REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:

   

ARTHUR J. REES – The Threshold of Fear. Colwin Grey #1. Hutchinson, UK, hardcover, 1925. Dodd Mead, US, hardcover, 1926.

   â€œLondon puts every man in his place.” Too often, as I came to learn, the place was but a grave to hold a broken heart and frustrated hopes. Something — and too much — of this I saw in the first dreadful years of peace that followed the war. To many men, broken by fighting for England, London showed itself more ruthless than the war — a place where only the strongest could hope to survive. The Christian doctrine of helping the weak finds few followers in Christendom’s greatest city. The jungle law rules for those who struggle there. It is kill, or be killed.

   
   Richard Haldman is a disaffected veteran of the Great War unhappy with what he finds when he returns home to England after the War. Without money, family, fortune, or friend he sees his future as grim, but then things seem to brighten up when he decides to spring for a last decent meal with his last shilling, and in an alcove at his hotel spies a beautiful young woman:

   Perhaps across her vision had floated some hidden phantom of the brain when her eyes seemed to look into mine. For there was fear in their clear, dark depths, and it was very real. She called to mind a picture I had once seen in a Florentine church, of a woman staring at the figure of Death. She had opened the door of her house to a knock, and it was Death himself, come for her. This girl had the look of the woman in the picture. In it was the same quality of helpless, appealing fear, as if she too had been brought face to face with some horror too great for the human soul to withstand.

   
   Following this encounter with this strange young woman Haldman runs across a copy of The Times and an ad for a job as a chauffeur-mechanic for a gentleman who requires discretion, and soon enough finds he has been hired, “You are engaged by Colonel Gravenall, of Charmingdene, St. Bree, Cornwall. He desires that the chosen applicant shall be sent at once. Could you go to Cornwall by the ten o’clock train to-night?”

   And it is at Charmingdene where he will meet his employer, Colonel Gravenall, in ancient Cornwall:  Cornwall had known me in other days, and had shown me its cromlehs, logan stones, black cairns, and giants’ caves, Haldman tells us, anxious to begin his new job where “the loneliest and highest place in Cornwall,” the hamlet of St. Bree.

   We are in the realm of the true Gothick thriller with ancient terrors threatening to break through the too thin veneer of civilization and the heavy atmosphere of the supernatural wavering like a white mist on the edge of our hero’s too thin grip on the world he thinks he knows.

   And as you might expect what he finds at Charmingdene is an atmosphere of dread, Gravenall a not particularly prepossessing Anglo-Indian officer Haldman doesn’t warm to who asks probing questions about whether the young man has ever been to South America or Peru, and who seems anxious to keep things hidden.

   There too he will meet the mysterious Dr. Penhryn (a bronzed and bearded man who appeared to me like a giant from the stalwart dimensions of his upper frame. But when he descended, as he immediately did, I observed that he was a much smaller man than I had at first supposed, for his fine, upright body was set upon two dwarfed and twisted legs…); Edward Chesworth, Gravenall’s nephew and Penhryn’s patient (suffering from a most unusual form of nervous disorder, which causes him to shun all society and to shrink from the sight of strangers ) who has another life he led in South America and Peru; and, the mysterious girl from London who is now behaving mysteriously and shadowing Charmindene but refuses to trust Haldman.

   And all that would still add up to very little than a bit of mystery if not for the drum, the mysterious sound of the drum that drives Edward mad, and then a death at Chamingdene.

   For anyone thinking of bailing, this is not a supernatural novel. It was highly praised in its day, 1925 as a top notch psychological thriller, which it is, modern in its details if not its setting. Arthur J. Rees was a popular mystery and thriller writer, an Australian though his thrillers usually are set in Cornwall. This and several of his thrillers are available in PD Ebook form from Internet Archive for anyone wanting to delve before collecting, and this one was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries as one of its classics of the genre.

   Haldman becomes closer to Edward and learns his strange story. As a young man in Peru Edward stumbled into a strange valley and a lost civilization. After nearly drowning he is resurrected by a witch doctor who told him he was dead for three days before he brought him back and now Edward believes Death has returned for him, the drum his call for Edward to return to his domain.

   Mad, perhaps, but Edward believes it, and there is a drumming that comes from nowhere and is driving Edward to return to the watery grave he once escaped.

   Then too Haldman falls for his mysterious haunted woman, who turns out to be Edward’s sister frightened her brother is going mad and will kill himself in his frenzy when the drum comes too close.

   At this point the book takes yet another turn as Haldman leaves St. Bree for London to consult Colwin Grey, a Sherlockian private detective and ex solicitor who cuts through the fog of the supernatural to unveil a plot of pure evil and with Haldman his Watson, turns the tables on a deadly killer whose motive is pure sadism revealing a portrait of a killer far madder than poor Edward.

   There isn’t much more I can say short of spoilers, other than this is a fine chiller, well written, well plotted, and atmospheric without slapping you in the face with it. I was so impressed by Grey’s short appearance near the end of the book unraveling the darkness surrounding Chamingdene, and the truly evil plot that threatens to destroy Edward, that I went out and found two more of Rees’s thrillers I’m waiting to read.

   The Threshold of Fear won’t let you down as a thriller even if the horrors are human and not supernatural. It holds up really well for a novel written in 1925, and if not a fair play mystery in any sense it is a truly enjoyable thriller that will keep you in your seat.