Dorothy Sayers' Third Omnibus of Crime
commentary by rbadac
You do know Uncle rbadac's trying to be nice to you, don't you? Reviewing all these things that don't cost much & are fairly easy to find, I mean. He could be risking pneumoconiosis going through old magazines in a dusty attic looking for uncollected Violet Hunt, or trotting out something Algernon Blackwood wrote on the back of an envelope when he was camping out & got chased by a bear, or digging up LeFanu's body to tug that fourth volume of IN In a Glass Darkly from his bony fingers that he insisted he be buried with... well, actually I'm still in negotiations with the estate on that one. No, I'm playing softball with you guys because I want you to be able to get involved; it's no use going on about the collected works of R. Templeton Thrumpickle if all you're going to do is stare.
So. You are aware of the Omnibus of Crime volumes of Dorothy Sayers, of course. There are three. The First & Third are fairly common, the Second, for some reason unknown to me, is "elusive." Don't let the title fool you, they're all half crime & half weird, each with its own section, to save trouble. Over in England they were titled Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, & Horror, & subtitled "Second" & "Third" series, & the contents are a bit different in the English & American editions.
Since the First covers so much material already familiar to us, & the Second is a bit of a rarity, let's crack the spine of the Third & see what scuttles out.
Very promising selection, a nice mix of classics & lesser-known works; you got your Blackwood's "Wendigo," your Broster's "Couching At The Door," Hartley's "The Island," James' "The Diary Of Mr Poynter," Irwin's "The Book," Metcalfe's "Time-Fuse," etc. I spy Thomas Burke & A.M. Burrage, Wakefield & Harvey. It's all good, at least all the ones I've heard of. We're going to look at some of the oddballs, though, just so we can say we did.
"The Pattern" Naomi Royde-Smith
Quite remarkable. Beaufort is a journalist who has been affected by the deaths of two great men with whom, in his work & in his life, he has concerned himself: the genius painter Dumaresque & the magnetic Socialist personality Greville Stannorth. He sees their faces post-mortem on a lowly sidewalk chalk artist, on a bishop, on a tailor... he meets Dumaresque's niece Margaret Gray, who reveals to him the connections between his visions & the unseen heart of matters.
The prose is stunning, taking up the sweep of complex events & emotions & fanning them out for the reader with an effortless, resplendent grace. Much, much more than "merely" a ghost story, it is a searing personal drama with the specific gravity of a novel. This is not the relaxed diversion of the usual supernatural tale, but full-blown literature; strong stuff, & not to be taken lightly. If you can handle it, it will make a greater person of you.
"Decay" J. C. Moore
This is a horror story. Do not read it if you are afraid of Death. I say that, & I also say there is not a damn thing in it that is in the least unusual or unnatural, & any one of you might find yourself -- will find yourself -- in the same position someday without realizing it until it is too late. Fat lot of good any warnings from me will do you then. Gimme that scythe, you gloomy sonofabitch, I need to wave it at these people. There. Now take it back. Catch you later, big guy.
"The Hill" R. Ellis Roberts
A snappy, entertaining little pagan thriller, though with an amusingly egotistical end with regard to its hero, Mr O'Brien -- his victory is a little too total, I think -- still, well-written & evocative. I've been curious about Roberts' collection The Other End (Cecil Palmer; London, 1923) for a long time.
"A Jungle Graduate" James Francis Dwyer
The German naturalist Schreiber tells the story of Lesohn, the ambitious fool who sought to train an orang-outang to do parlour tricks, with an eye to taking him back to Paris & making a fortune. A cruel stunt & an ironic turn of events show him the error of his ways. Probably should have taken him out of the jungle first, M'sieu. Rob Suggs read this; it's why his monkey is a gimp.
"The Head" Manuel Komroff
How The Brain That Wouldn't Die managed to be published in the March 1935 issue of Esquire (so saith the acknowledgement) I couldn't begin to tell you. Pretty funny, after a gruesome fashion; though written "straight," inconceivable that Komroff did not smile while writing it, nor Sayers while including it.
"The Mistaken Fury" Oswald Couldrey
Now you will like this one. A college Dean is of a sudden visited by an old crone in black who proves to be one of the Erinyes. She is under the impression that he has killed his father, despite the Dean's protests to the contrary. Not the old joke you might think ("Your mother's husband jumped out the window when the market crashed in '29 -- your father just caught a 15 lb. trout"), & thank goodness for that, but a humorous take on conscience & antiquity, with a rather bittersweet ending. Nice. This is the best story from Couldrey's collection of the same title, which is mostly Hellenistic fantasies.
"No Ships Pass" Lady Eleanor Smith
Not in her collection Satan's Circus (Gollancz; London, 1932, & editions from Bobbs-Merrill & Grosset & Dunlap in America), but also in the Manley/Lewis Ladies of Fantasy & Stern's Travelrs in Time. Patterson's yacht explodes in the southern Atlantic, & he swims ashore to a strange island which has four other inhabitants, survivors of other seagoing mishaps. If you can call this surviving. Without going into too much detail, two are from a pirate ship whose crew mutinied in 1795, another is from the Titanic. No one is named Gilligan. Good story, as are all of Lady Eleanor's.
"The 19 Club" A. J. Alan
A light entertainment, not supernatural. Mr Alan was on radio in his time, & had a couple of books collecting stories like this, which were no doubt aided by his "BBC accent." Too jaunty for Bleiler overall, but if accepted within its limits, not bad for a quick read.
"Sombrero" Martin Armstrong
Not weird, but a good tale. I'd say more, but I'd rather save it for one of Armstrong's more on-topic stories.
"The Scoop" Leonora Gregory
Silly.
"The Idol With Hands Of Clay" Sir Fredrick Treves
Psychological horror. Good, but depressing as all hell.
"Anniversary" Clarence Winchester
Ho hum. Not much to it. Stylistically bizarre & lightweight.
The other eighteen stories in the "Mystery & Horror" section of the American Third Omnibus are by more famed authors, some of which I've already mentioned. For a trade-off of some English writers, including Ann Bridge, Americans got Helen R. Hull's excellent "Clay-Shuttered Doors," an A. Merritt story, & the Komroff reviewed above. The Burrage story "The Bargain" wasn't in his two primary collections, but Ash-Tree saved it in their now o.p. title Intruders. Thomas Burke's "The Dumb Wife" is a Hitchcockian horror story out of the Limehouse mold, E.M. Delafield's "Sophy Mason Comes Back" was in one of the Dalby Mammoth collections if I remember correctly.