970s Thames Television series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.
In those episodes (in the second series of Rivals), the marvellous Douglas Wilmer portrayed Van Dusen in “Cell 13” and “The Superfluous Finger.”
douglas wilmer as holmes
This is rather appropriate, as Wilmer played Sherlock Holmes himself in the first series of the UK sixties production of Holmes’ exploits, filmed in black and white. Peter Cushing was to take the role for the second series, this time in colour. Despite much criticism of production problems by both actors, Wilmer is actually a rather good Sherlock.
In addition, the character appeared in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s graphic novel Nemo: Heart of Ice (20130. Van Dusen aids explorer Janni Nemo when she encounters H. P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods in Antarctica.
So have a squint at some of the above stories, and see what you think.
In a couple of days on greydogtales – we don’t know. We’re not detectives…
If you like greydogtales, whether you’re a lurcher or a lesser being, stay with us for a moment. I have truths to tell (quite unusual, really), and I speak as a guy in his late fifties who made an odd decision last year – it was time I took writing seriously. You can enjoy this as a young whipper-snapper poking fun at an ancient relic, or enjoy it as a seasoned veteran wondering if you left it too late to do what you wanted. I say enjoy, but…
we produce all our own memes and ads (you guessed, huh?)
There was a moment last Summer, probably a Tuesday morning, when this was the Author Page of John Linwood Grant. I had ambition, a new printer cartridge and plenty of hard-boiled eggs. I think we lasted two, maybe two and half posts before greydogtales mutated into an unruly beast which goes where it wants. So much so that if I really wanted to sell books, I’d probably have to start a protest page, complaining that I’d been misrepresented here.
the author, trying to pretend he’s not there
There is something inherently troublesome in writing about your own writing all the time. I couldn’t even manage it for two weeks (though I salute those who can). So once I found that people liked the kind of weird stuff I like, I couldn’t stop the mutation. We lurched (I use the word quite deliberately) into wild sessions on longdogs, classical authors, and fantastical artists.
Instead of presenting brief information on my writing career for interested readers, greydogtales started offering original content three or four times every week. Metal dog leads, film-makers and audio horror; Middle-Eastern folklore and British folk-horror; bitey-face, comics and contemporary scary tales. We became what we are today – a bit of a cheerful mess. Bizarre posts and the infamous Django with no pants.
our key researcher contemplates the next issue
I’m always amused by the fact that I have no idea what will be popular from week to week. Training your Human shot through the roof, but then a piece on post-Lovecraftian fiction did the same a couple of months later. In neither case had I expected it. Sometimes it’s just luck, or one person sharing a post everywhere.
Despite all this I am a professional writer, producing strange period fiction and dark fantasy, and I have two very strange lurchers (plus an ancient labrador). Which is interesting, considering that the most popular things I’ve written in ten months have actually been:
Lurchers for Beginners, and its various sections, including Training Your Human
The Journal of J Linseed Grant, an eccentric recluse recounting his struggle with life and his housekeeper Mrs Gumworthy
“From the journal of J Linseed Grant, 24th May: “The dogs’ gambling habit is growing worse. The black female now has three collars and most of the food bowls. One of my fountain pens is missing, and I suspect that she is marking the cards.”
Lurchers for Beginners has been a phenomenal and entirely accidental success. Which was not part of The Plan, as I’ve often said. But I notice that other authors have Work In Progress, Reviews and New Releases sections on their pages. So I’m going to make a feeble attempt to adjust the balance for half a page. Following posts will be up to Django and the research team, or whatever hits us when we’re reading, browsing and out with the dogs.
a surprise hit
Things are going fairly well, which is not a wise thing to say. So ignore that. It’s been a hell of a first ten months or so, and incredibly tiring. Not long before greydogtales kicked off, I sent out my first short stories ever which was a strange experience. Since then I’ve put out these stories as free tasters:
The Intrusion – Last Edwardian
A Loss of Angels – Last Edwardian
One Last Sarabande – Last Edwardian
coming this summer
And had a sale or a solid nod for the following:
Grey Dog – pre-Last Edwardian
A Dark Trade – pre-Last Edwardian
Hungery – Young adult fantasy
Lips Shall Speak No More – Last Edwardian
Messages– Lovecraftian
A Stranger Passing Through – Revenants
A Persistence of Geraniums – Last Edwardian period
The Jessamine Garden – Last Edwardian period (in America!)
With the Dark and the Storm – African Weird/Lovecraftian
Horseplay – Yorkshire Wolds Weird
available now
Plus I wrote the novella A Study in Grey, the Last Edwardian/Sherlock Holmes crossover published in April. And I have six or seven more stories under consideration. I wish I was ten years younger just to have the energy to write, maintain greydogtales and do all the background things like trying to master social networks. Or maybe even one year younger. I shouldn’t be greedy.
What has changed since I was young(er) is that you really have to be a one-person marketing division. No-one will get you noticed but yourself. But if you go around saying you’re good, people quite reasonably look dubious. So you have to network, and hope, and be kind. And write hard.
A Study in Grey has been popular. Going with the failed idea that this is my Author Page, I can offer evidence. Writer Tim Prasil, something of an expert in period psychic tales, says of it:
“Grant masterfully weaves together these two seemingly dissonant fictional realms: the “no ghosts need apply” world of Sherlock Holmes and Carnacki’s, where ghosts not only apply — they prove worthy of the job.”
The review and his excellent ghost-hunting blog can be found here:
Blogger Matt Cowan was kind enough to review it on his site Horror Delve, which covers all sorts of interesting horror-type stuff, saying:
“…if you’re in the mood for a mystery involving psychic agents and eerie seances set in Edwardian England, A STUDY IN GREY should be right up your alley.”
“Some authors create names for a story, this author fills them with life and personality. I loved the controlled sense of suspense, and the sheer wit.”
the continuing saga of henry dodgson
Harrumble! Returning to almost where we came in, Works in Progress include:
The Last Edwardian novel, which triggers the whole series
More standalone tales of the Last Edwardian throughout the twentieth century
Further Revenants and African Weird short stories
Sandra’s First Pony – Tales from the Wolds, which may be published or free
tales of african weird
After and during that, I need to look at serious plans for a Lurchers for Beginners book in 2017. Without our lurchers over the years, I might never have truly known what ‘weird’ meant. I’ve also had an offer to take J Linseed Grant’s insane journal into print next year.
So I’m quite busy.
And yes, the site is cluttered with strange nonsense, and because it works mostly off my brain activity in odd half hours, or after many pale ales, it often seems to charge from one issue to another with no logic at all. Maybe that’s why we get so many listeners, though I suspect that there are many lurcher lovers thinking “Not as much doggie goodness as I’d wanted.” We’ll try and correct that a bit over the next month or two with more Lurchers for Beginners posts, honest!
Do you dare to step within? Be warned – today we crash into lots of weird new works by authors all over the world, fail to give any of them proper coverage, and then drift off to Africa. And Django resurrects a household tradition. This is indeed one of our confused mid-week medleys…
Someone asked us recently – why greydogtales? We think that they were interested in the name, rather than questioning our existence. The name bit we can answer. It’s partly because last year the first new story we wrote, a tribute to William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, was called Grey Dog, and partly in honour of our late lurcher Jade, who was a lovely but troubled rescue.
We’ve mentioned Jade before, and boy, was she hard work. Almost impossible to train, and proof against any behaviourist we tried. She was, however, great in summer. She hated bluebottles. As we also hate the little buggers, it was a delight to find the stairs and hallway littered with dead flies. Being an agile lurcher, Jade was quite capable of leaping and catching them in mid-air. I imagine that they tasted rather bitter, so she left the bodies to be swept up later. Good dog.
It was promising, then, to find that Django, our quite sane but silly longdog, has developed the same interest in ridding the house of flying vermin. With the heat up this week, he has been patrolling the house and taking down enemy fly-craft with some success. Unlike Jade, however, he seems incapable of using insect recognition charts, and thus goes after bees as well. So we live in fear of him getting a stung nose, and at the same time we applaud him for his fly termination. Daft dog.
Note-type thing: For all the books below we’ve given a UK Amazon link for consistency. We’d like to point out that if you ask a grown-up, they will be able to find other sales links, even ones direct from the publisher. If you use the last option, the writer may get a better cut that way.
Now, weird works. That was where we were going. Let’s start with a mention of Matthew M Bartlett. Matthew seemed on the surface to be a shy, ordinary joe, the kind of dime-a-dozen guy a dame could pass in the street on her way to a cheap bourbon joint, yet that hot afternoon in Queens, something changed…
Sorry about that. We drifted. So, you should look at his stuff. We were utterly absorbed by his book Gateways to Abomination, a slightly indescribable collection of short pieces interwoven to give you clues to some deeper single vision.
With its focus on Leeds, Massachusetts, we were driven to respond with a challenge from Leeds, Yorkshire, which you can read on Brian O’Connell’sConqueror Weird website here: john linwood grant on matthew m bartlett
Matthew has now released Creeping Waves, which is both a sequel and not a sequel – you can read it separately, but if you’ve read Gateways, you’ll probably get even more out of both of them. Hopefully we’ll pin him to the interview board later this summer.
El Bartlett also has a story in Ravenwood Quarterly’s soon-to-be-released inaugural issue, so we nudged editor/publisher Travis Neisler for a quick pitch about that endeavour:
“Hi! I’m head weirdo here at Ravenwood and I approve of this message… sorry, it’s election time here in the state. Mr. Grant offered me a moment to spotlight what we’re up to, so here I am. The magazine is coming along with the help of the most excellent Sam Gafford and we are still hopeful for a late June shipping date. After that you can expect chapbooks for John Paul Fitch’s “Sunflowers” and then Mr. Grant‘s “A Persistence of Geraniums” as well as some others. Big things happening! Another big thanks go to Sam Gafford – we seriously could not have got this far without him. Thanks for the opportunity to chitter on!”
As we’ve raised the spectre of writer John Paul Fitch now, it’s worth mentioning that John has recently written four episodes for the upcoming ‘Fragments of Fear’ TV show. The concept of Fragments of Fear is rather tempting: “From a dark and foreboding subterranean vault, a series of otherworldly narrators lead the viewer through tales of terror, horror, and suspense, offering a dark and disturbing take on Jackanory meets Tales from the Crypt.” You can find out more below:
Had enough weird yet? No? Then why not check out the new book from Michael Wehunt, entitled Greener Pastures. Michael, who dwells in sunken Atlanta (What? Ed.), has already produced over twenty disturbing and strange short stories, one of which, I Do Not Count the Hours, was included in The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu which we mentioned last week (see cthulhu may not live here any more ).
Greener Pastures, his first collection, not only pulls the best of these together but also includes some new tales written especially for the book. Well worth a look.
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“She said that her name was Beauty, that she’d been raised in a mission beyond Lokoja. She was a liar. When you looked into her eyes, the colour of ironwood, you could see that no Jesus-man had ever been inside that head.” (jlg)
If you follow our ramblings on Facebook, you might know that we have an interest in Africa (we’ve even been there, but only to the Northern bits, sadly). The two areas most relevant to our own writing are:
the background of events in South Africa during the Boer War, worrying events which affect the nature of some key characters in our Tales of the Last Edwardian
our growing series of strange tales set in colonial Nigeria, mostly from a black perspective, which might also be seen as a response to the casual and unpleasant racism of Edgar Wallace and pulp writers earlier last century.
We in the greydogtales kennel believe that depicting people of colour (and exploring different backgrounds, beliefs, cultures and ethnic identities) in weird and dark fantasy fiction is important. Not only that, but it’s exciting. The idea that you can have a field called ‘weird fiction’ and then only populate it with stock white characters seems rather silly and unimaginative.
But we are very white in reality, however adventurous we might be, so we’re always interested when we find new stuff that expands our horizons. Despite the fact that we knew of the Imaro stories by black author Charles R Saunders, we’ve only recently come across the broader idea of a whole Swords and Soul sub-genre. As we love a good fantasy, the idea of heroic sword and sorcery tales based on African mythology, history and characters sounded terrific. We were already fans of writers such as the late Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, who wrote about the oral traditions and myths of his own Igbo people – there are enough ideas in that corner alone to fill a few bookshelves. So we investigated.
As far as we can tell, author Milton J Davis seems to be one of the key proponents for taking the sub-genre forward, along with Saunders himself. So our plan is to indulge ourselves with some Sword and Soul, and if we find something cool, we shall report back. If we’re really lucky, we might be able to persuade one of the authors to come on greydogtales and say a few words. Our first stop is going to be Griots, an anthology of fourteen sword and soul stories co-edited by Mr. Saunders and Milton J. Davis. No, we don’t know what they’re like, but that’s the fun of exploring.
There are more interesting people,dogs and books to mention, but they’ll have to wait until later. Time to go write fiction, pick up dead flies and earn chicken carcasses. We’ll be back soon…
