Fri 20 Feb 2015
A Review by David Vineyard: EDEN PHILLPOTTS – Lycanthrope: The Mystery of Sir William Wolf.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[6] Comments
EDEN PHILLPOTTS – Lycanthrope: The Mystery of Sir William Wolf. Butterworth, UK, hardcover, 1937. Macmillan, US, hardcover, 1938. Also available online here.
Sir William Wolf has just inherited Stormbury on his father’s, Sir Porteous, death. A slight scholarly man, he has a quality of strength about him as well as frailty. He has just returned from Greece where he was studying antiquities with his man and close friend Bob Meadows. He returns home to another close friend, the hearty John Malfroy offering support in these difficult times.
Sir William Wolf had deeper problems than running Stormbury, though. Recent mysterious events and a creature only half perceived in the darkness have left Sir William with a strange idee fixe he explains to his friend Malfroy:
And it gets worse:
“You can’t get on equal terms with a lycanthrope, supposing any such abortion existed.”
If Sir William was merely obsessed, it would be difficult enough, but there are mysteries afoot, and it is hard to dismiss Sir William’s fears so easily. Eventually the tension will force a separation between Sir William and his long time friend and servant Bob Meadows, and a new man will be hired, one James Callender, and whether he, or anyone, can be trusted is a real question.
I should pause here to explain something. Lycanthrope is a thriller, but it is not a horror novel, Lycanthrope is a detective story.
Enter our sleuth, whose explanation of the complicated events takes up the latter part of the novel.
Okay, it’s not Hammett. This is old fashioned, even for 1937. It would have been old fashioned in 1927, maybe even 1917. Eden Phillpotts was born in 1862 and had his first great success with the chapbook My Adventure on the Flying Scotsman, by most accounts the first mystery set on a train well before the 20th Century. He was still writing in 1950. He lived until 1960, two years short of 100.
If you know Phillpotts at all it is for his detective novel The Red Redmaynes, and if you don’t know that you might know him because of a young woman he encouraged to write detective stories — Agatha Christie.
Phillpotts wrote detective novels and well-received regional novels under his own name, and thrillers a bit less formal about the detective work as Harrington Hext.
That said, Pettigrew does an admirable job with the Sherlock Holmes bit. He may not have been a great actor, he admits he was no tragedian, but as a detective he is gifted, and he needs to be, because more is going on at Stormbury than Sir William’s obsession. Mystery and conspiracy swirl around the place, and more than one of both. Why did Bob Meadows desert his friend, and who is James Callender …?
For me, the old fashioned element of this book worked in its favor with the atmosphere and the hint of the supernatural. Phillpotts isn’t content merely to tell you the mysterious events. He wants you to feel them.
Lycanthrope manages some thrills and chills, and the mystery is satisfyingly solved. If Sir William reminds you a bit of Sir Henry Baskerville its no accident, but this in no other way resembles Doyle’s novel. Pettigrew is no Holmes, but you might keep in mind Holmes is an actor as well.
Can Pettigrew save Sir William’s fragile grasp on reality much less his life? Can he unravel the conspiracies at foot and lay the wolf haunting Stormbury?
I enjoyed this one. It moved much faster than I expected, and it turned into a much better detective story, if hardly fair play, than I had expected. Pettigrew proves an engaging narrator and a believable one, and Sir William, who could easily become a silly fool we could not identify with, becomes a figure you want to save.
I can’t tell you why you can’t actually call this one a murder mystery, but it comes very close to being one.
All in all, despite its dated prose, this was one worth reading, a good example of why Phillpotts remained in print from the end of one century into the middle of another.
Editorial Comment: Unless Al Hubin is in error about this, Lycanthrope is the only case of mystery that Samuel Pettigrew was ever consulted on.
February 20th, 2015 at 3:42 pm
Steve
Great work finding a cover for this one. I was afraid the Train chapbook and a photo would be all you could find other than the Dover RED REDMAYNES.
February 20th, 2015 at 4:06 pm
Google Images to the rescue, as it almost always does. Then of course I always check out Gutenberg et al. for online versions of older books. I’ve read the first couple of chapters of this one, but without your review to suggest it would be worth going further, I probably wouldn’t. My first reaction was that its a tad too old-fashioned for me. The cheapest way to get Phillpotts in printed form is probably the Dover edition of REDMAYNES, the one you mentioned. This may be the only Phillpotts still in print, other than POD editions. Is there anything out of the ordinary that makes it qualify as a classic, if that’s the correct word?
February 20th, 2015 at 8:37 pm
It’s no classic and as I said dated when it was written, but once the wolf business begins it gets better, and towards the end there is some nice tension and Pettigrew proves an engaging sleuth as he turns on end almost everything that has gone before.
Phillpotts does a nice job of convincing you this is going to be a supernatural novel and then flipping it to a detective novel without losing the reader. It’s far from realistic, but it has an almost Rashomon structure as Pettigrew takes you back through everything you think you saw and unveils not one, but two conspiracies.
REDMAYNES is a classic. For one thing it has a relatively believable American detective. It’s still well respected in the genre. Even Barzun and Taylor have nice things to say about it.
I’ve been collecting since the 70’s and I’ve seen damn few Phillpotts, even in England, though he was a popular enough writer there and published here. He’s a name you encounter in most histories of the genre, usually with some respect but his work is scarce save for that Dover edition of REDMAYNES. It may have been edged out now but REDMAYNES used to make the list of the 100 best Golden Age Mystery novels if not the most modern.
February 20th, 2015 at 11:06 pm
David
You make it sound as though Pettigrew did quite a good job as a detective. Is there any reason you can think of as to why he appeared in only the one book?
February 21st, 2015 at 7:03 pm
The set up that explains why Pettigrew is the sleuth is unique to this book and Phillpotts may not have wanted to do it again. It might not work a second time.
Despite being dated this would make a good movie. There are a good many things lurking in shadows and seeing things as you expect or want to see them when they are really what you expect to see but not what is actually there. Like Carr much depends on who is doing the seeing.
Reading this I cast it as a movie in my head. I thought of Rathbone or Chris Lee as Sir William, George Sanders as Malfroy, and for Pettigrew the Edmond Gwenn of THEM or Hitchcock’s FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT.
Phillpotts evidently liked to use offbeat sleuths, and I suspect there are more to be found in his work.
I would like to see Pettigrew take on a classical murder mystery myself.
I should make a point, this is a thriller. Some of the explanation suffers from some Carrean hanky panky of the long arm of coincidence dislocated at the shoulder type, but by then you want to give Pettigrew the benefit of the doubt.
Though he is clearly a lower middle class sleuth Pettigrew is almost as high handed as Holmes and at times nearly as reckless. Some of his plans could easily have gone tragically wrong, and, like Holmes, he is far from omniscient (in the stories and books Holmes record is well off 100% for solving the case in a timely manner or saving his client — two are killed despite him and one he nearly gets killed). It’s very close to the end before you know Pettigrew is as clever as he thinks he is.
I do think most writers would have been tempted to use Pettigrew again, and I would have read it if he did (and I could find it).
February 21st, 2015 at 7:23 pm
OK. Now I’m convinced that this is a book I need to read. You’ve been very persuasive!