"As Far as They Had Got" (round-robin mystery, 1911).

"There, in the middle of the upper panel, was the print of a human hand—in blood!"
Arthur Morrison, "As Far as They Had Got" 1911

Long before the Detection Club's round-robin mystery The Floating Admiral (1931), there was "As Far as They Had Got," which appeared in the September 1911 issue of The Strand magazine and included Richard Marsh (The Beetle), Arthur Morrison (Martin Hewitt, Investigator), and spy novel pioneer E. Phillips Oppenheim among its authors. The Strand dubbed it a "Follow-My-Leader Story." Most of the authors provided a footnote that outlined an ending to the story, but they did not have access to these proposed endings as they wrote their particular section.

The story centers on two men out for sail on a river who become ensnared in the aftermath of the Moorgate Street robbery. The story takes a number of twists and turns.

New edition, Judith Lee stories.

Valancourt Books has issued a new edition of Richard Marsh's Judith Lee stories (1912–16), edited by Edge Hill University's Minna Vuohelainen. As I mentioned in this blog post, Lee is an early female detective with capabilities in ju-jitsu and lip-reading. Marsh (aka Richard Bernard Hellmann, 1857–1915) is best known for The Beetle (1897), and his mysteries, horror works, and ghost stories have been reprinted by Valancourt.

BBC Radio's focus on SH, the gothic.

BBC Radio 4 Extra hauls out of its vault a series of programs (dubbed "the Holmes Service") that feature various incarnations of the Great Detective. These include:

• A Study in Scarlet (with Robert Powell as Holmes, dramatized by Michael Hardwick)
• The Adventure of the Speckled Band (with Cedric Hardwicke as Holmes, 1945)
• The Hound of the Baskervilles (with Roger Rees as Holmes)
• The Final Problem (with John Gielgud as Holmes and Orson Welles as Moriarty, 1954)

Horace Walpole, NYPL

A separate series of programs focuses on the gothic, which includes:

• Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"
• Richard Marsh's paranormal bestseller The Beetle 
• Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto

BL's "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians."

1877 Chatto & Windus edition
of Wilkie Collins's
The Moonstone

The British Library's online exhibition on "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians" has some items of interest for mystery fans:

• Under "the Gothic" are features on "The Victorian Supernatural," "An Introduction to The Woman in White," and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• Under "The Imperial Gothic" are works by H. Rider Haggard and Richard Marsh, as well as Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone.

• Under "Crime and Crime Fiction" are "Crime in Oliver Twist," "Crime in Great Expectations," and "Juvenile Crime in the 19th Century." Also featured (by Judith Flanders, author of The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime that I reviewed) are "The Creation of the Police and the Rise of Detective Fiction" "Jack the Ripper," "Murder as Entertainment," and "Penny Dreadfuls" (including The Boy Detective, 1865).

Note that the attribution for Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) is incorrect; it is not by the pseudonymous Andrew Forrester (James Redding Ware), but rather William Stephens Hayward.

Update. The BL has corrected the attribution for Revelations of a Lady Detective.

Richard Marsh's Judith Lee, continued.

There's been a lot of interest in my review of Richard Marsh's hard-to-find Judith Lee stories (1912–16) since it appeared as part of Patti Abbott's series on Friday's Forgotten Books. Now Black Coat Press has issued The Complete Adventures of Judith Lee. According to editor Jean-Daniel Brèque, the edition includes the stories collected in Marsh's Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (1912) and The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916), as well as "The Barnes Mystery" (a 1916 story from the Strand magazine). This is welcome news for fans of early female sleuths and Marsh.

Update, 1-22-16. There's another new edition of Judith Lee stories from Valancourt Books, edited by Minna Vuohelainen (Edge Hill University, UK)

Friday's Forgotten Books: Judith Lee (1912–16), by Richard Marsh.

I did not propose to sit still [...and] allow those three uncanny beings, undisturbed, to work their evil wills.
—Richard Marsh, "Conscience" (1913)

"He had me by the throat before I had
even realized that danger
threatened." Illustration from
"Mandragora" by Richard Marsh
Washington Herald 1 Mar. 1914

Judith Lee is a "teacher of the deaf and dumb"—in other words, she can read lips. This skill tends to embroil her in trouble. In "The Man Who Cut Off My Hair," Lee encounters jewel thieves; the reader might be annoyed that Lee is enraged by her unwanted haircut rather than the robbery of an elderly man. In "Conscience," Lee connects cryptic utterances with two murders and takes action to avoid further deaths. In "Matched," Lee looks into the case of a bride who has vanished. In "Auld Lang Syne" she thwarts a bombing. In "The Miracle," Lee prevents a prospective marriage based on fraud. In "Isolda," Lee steps in to flout a fraudulent fortuneteller. In "Uncle Jack" she bests an American con man. In "The Restaurant Napolitain," Lee confronts agents of the Mafia. In "Mandragora," she works to free an innocent man from prison.

Lee does not always act wisely (as in "The Restaurant Napolitain" when she faces the bad guy—alone—and tells him she knows he has murdered someone). In some respects, she may resemble Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange (The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, 1915).

Richard Marsh (aka Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) is best known for The Beetle, which outsold Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. His grandson was the horror writer Robert Aickman (1914–81). Few copies of Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (1912) and The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916) exist in U.S. libraries, and the sole copy of The Adventures of Judith Lee on abebooks is priced at more than $1200. I am hoping that Valancourt Books, which has been reprinting Marsh's works, will eventually get to Judith Lee.

Via the Library of Congress' Chronicling America project I downloaded 10 of the Washington Herald versions of the Judith Lee stories that are collected in Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (unfortunately, "Was It Luck or Chance?" was not entirely legible). As an aid to those who may wish to read these stories, I have uploaded the readable copies to my Web site; the links on the story titles in this blog post will take readers to them.

Update, 1-22-16. There's a new edition of Judith Lee stories from Valancourt Books, edited by Minna Vuohelainen (Edge Hill University, UK)

Otto Penzler on zombies.

Richard Marsh's
early zombie novel
A Spoiler of Men (1905)

Otto Penzler expounds on zombies ("They don't dress well") and his upcoming zombie collection on BBC Radio 4's August 14 Americana program.

Valancourt reissues Marsh's The Second Coming (1900); Joseph Payne Brennan.

Illustration by Sydney Cowell
for Richard Marsh's
"Exchange is Robbery"
The Idler, 4 (1893–94)

Valancourt Books continues its reissues of the work of Richard Marsh (aka Richard Bernard Hellmann, 1857-1915, best known for The Beetle, 1897) with The Second Coming (1900), a daring work that posited the effect of the Second Coming of Christ on London society and brought an avalanche of criticism onto Marsh's head.

Also note that the spring 2010 issue of Wormwood includes an essay on Marsh by Callum James (also see this post on James's blog on Marsh) as well as a piece by Mike Barrett on supernatural sleuth Lucius Leffing, who was created by Joseph Payne Brennan (1918–90).

Valancourt continues Richard Marsh reissues with The Goddess (1900).

Valancourt Books continues its reissues of the mystery works of The Beetle's Richard Marsh (1857—1915) with The Goddess: A Demon (1900), in which the savage murder of a gambler suggests a supernatural cause. It's edited by Minna Vuohelainen, who published an article in Clues 25.4 (2007) on Marsh's possibly autobiographical prison narrative "For Debt" (1902). Read the sniffy piece "The Yarning School" (The Academy, Nov. 3, 1900), which discusses Marsh's place in the type of literature that "begin[s] a story anywhere and continu[es] without art or insight, but with reckless invention" (423), along with authors such as Fergus Hume (The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, 1886).

Early zombie work reissued.

Long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was Richard Marsh's A Spoiler of Men (1905), dubbed by the Morning Leader as "thoroughly gruesome and effective." Now republished by Valancourt Books, it joins Valancourt's other Marsh reprints such as The Beetle (1897) and The Seen and the Unseen (1900).

Richard Marsh, Wilkie Collins, and John Buchan this week on BBC Radio 7.

This week on BBC Radio 7: The life of an actress is threatened in "An Illustration of Modern Science" (1896) by Richard Marsh, best known for The Beetle (1897); a policeman recalls a memorable murder case in Wilkie Collins's "Who Killed Zebedee?" (1880), read by Ronald Pickup; and Richard Hannay seeks to thwart German spies in John Buchan's classic The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). Go here for the schedule or to listen.

About the image: John Buchan, NYPL.

Fangs for the memories.

Valancourt Books has just reissued Florence Marryat's Blood of the Vampire (1897, published the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula). It features Harriet Brandt, "daughter of a mad scientist and a voodoo priestess," who seems to have a curiously lethal effect on those around her.

Actress, operatic singer, playwright, and spiritualist Marryat (1837–99) produced more than 50 books over the course of her lifetime.

Also new from Valancourt: Marie Corelli's Ziska (1897), "a supernatural tale of reincarnation, seduction, and revenge"; Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1871–72); and Richard Marsh's rare short story collection Both Sides of the Veil (1901). (BTW, Marsh' s grandson, the late horror writer Robert Aickman, celebrates a birthday tomorrow.)

About the image: A rendering of Florence Marryat from her acting days. New York Public Library.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Philip Bennion's Death by Richard Marsh (1897)

. . . I had wandered into a world of cross questions and crooked answers.
—Richard Marsh, Philip Bennion's Death 74

My latest selection in Patti Abbott's Forgotten Books series is Philip Bennion's Death by Richard Marsh, originally published as The Mystery of Philip Bennion's Death in 1897. Old Mr. Otway and his lifelong friend Philip Bennion sit up talking late one night about the art of murder, and Otway wakes the next morning to find Bennion dead. As a sleepwalker, Otway fears that he has killed his friend while unconscious (he also possesses a talent that many writers would envy: he notes, "I have written stories and dispatched them to editors while fast asleep, and they have been accepted and paid for" [5]). However, there is a packet of other suspects: the resentful servant; the wastrel nephew who inherits Bennion's estate; the beautiful ward whose engagement was opposed by Bennion and who was accused by Bennion of duplicity; and the fiance, who, with his financial success and hearty personality, appears to be the perfect catch, making Bennion's opposition baffling. A mysterious Italian cabinet bought for a song is presented as integral to the murder but Marsh skillfully walks the line between otherworldly premises and all too human motivations.

Richard Marsh (aka Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857—1915) is best known for the supernatural novel The Beetle (1897), which rivaled another novel—Dracula—that year in popularity. His grandson was the horror writer Robert Aickman. In addition to Philip Bennion's Death, Valancourt Books has reprinted Marsh's Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (1898) and The Datchet Diamonds (1898), as well as his collection of ghost stories, The Seen and the Unseen (1900).

Valancourt to reissue Richard Marsh's The Beetle.

"Mr. Marsh has as prettily gruesome an imagination as any writer of sensational fiction." —To-day.

Kansas City's Valancourt Books has announced that it will shortly reissue Richard Marsh's The Beetle (1897), which created a sensation with its supernatural account of an Egyptian sect that seeks to use the powers of someone who can turn into a large beetle (pre-Kafka, of course).

Marsh was the pseudonym for Richard Bernard Heldmann (1857-1915); Valancourt has reprinted a number of his mysteries and ghost stories. Talent obviously runs in the family, for Marsh's grandson was the horror writer Robert Aickman.

And for those weary of the same names on the bestseller list, Valancourt's list of its top sellers for July provides a refreshing alternative:

1. Clermont by Regina Maria Roche (first publ. 1798)

2. Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons (first publ. 1793)

3. The Italian by Ann Radcliffe (first publ. 1797)

4. The Sorrows of Satan by Marie Corelli (first publ. 1895)

5. (tie) The Fate of Fenella by Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, et al. (first publ. 1892)

5. (tie) The Garden God by Forrest Reid (first publ. 1905)

The Resurrection of Philip Bennion's Death.

Valancourt Books has announced its reprint of Richard Marsh's Philip Bennion's Death (1897), in which old Mr. Otway's friend is murdered, and Otway wonders if he committed the crime while sleepwalking.

Marsh (1857-1915) was the pseudonym for Richard Bernard Heldmann; his best-known work is probably The Beetle (1897). His grandson was the horror writer Robert Aickman. The summer 07 Clues features an article on Marsh's possibly autobiographical prison narrative "For Debt" (1902). Valancourt has also reprinted Marsh's The Joss: A Reversion (1901).

The Kansas City-based Valancourt is putting back into print hard-to-find Victorian, gothic, and other works, such as Bram Stoker's Lady Athlyne (1908), with new introductions by scholars and writers. H. Rider Haggard, Caroline Lamb, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Ann Radcliffe are just some of the authors represented.