ALICE & CLAUDE ASKEW “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire.” First published in The Weekly Tale-Teller, UK, July 1914. Collected in Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer (Wordsworth, UK) as “The Vampire.” Anthologized several times over the years, including The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published, edited by Otto Penzler. Available online here.

   Psychic detective Aylmer Vance was the brainchild of husband and wife writer duo Alice and Claude Askew, English authors who were tragically killed when a German submarine sank the ship they were traveling on in 1917. Like his more well known and esteemed counterpart, one Sherlock Holmes, Vance also had an assistant/sidekick who recounted his cases in narrative form. Enter Dexter, Vance’s “Watson,” who acts as “recorder of his strange adventures.”

   In “Aylmer Vance and the Vampire,” the reader learns of a most unusual case investigated by Vance and Dexter, one that involves a vampire and a witch’s curse and unravels less like a mystery and more like a Gothic supernatural tale. Although it’s not a particularly compelling work of detective fiction, the story does contain all of the major tropes of the then emerging modern vampire story.

   There are references to an ancient race, an exotic Continental locale, and the tension between ancient superstitions and modern rational thought and skepticism. There is also a castle, which serves as the locale for strange happenings, one which the narrator Dexter described as a “gloomy edifice” with “the great stone walls, the long corridors, gloomy and cold even on the brightest and warmest of days …”

   All told, “Aylmer and the Vampire” is a solidly constructed vampire story and one that deserves more recognition. While reading it, I couldn’t help but picture Peter Cushing portraying Aylmer Vance in my mind’s eye. That surely counts for something. Recommended.

GASTON LEROUX “The Woman with the Velvet Collar.” First published in English in Weird Tales, October 1929. Reprinted in Startling Mystery Stories, Spring 1969, and in several anthologies of weird fiction since. Originally published in French as “La femme au collier de velours” in 1924.

   Although it took me a while to become fully immersed in Gaston Leroux’s “The Woman With the Velvet Collar,” by the story’s end I was left with the indelible impression that I had just read a well-crafted horror tale. First appearing in English translation in Weird Tales, Leroux’s conte cruel transports the reader to Corsica, a land known for its vendettas and its cultural and physical separateness from mainland France.

   â€œThe Woman With the Velvet Collar” unfolds with a discussion between two sailors, a sea captain named Gobert and his friend, Michel. The two men are discussing Corsican vendetta stories, with Gobert assuring Michel that he has a story that is far more horrifying than any run of the mill vendetta. The tale further unfolds as Gobert begins to tell a story within a story, about his experiences in Corsica in which he encountered a ghost like woman dressed all in black and with a black velvet ribbon around her neck.

   As it turns out, the woman was named Angeluccia and she was married to a local Corsican official. But she kept a secret from her husband! She was secretly romantically involved with her cousin, one of her husband’s employees. Without giving too much of the plot away, let’s just say that the guillotine makes a bloody appearance in this fiendishly clever tale about what happens when a costume party in which Angeluccia dresses up as Marie Antoinette turns into the beginning of a dark foray into the supernatural.

Bibliographic Note:   Captain Michel also appeared in three additional stories:

       Le noël du petit Vincent-Vincent (1924); The Crime on Christmas Night (1930).
       Not’ Olympe (1924); The Mystery of the Four Husbands (1929).
       L’auberge épouvantable (1925); The Inn of Terror (1929).

  ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE “The New Catacomb.” First published in The “Sunlight” Year-Book (1898) as “Burger’s Secret.” First collected in Tales of Terror and Mystery (John Murray, UK, hardcover, 1922) and in the US in The Black Doctor and Other Tales of Terror and Mystery (George H. Doran Co., 1925).

   Admirers of the young Tennessee Williams’ Weird Tales story, “The Vengeance of Nitocris” will find much to appreciate in Arthur Conan Doyle’s conte cruel, “The New Catacomb.” Much as in the former story, it won’t take long for a discerning reader to figure out how the story is likely going to end. Doyle’s punchy, if not overly imaginative, non-supernatural horror story, is a tale in which the quest for archaeological knowledge, a love triangle, and a man’s quest for revenge all play prominent roles and can only really lead to one particular horrifying conclusion.

   The story unfolds in an apartment in Rome in which two students, Kennedy (an Englishman) and Burger (of mixed German and Italian parentage), are discussing their love for archaeology. Kennedy soon discovers that Burger has uncovered a hitherto unexplored ancient catacomb and is eager to learn all about it.

   His zeal for knowledge, however, comes at a price. Burger insists that Kennedy disclose to him the details of a sordid relationship the Englishman had with one Miss Mary Saunderson.

   Why does Burger want to know these scandalous details of Kennedy’s love life and what’s the relationship between this aching desire to know and Burger’s archaeological find? As it turns out, all questions will be answered in the dark recesses of a Roman catacomb, a territory in which both Kennedy and Burger will enter together, but from which only one will return to the surface above.

ROBERT WEINBERG “Three Steps Back.” First appearance: Dial Your Dreams & Other Nightmares, DarkTales Publications, softcover, August 2001.

   If you were to ask me for an example of a solidly constructed horror story that doesn’t touch upon the mystical, the supernatural, or the weird, Robert Weinberg’s “Three Steps Back” would immediately come to mind. Originally published in Dial Your Dreams, a collection of Weinberg’s short stories, the tale can be found within a sub-section of the collection simply entitled, “Nightmares,” in which Weinberg contends that he “always felt the most frightening horror stories are those that don’t feature any element of the supernatural … The real horrors of the world surround us.”

   Set on a university campus, the plot of “Three Steps Back” revolves around the desire of a graduate student by the name of Jake Edwards to unravel the mystery of the Gray Ghost of Illinois University. But the ghost in question here isn’t a supernatural entity. No, he’s just an older man with an extremely bizarre habit: he doesn’t seem to want anyone to be behind him. It’s as if he fears some sort of presence behind him.

   Soon Jake comes to realize that the Gray Ghost is all-too-human. He’s a veteran named Chet Williams who has a severe case of what we now call PTSD. Williams’s fear of people lurking behind him, as it turns out, stems from a particularly heinous experience in a Viet Cong POW camp.

   But that can’t the extent of the story, now can it? Weinberg skillfully builds the suspense, raising it up a notch until the ultimate revelation. As he so rightly notes in his introduction, horror doesn’t need to be supernatural to be mightily effective.

  ULRIC DAUBENY “The Sumach.” First appeared in The Elemental: Tales of the Supernormal and the Inexplicable (George Routledge & Sons, 1919; Ash-Tree Press, August 2006, out of print). Story online here.

   Ulric Daubeny (1888-1922), a British scholar of church architecture, published one original volume of supernatural fiction. Entitled The Elemental (1919), the volume isn’t particularly easy to come by these days. After reading “The Sumach,” I can attest that that’s probably something that should be rectified. I had an opportunity to read this particular Daubeny short story in the recently published anthology, The Rivals of Dracula (No Exit Press, 2015).

   Although this work of weird fiction isn’t in the same league as say Arthur Conan Doyle or H.P. Lovecraft’s output, it’s certainly on par with the short fiction penned by other somewhat contemporaneous writers in the supernatural genre, authors such as Frank Belknap Long and E. Hoffmann Price, both of whom wrote for Weird Tales.

   â€œThe Sumach” is notable for two reasons. First, it is the tale’s reliance on two female protagonists and the concomitant lack of a male character central to the outcome of the story that makes it a bit unique. Second, and more importantly, Daubeny’s “The Sumach” successfully merges the weird biological/plant story with that of the vampire tale. Indeed, the eponymous sumach, as presented in the story, is both an artifact of nature and an agent of the supernatural. It is, for the lack of a better term, a vampire plant.

   With a premise as uncanny such as this, it’s notable that Daubeny is able to weave a tale that never descends into camp or parody. “The Sumach” remains a story in which a woman, in her quest to solve the mystery of her cousin’s tragic demise, comes face to face with a plant that has taken on the characteristics of a vampire that once haunted the English countryside.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.” First published in Unknown Worlds, October 1942, as by John Riverside. Reprinted many times, most notably in the Gnome Press collection having the same title (1959).

   The impact of the hard-boiled school of writing can be seen today in many literary voices, but not surprisingly, it first made itself felt in genre fiction, and not just in the mystery genre. In the 1930’s the voice began to appear in the Western, in Hollywood films, and in science fiction, particularly in that branch of science fiction known as Campbellian after editor and writer John W. Campbell Jr. It was only natural then that as the lines blurred the genres would blend together somewhat, and by the 1940’s, it was well established in most genre fiction.

   Unknown (later Unknown Worlds) the companion to Campbell’s science fiction pulp Astounding Science Fiction, published a great deal of fantasy and horror, but all along the Campbellian ideal of well worked out logical fiction, many of the works appearing there the best of the writers’ careers and among the best and most loved stories of its age.

   Most of the major writers from Astounding contributed to Unknown as well, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, Isaac Asimov, A. E. Van Vogt, and some earlier writers like Jack Williamson and Henry Kuttner. Humor, horror, adventure, and high fantasy went hand in hand. De Camp and Pratt’s “Incomplete Enchanter,” Hubbard’s “Fear,” “Death’s Deputy,” and “Typewriter in the Sky,” Williamson’s “Darker than You Think,” Eric Frank Russell’s “Sinister Barrier,” and many other classics first saw light there. Among those who wrote for the new market was Robert A. Heinlein, dean of the Campbellian science fiction movement, who wrote this little novelette under the name John Riverside.

   In it Teddy Randall and his wife Cynthia (Cyn) are private investigators approached by Mr. Jonathan Hoag, a prim and somehow unsettling individual they both take an instant dislike to, but his money is good and the case seems simple enough if a bit whacky. Mr. Hoag, it seems, has a memory problem.

   No, not amnesia, at least not exactly. Mr. Hoag doesn’t know what he does during his days. They are a complete blank, so when he finds what he fears is blood under his fastidious finger nails he hires the Randalls to follow him. Whacky, as I said, but the the Randalls aren’t the scrupulous type, and money is money. They take the case. So what if their client doesn’t appear to have any fingerprints.

   The Randalls work together, a well oiled and capable little investigative team, and part of the enjoyment is watching the duo think and work. They are a sort of sexy slightly larcenous Nick and Nora or Pam and Jerry North, an attractive addition to the subgenre of married sophisticated sleuths that delighted mystery fans in the years following the debut of Hammett’s Nick and Nora.

   And follow Mr. Hoag they do, until Randall discovers the address and the office in the Acme Building he followed Hoag to on the first day doesn’t exist and even the floor of the building he was on isn’t there. At first they suspect he was drugged by Hoag, or that worse, he was hypnotized when Hoag stopped and spoke to him, but Hoag genuinely doesn’t appear to remember the encounter or anything else Randall saw that day.

   Things get even more weird when Randall meets a threatening Mr. Stoles:

   Stoles than recounts a simply horrifying and ridiculous story, something about the Sons of the Bird, and Randall wakes up in his bed from the nightmare. He tries to shake it off, but things are getting weirder by the minute what with Hoag now telling them that he is being watched — from inside the mirror. Hoag even seems to attack Cyn the next time she follows him, and she can’t even defend herself despite having a gun. Then there’s the note neither of them wrote:

   When they go to Hoag’s doctor things get even stranger.

   And things are about to get stranger yet, when the Randalls discover a new full length mirror has been installed in their bedroom.

   Perhaps the best thing about “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” is that it doesn’t let the reader down. Heinlein pays off in a finale that is both disturbing and a bit funny, but also profoundly disturbing. Don’t blame me if after you read it you remove the mirror from your bedroom and handcuff yourself to your loved one every night at bedtime like the Randalls.

   Blame Heinlein, and Jonathan Hoag. While it isn’t horror, and you could even call it a satirical masterpiece, the story will leave you with more than a frisson in its profoundly disturbing implications. Like Fritz Leiber’s “Conjure Wife” and Jack Williamson’s “Darker Than You Think” from the same magazine the frights here lie in the implication more than the instrumentation.

   It rivals Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in that, as was written of that book, it is the rare mystery where the solution to the crime is more terrifying than the crime itself.

H. P. LOVECRAFT “The Terrible Old Man.” Written January 28, 1920, and first published in the Tryout, an amateur press publication, July 1921. Appeared in Weird Tales, August 1926. Reprinted many times.

   Although there really isn’t that much literary value in the story, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Terrible Old Man” could certainly be built upon and skillfully adapted into a truly captivating Gothic horror film. Originally published in the amateur journal Tryout (1921) and subsequently reprinted many times, including Pirate Ghosts of the American Coast (1988), the very brief story is notable for its New England coastline setting, one that Lovecraft would return to time and again in his more sophisticated writings.

   The plot is simple, but loaded with noticeable xenophobic undertones that make this little known story even less valuable than it otherwise would have been in light of Lovecraft’s far more historically significant later works. While the titular character, the Terrible Old Man, is never given an identifying name, the men who plot to steal from the old mysterious pirate are most explicitly marked by their “ethnic” sounding names: Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva.

   Not only am I guessing Italian, Polish, and Portuguese, but that these three aforementioned nationalities were among Lovecraft’s least favorite immigrant groups in his home town of Providence, Rhode Island. For it is this gang of three men – three “foreigners” in Protestant New England – who seek to rob the story’s old man – a former sea captain – of his treasure.

   Yet, it is the sea captain who has the last laugh. For he is terrible indeed! Although the supernatural elements in the story are relatively attenuated, at least for an H.P. Lovecraft story, the reader learns that the three would be robbers are found murdered. The old man, clearly the responsible party, is said to have yellow eyes. Is he a ghost or a zombie? We never learn, which allows our imaginations to run wild.

   As I said at the outset, this is hardly a commendable work of literary fiction; in many ways, it is amateurish in the extreme. But there’s something there, some genuine imaginary terror lurking behind the terrible old man’s eyes. It’s a chilling little tale, one that I thought I’d soon forget after reading it, but oddly enough one that has stuck in my mind for a while.

GORDON YOUNG “Born to Be Hanged, But…” Adventure, 03 December 1919.

   So speaks young Don Everhard, the hero of Gordon Young’s tough novelette that headlined the December 3, 1919, edition of the great pulp Adventure. It was a pretty good issue too, Harold Lamb’s “Said Afzel’s Elephant”, and stories by J. Allan Dunn, and Arthur O. Friel, but it’s the Young novelette and Don Everhard the character that are of interest here.

   The story is pretty straight forward. Young Don Everhard, actually Don Richmond of a respectable San Francisco family, is a professional gambler with a fast and deadly gun in contemporary San Francisco. During an election year he comes upon an incriminating letter that would embarrass reform candidate Congressman Bryan and beautiful Helen Curwen and favor James H. Thorpe, a lumberman and Bryan’s opponent for the governor’s race. Everhard has a history with Thorpe and roundly hates him. (“If he was a Republican I would vote Democrat, and if he was a Democrat I would vote Republican”).

   In knightly style Everhard returns the letter unread to Mrs. Curwen, but when word gets out he had the letter he is approached by two men to buy it; one the mysterious Ellis, and the other an agent of Thorpe. Everhard isn’t having any of it, but when Thorpe tries to set him up in a poker game with a professional gunman, he kills the man and has to go to ground, which he does hiding out as a crew member on a ship, until the truth comes out.

   When he is cleared Mrs. Curwen approaches him. She is meeting with Thorpe to try and beard the lion over the letter, but when the meeting ends in a blaze of gunfire … well, as Everhard opens the story:

   Of course he gets out of it and retains his honor and the ladies, but the really interesting part of this story is in the telling, because years before Carroll John Daly or Dashiell Hammett, the only thing distinguishing Don Everhard from the hard boiled private eye of a thousand pulp stories is that he’s a gambler and not a detective. The language is the same, all-American unsentimental (but actually very sentimental) voice of Twain and London, out of Bret Harte and the Dime Novel. Young is a better writer than Daly, but if Daly didn’t read these and Race Williams and wasn’t influenced by the diamond-hard fast-shooting gambler I would be greatly surprised.

   A “witch’s mirror of blood.” If that isn’t the hardboiled voice of Black Mask, I never heard it.

   Robert Sampson wrote more about Gordon Young and Don Everhard in Yesterday’s Faces, his massive work on the early pulps. Today Young is best remembered for his South Seas adventure tales about Hurricane Williams, with only one expensive edition of Everhard stories reprinted, but if Young and Don Everhard are not quite the hardboiled private eye that soon followed they are so close that the difference is difficult to measure.

   Like his private eye pulp descendants Everhard is a tough, no nonsense, cynical, fast-thinking, fast-shooting hardboiled egg with a soft center, an errant knight on the edge between respectable society and the underworld, a man with his own code and his own rules navigating a twisting course between the innocent and not so innocent and the truly guilty, brutal, corrupt, and dangerous.

   The voice and the idea may not be quite there yet, but like the last half of Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear, we are so close to the hardboiled private eye we can feel his breath on the back of our neck. I would argue that with this story alone Young was already ahead of Daly’s “Knights of the Open Palm” or Three Gun Terry Mack by a mile.

REX STOUT “Man Alive.” First published in The American Magazine, December 1947. Included in the collection Three Doors to Death (Viking, 1950; Dell #626, 1952; Bantam, 1966).

   It’s been too long, far too long, since I’ve read one of Rex Stout’s tales of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin on a case together, and if I can, I’m going to make a point of going back and re-reading as many of them this summer as I’m able to, with a special point of emphasis on the few that I’ve never gotten around to read. Shame on me.

   It is difficult to say exactly why it is so, but the stories are very much timeless. I had no difficulty at all in slipping back in a time bubble to the insular world of a Manhattan brownstone office and home, picking up when I left off, with another case at Wolfe’s door. It is difficult to believe that this story was written in 1947. The few references to the outside world are Archie’s new Cadillac and the fashion show that Archie attends in hopes of spotting the father of their new client, female and the about to become the new owner of the firm.

   Why, you may ask. It so happens that the girl’s father is dead, having committed suicide by jumping naked into a geyser at Yellowstone Park. This being a Nero Wolfe mystery, of course he is not dead, and although he was in disguise, the girl knows she saw him at a previous show.

   Also, because this is a Nero Wolfe mystery, it is no surprise to the reader when her father turns up dead for real, and Wolfe’s client is suspected of the murder. This is also one of those affairs in which Wolfe gathers all of the possible suspects in his office, police in presence, to determine the real killer.

   He is flummoxed, though, when all of the suspects alibi each other. None of them could have done it, save perhaps his client. Although taken aback, Wolfe probes further, digs deeper, and after some pursing of his lips, is able to steer the conversation around to the only solution there could be to the crime.

   It’s a very good detective story, but even better was the company and familiar surroundings.

STANLEY ELLIN “The Day of the Bullet.” First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1959. Reprinted in The Blessington Method (Random House, 1974) and The Specialty of the House (Mysterious Press, 1980). Also included in Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic Books, Tim McLoughlin ed., 2005). Adapted for television: Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 14 February 1960 (Season 5, Episode 20); teleplay: Bill S. Ballinger. Nominated for an MWA Edgar, Best Short Story, 1960.

   That’s a long list of bibliographic data, one nearly as long as my comments are going to be. The story that won the Edgar that year was “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl, which I do not remember reading, so I can only conjecture, but Dahl’s story must have been a doozy to beat out this one.

   Stanley Ellin wrote a number of novels, but if he’s remembered today, it will be for his short stories, which he wrote at a rate of once a year. Inevitably they were gems of story-telling as polished as they could be, including this one.

   It’s the story of two 12-year-olds growing up in Brooklyn until they were separated when parents of the narrator of the tale moved to Brooklyn in 1923. They never saw each other again, but the teller of story recognizes his former friend when his bloody photos is published in the newspaper, some 35 years later.

   It turns out their last adventure together was a trip to a nearby golf course fishing for lost balls, when they witness a guy being beaten up by a pair of gangsters. Iggy, the friend, wants to tell the police, and so they both do, but what happens from that point on was the turning point in Iggy’s life.

   This deeply noirish tale is also a story of growing up, of making the wrong decision in life, but one you don’t realize at the time. It’s a warning story, of sorts, not really a sad one, as it’s told at a solid distance away, chronologically, but it could be if you think about it for a while.