Violet Books

Thomas Burke's first book of fiction was Limehouse Nights (1917) which went through several editions on both sides of the Atlantic before the US publisher repackaged it with a dustwrapper & interior illustrations by the brilliant macabre & erotic artist Mahlan Blaine, supplanting the true first edition in many collectors' esteem. This classic set of tales about London's Chinatown made the Queen's Quorum list of mystery masterworks. The book's weirdest entry is "The Bird" about a parrot that possesses the soul of a sea captain. "Beryl, the Croucher" a massively cruel & grotesque "love" story, as illustrated on the dw.

East of Mansion House (Doran, 1928) presents another batch of Thomas Burke's criminous & weird tales of the Limehouse Chinese district, together with Clutterfield, Stewpony & the wharves -- old London's lower neighborhoods. Several tales are fantastic. "White Wings" is about the dwarf Chan Lee who is secretly a supernatural being; "Tablets of the House of Li" is Burke's most horrific supernatural story; plus many tales of crime, revenge, love gone seriously awryć& including a grotesque autoerotic suicide tale, "Black Country," missing from the UK edition

The high point of Dark Nights (Jenkins, 1944) is one of the greatest of all weird crime novelettes, "The Bloomsbury Wonder" first issued separately by the Mandrake Press, 1929. There are an additional 11 Thames waterfront & Limehouse tales of crime & murder. Several of the stories feature an elderly night-wanderer who is entirely autobiographical, tramping London's darker streets in search of colorful pubs & chance adventures. If you ever spot the book with this thrilling pictorial of a gaslit Limehouse street, go for it

How unfortunate that Burke's most desirable collection (from a weird collector's point of view) is also his rarest. Night Pieces: Eighteen Tales appeared in 1935 in London from Constable, in New York from Appleton, each with the same dustjacket design, & both with short runs, for it's nigh impossible to find even a beat-to-death copy, let alone with its colorful dw intact. Rumor has it that plans are afoot for Richard Dalby & myself to co-edit the complete weird tales of Thomas Burke. Full half the content will be from Night Pieces.

Sax Rohmer's Daughter of Fu Manchu (Doubleday, 1931) is shown here in a scruffy Burt reissue. Many Fu Manchu dustwrappers are so thrilling that even bunged around the edges they hold their appeal, & if you've a fine dustwrapper even on a reprint, it can command a shocking price compared to it's low, low value without the dw. In a tale that features a secret society, elixirs of life & death, a weird tomb, & sundry other pleasantries, Fu Manchu's daughter, we're informed, is "as alluring & evil as her sire" though on the cover she is merely menaced by dagger. In the background you'll see a map of Limehouse. In his youth Rohmer was a newspaper reporter & Limehouse was his beat. Those days fired his imagination for a lifetime.

Rohmer's The Slaves of Sumuru, was a paperback original in the US, soonafter issued in the UK for its first hardcover (Jenkins, 1952), the dw showing the titular antiheroine in a costume worthy of the Daughter of Fu Manchu. Rohmer began this series while his career was in a slump (until a new Fu Manchu film revived interest in the character). But during the slump he may have thought the "yellow peril" attributes to his stories were bogging down sales, though in truth Fu Manchu was so strangely noble that he transcended yellow peril. Rohmer seems willfully to have fashioned Sumuru with no detectable race. Even so, he infused her with the same mystery, menace & sex appeal as marked the Evil Doctor. With her mesmeric powers Sumuru is an arch femme fatal "whom all men feared & few men knew." Yum.

The flap copy of the 1947 Geoffrey Bles edition of Count Gobineau'sTales of Asia compares these exotic novelettes to James Morier's Hajji Baba of Ispahan. Titled Nouvelles Asiatiques in the original French, & an edition from Harcourt Brace was retitled The Dancing Girl of Shamakha. The tales are spirited & beautifully told, with the added nicety that one of them, "The Illustrious Magician," qualifies as heroic fantasy.

William Dixon Bell wrote three fantasy juveniles with exotic settings and a predilection for things Oriental. In composing The Secret of Tibet (1933), Bell evidently had Fu Manchu in mind, for which reason we might justifiably regard him as "a poor lad's Sax Rohmer."

The Wallet of Kai Lung (1923) had already appeared in England many years earlier, but not in pictorial boards as for the belated American 1st, issued by Doran together with Bramah's new collection, Kai Lung's Golden Hours. These tales of an unlikely but marvelous China are recognized classic works of fantasy, each story having nested within it a second story, for Kai Lung is an inveterate dissimilator & tale-spinner who escapes tight corners by the tactic of "wait, let me tell you a story" -- a method Bramah perhaps borrowed from Count Potocki's The Saragasso Manuscript & assuredly from Scheherazade.

The splendid Doran edition of The Wallet of Kai Lung featured completely different pictorials on front & back boards. The publisher carried this binding scheme through to the third volume of Kai Lung tales, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928) for a total of six unusually fine paintings.

Ernest Bramah's second volume of awesome & amusing Chinese fantasies was Kai Lung's Golden Hours (1923), issued stateside in this stunning binding. Hilaire Belloc in his introduction laments the difficulty of sharing with everybody in view the enormity of his fondness for Kai Lung, for putting the book in all hands was like "the reading of Keats to a football crowd," as it is the poetic spirit alone that understands the depth of Bramah's art.

The Island Where Time Stands Still (Hutchinson, 1954) is a Gregory Sallust story, Dennis Wheatley's demonic alter ego. Sallust was involved in sundry international spy intrigues in a good lot of books, only a few of them supernatural, though Gregory himself is a sort of sadistic demigod. In Island, though, our antihero definitely finds himself in a supernatural as well as an asiatic adventure. Gorgeously dustwrappered & with map endpapers into the bargain.