The Best of the Creeps Series

commentary by rbadac

   

Rbadac slumped in the Corinthian leather wingback & stared into the fire. He took a long pull at his single-malt & turned to regard us with world-weary eyes.

The rest of us waited for him to speak. One or two glanced at their watches.

At length he began:

   

I can't help but wonder about the Creeps Series, that string of books put out by Philip Allan in the Thirties, which were mostly anthologies, though there are a few single-author collections, such as L.A. Lewis' Tales of the Grotesque {1934} that were considered part of it, & were edited anonymously by the delightfully nasty Charles Birkin, who occasionally contributed a tale or two under the pseudonym Charles Lloyd.

They usually receive faint praise from E. F. Bleiler, who dutifully lists them in his The Guide to Supernatural Literature, but dismisses them with adjectives like, "unremarkable," "undistinguished," & "low-level," while noting that certain volumes are sometimes elevated from this black sheep status by the presence of the occasional good writer, most notably H. R. Wakefield, no stranger to us.

Of course the Guide, being concerned strictly with the supernatural, necessarily omits stories of material horror & the conte cruel, & therefore is forced to do a minefield step through anthologies which include them, such as the Creeps, & others, like the Pan Books of Horror Stories edited by Herbert Van Thal.

It is certainly annoying when good writing is buried in the weeds of bad editing, & it makes me all the more thankful of those wild-eyed Canavans who take the time to explore those backyards now & then. Saves me the trouble. Bleiler's comments are backed by more reading than any five of us are likely to accomplish in our lifetimes, & are usually justified in the main; but they may also reflect a personal taste. I myself am rather partial to the stylistic conventions of this particular period, & am rarely disappointed by the honest effort of a decent, workmanlike English ghost. I'm also fond of the well-done conte cruel, & get a lot of enjoyment from the likes of Birkin & Maurice Level-- but then, I'm a jaded ne'er-do-well, unheralded by men, unloved by women, & a notoriously bad influence on children (except for the ones who want to grow up like me), so my argument is a tad subjective. Still, regarding the Creeps, the first three (Creeps, Shivers, and Shudders, all 1932, & combined as The Creeps Omnibus in 1935) are surely worth a look, not only for being the ones heaviest with Wakefield (two each in Creeps and Shivers, four in Shudders), but also for certain other pearls, like the stories of Tod Robbins.

Robbins (1888-1949) was an American who resided in Great Britain & France, & who apparently was really named Clarence; my copy of his The Unholy Three (1917), the novel from which the Lon Chaney films of 1925 (silent) & 1930 (talkie) were taken, shows his name as "Clarence A. Robbins ('Tod' Robbins)"; The Creeps just call him Tod, & I think we should, too. Besides this novel, & The Master of Murder (Philip Allan, 1933), he also did two collections, Silent, White, & Beautiful (Boni & Liveright, 1920) & Who Wants a Green Bottle? (Philip Allan, 1926), which repeats some stories from the earlier collection & adds new ones. The three primary Creeps give us six of these: "Cockcrow Inn," "Silent, White, & Beautiful," & "Spurs"(in Creeps, "Wild Wullie The Waster" & "Who Wants A Green Bottle?" in Shivers, & "Toys" (in Shudders. One of the lesser Creeps (Nightmares, 1933) also has a humorous fantasy, "The Whimpus." He also contributed six other stories to several issues of The Thrill Book, a semi-monthly mag done by Street & Smith, which ran for a grand total of eight months from March to October in 1919 (!). I'm in way over my head now, & you pulp experts will have to take it from here. Mike Ashley's spot on him in his Who's Who in Horror & Fantasy Fiction (1977) has more on his books.

"Spurs" is the basis of the Tod Browning film Freaks (1932), which pretty much ruined Browning's career, & even today still makes a dent in most mixed social gatherings; naturally I recommend it highly, & I still take notes when the guy with no arms or legs rolls, lights, & smokes a cigarette. They don't make 'em like that anymore. The story is fundamentally different from the film, employing only the midget, the girl, her lover, & a dog, & has a chill of a different sort.

"Silent, White, & Beautiful" isn't particularly startling to modern tastes plot-wise (the Roger Corman film Bucket Of Blood of 1959 owes it a debt, though I'm not sure it is acknowledged), but Robbins' style is pleasantly in evidence. His odious character studies, in which he specializes, are at the fore here: the obsessed sculptor, his callous young wife, & his hideous mother-in-law, all etched in Robbins' peculiar brand of acid; their final fates, for us, a left-handed relief.

"Cockcrow Inn," on the other hand, is a rollicking ghost story told by the grandson of Mr. Tibbit, a Godfearing man who lived in a time when witches were burned & pirates were hanged. He himself is the hangman of the dreaded Whitechapel Willie, a black-hearted pirate who chews mouthfuls of glass & has made "many a brave ship's crew walk the plank not five miles off Wishbone Point." Willie comes ashore now & then to make free with the odd farmer's wife or daughter, "a crying shame" to the locals, & his end is not mourned by them. But three weeks of being hung on the beach & pecked by seagulls is not quite enough to keep our bad boy down, as Tibbit discovers to his dismay one Hallowe'en night.

"Wild Wullie The Waster" & "Who Wants A Green Bottle?" are a couple of weirds set in Scotland, the first involving billiards-playing ghosts, the second an account of a laird's experiences with the soul of his dead uncle, who takes him to Hell. Bleiler describes these as "good pulp fiction, with a note of whimsey & sophistication that is unusual in the form," though I'm sure aficionados of the form could name several similar examples ! And "Toys" is a malign allegory of cruel fate as a bored old man with absolutely no love for the human race whatsoever; definitely not someone to whom you would want to sell a scale-model of your hometown.

Turning from Robbins to the other regulars in the Creeps stable, we find Elliott O'Donnell represented fairly frequently, usually with two or three stories per volume. O'Donnell is perhaps best known as a compiler of "true" ghost stories of a somewhat better-than-average quality than what one usually finds in the idiom. He is by no means a bad writer; his style is very readable, & his fiction ghost stories hold up well as fiction. "The Ghost Table," which hops around at night messing with the rest of the furniture & trodding on the cat, is quite entertaining, & "A Wager & a Ghost" is a nice turn on the Michael Arlen "A Gentleman From America" plot.

The "Accusing Shadows" (in Shudders,) which give spectral evidence of a gruesome murder, make for a well-handled tale, "a ghost story founded on fact" though it may be (I suppose that was inevitable). O'Donnell's tone abruptly blossoms in "The Haunted Spinney," which is probably the best of the bunch -- the mental processes of the witness to the killing in the spinney (a copse of trees or a thorn thicket, in case you were wondering), & the ghostly aftermath are notches above O'Donnell's usual capable level.

Philip Murray seems to be the only writer in these volumes who does not have a collection of his own, which may be just as well, since his stories come closest to deserving the criticisms Bleiler levels at the series. 'The Patch,' however, concerning an unexplained ghost underneath a bed, is not bad, & has a Wakefieldian quality about it. Mrs. H. D. Everett, victim of a time when women writers were defined by their married state, has "The Death Mask" in Shivers, with its harrowing concept of handkerchiefs rising to form the features of a deceased wife's corpse, due to her face having been thus draped at her death, & "The Crimson Blind" in Shudders, which is only seen in the window in the hours before dawn, & reflects the actions of a lunatic of long ago. Both can be found also in Mrs. Everett's collection The Death Mask & Other Ghosts (Philip Allan, 1920).

The eight Wakefield stories in the three volumes are virtually the entire contents of They Return at Evening (Philip Allan, 1928), excepting only "A Peg On Which To Hang" & "An Echo." They are too familiar to go into here, other than saying they are justly the best of the lot.

And Charles Birkin's own Charles Lloyd stories are indicative of his eventual direction, though admittedly early efforts themselves -- not that they fail to showcase his absolutely jet-black worldview; in "The Last Night" in Creeps, an asylum inmate gets the better of an abusive doctor with her cold-blooded suicide, & "The Harlem Horror" in Shudders is equally unrelenting in its depiction of missing children being re-engineered as circus freaks (shades of Browning's film again!). Birkin must have been quite a hit at parties; five minutes with him & the most devoutly-practicing Pollyanna would have cheerfully slit her own throat.

There were at least eight other Creeps books in the years following, usually with the typical one-word title: Horrors, Monsters, Terrors, etc. etc. Though it is doubtful any of them measured up to the quality of the first three, there may yet be a forgotten treasure or two among them...

   

He paused. The room was almost empty. Most of us had retired to the bridge tables some time ago. Imagine! Attempting to discuss books which hadn't been in print for nearly seventy years ! How were we supposed to know what the bloody hell he was on about??

Ruthven & Posonby were asleep on the sofa, the former's brandy upset on the carpet, the latter's cigar burning a hole in Ruthven's coat sleeve. Rbadac muttered an imprecation. "Blighters," he sulked. "Wouldn't know a good ghost if it bit them in the arse." He settled back in his chair & resumed gazing disconsolately into the fire, drumming his fingers, & presently dissolving into a thin, petulant mist.

   

copyright © 2000 by rbadac, all rights reserved

   

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