Back From Beyond - Part I

 “I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness...”

-H.P.L., “From Beyond”

This is a story based upon a real event. In New York in 1922, a young woman was reported as having travelled at night in her dreams, across our solar system to our neighbouring planets, there to encounter the inhabitants of those worlds. Elsa Sheridan met various oddly-proportioned and -featured creatures in her sleep, learned of their lifestyles and their planetary conditions, and her revelations were apparently eagerly examined at the time by scientific and other organisations. This was an era when Spiritualism and ghost-hunting were considered almost acceptable as scientific pursuits so it stands to reason that Miss Sheridan’s novel pronouncements would generate some interest. But what if something else was happening? Something focused through a Lovecraftian lens...?

*****

For this adventure, the Keeper needs a small party of Investigators with moderate experience and with a growing reputation for hunting down the strange and inexplicable. The group needs to start in New York in May of 1922; ideally, they should have some contacts or connexion to the American branch of the Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) or its parent organisation in London (SPR), but this isn’t strictly necessary. It is crucial only that their skills as Investigators are becoming relatively well-known.

An Offer of Employment...

While occupied in New York on separate business, the party should be made aware of the newspaper phenomenon that is Elsa Sheridan and her nightly adventures (Beyond Papers #1, above). The same article appeared in the Buffalo Morning Express and the Syracuse Herald on the 7^th of May 1922, the Seattle Daily Times of the 14^th of May 1922, and again in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the 28^th of the same month. It appeared later in the same year in the Pittsburg Sunday Post and then four years later on the 3^rd of December 1926 in the Sandusky Star Journal (this frequency of appearance in print media allows for some flexibility for the Keeper in terms of timetabling this adventure). The party may discuss her claims, accepting or dismissing them as they see fit. Later, as they pursue their aims, they receive a message to the effect that a Dr. Windrush of the ASPR wishes to visit them to discuss some urgent matters. The players may well decide to ignore the request; if so, they will find that their caller can be very dogged when the situation demands.

Dr. Windrush asks the group if they have heard of Miss Sheridan. He states that the ASPR would very much like to investigate her claims but, for reasons of reputation and a shortage of personnel, he would prefer to have an outside agency – such as the party represents – perform a “first pass” to assess the subject’s credibility. Without allowing them access to the ASPR headquarters (in order to maintain their stance of public neutrality), he could provide access to their library at call, and offer any pieces of moveable equipment which the Society’s laboratories might contain. Additionally, he would set up a meeting with Miss Sheridan. For their trouble, he offers the party a US$50 retainer each, plus US$5 per diem with expenses – if reasonable, accompanied by receipts.

If the party is not interested and turns down the offer, the story ends there. At some later stage, months afterwards, while out at an evening’s entertainment in a theatre in New York, one of the Investigators may spot Miss Sheridan at the back of a chorus line, looking bored and going through the motions, but that will be it. If they contact the ASPR (or SPR in England), they will be directed to a bland statement in the Society’s Journal to the effect that the Sheridan case was a minor publicity stunt, a “fanciful tissue of falsehoods”, and that no further investigation is required. Hopefully though, the team will be eager to take a look.

Some suspicious types may decide to investigate Dr. Windrush also. The scuttlebutt (i.e., a Library Use Roll at a library, or newspaper office, or similar) will reveal that the ASPR has suffered two blows to its credibility in recent weeks: an ‘ASPR-guaranteed’ medium was found cheating some four weeks ago, while two weeks previously, another accredited seer published an interview outlining how she fooled the ASPR into believing in her “powers”. Litigation is in progress against the second medium and the New York Times for libellous statements published, and so most of the ASPR luminaries are spending time in court. Other members have decided to undergo “field work” out of town, or are simply lying low. Dr. Windrush is currently the only ASPR member keeping the flame of psychic research burning...

Let’s Get Busy...!

Having accepted the case, the way forward is entirely up the players. Dr. Windrush offers to contact the group when he has set up the meeting with the test subject (Elsa) but until then the party must formulate an experimental procedure: how does one investigate a person’s dreams? What research must be done? What equipment must be obtained? Let the team thrash things through and establish their own process. Any reasonable (but not purpose-built) equipment is available from the ASPR labs if required, and books on many topics will be couriered over as needed. Amongst these will be the following:

HILL, J.A., Spiritualism: its History, Phenomena and Doctrine (1918)

Swami PANCHADASI, A Course Of Advanced Lessons In Clairvoyance And Occult Powers (1916)

McKENZIE, J.H., Spirit Intercourse (1916)

FRINGS, J.W., The Occult Arts: An Examination Of The Claims Made For The Existence And Practice Of Supernormal Powers, And An Attempted Justification Of Some Of Them By The Conclusions Of The Researches Of Modern Science (1914)

PODMORE, Frank, Mesmerism & Christian Science (1909)

JACOLLIOT, Louis, Occult Science In India And Among The Ancients, With An Account Of Their Mystic Initiations, And The History Of Spiritism (in English & French, 1908)

PODMORE, Frank, Modern Spiritualism (1902)

LANG, Andrew, Cock Lane And Common Sense (1894)

WAITE, A.E., The Occult Sciences: A Compendium Of Transcendental Doctrine And Experiment, Embracing An Account Of Magical Practices; Of Secret Sciences In Connection With Magic; Of The Professors Of Magical Arts; And Of Modern Spiritualism, Mesmerism, And Theosophy, (1891)

MACKAY, Charles, Memoirs Of Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds (1880)

From this selection, the party will gain the following: a good overview of the aims and goals of the Spiritualist movement; thoughts on what “crossing the veil” might encompass and techniques for facilitation; notions of the power of hypnotism, including self-hypnotism and auto-suggestion; and some biting commentary on the ability of the human animal to delude itself and others. If, after reading through this lot, they seem stuck and unable to progress, the Keeper may offer suggestions as to ways forward with the expedient of an Idea Roll. Any other literary sources the party must come up with by themselves, including Mythos tomes (if they have them).

Speaking of the Mythos, if players consult their tomes (a Cthulhu Mythos Roll), they will find vague references to creatures on other planets in our solar system, specifically the Great Old One Tsathoggua which is said to have come from “Cykranosh”, another name for Saturn, and Yuggoth, the home of the Mi-Go, supposedly an undiscovered planet too far out to be seen (Pluto is not due to be discovered until 1930). Any party members who are adept at Dreaming may use their Dream Lore skill to realise that each planet has its own Dreamlands and that Saturn’s cats and those of Earth wage constant and terrible war in their Dreamlands environments; there are also rumours of a feline race dwelling on Neptune. None of this, however, sounds anything like Elsa Sheridan’s view of the solar system.

When the party has decided upon a plan of action and has gathered all of the equipment and literature that they need, Dr. Windrush contacts them to say that he has secured an interview with Miss Sheridan at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, mid-morning on the following day.

Meeting Miss Sheridan

STR: 9

CON: 11

SIZ: 10

INT: 14

Idea: 70%

EDU: 16

Know: 80%

POW: 14

Luck: 70%

DEX: 11

APP: 15

Move: 8

SAN: 70

HP: 11

Weapons: None

Average Damage Bonus: +0

Spells: None

Skills: Art: Drawing 25%; Art: Scriptwriting 50%; Conceal 21%; Craft: Acting 60%; Craft: Singing 35%; Credit Rating 60%; Disguise 55%; Hide 50%; Listen 45%; Speak French 30%; Psychology 40%; Spot Hidden 31%

SAN Loss: it costs no SAN to see Elsa Sheridan

The party meets Miss Sheridan at Tony Sarg’s Oasis Lounge, a trendy eatery in the hotel. She is a petite and vivacious young woman who, on first appraisal, seems to be trying to appear much older than she really is. She is quite pretty with blonde hair, blue-grey eyes and a nervous energy. Those party members encountering her for the first time might like to make Psychology Rolls. There is an underlying tension about her: she attempts several times to subtly peek at other guests in the lounge seated nearby, observing their arrangements of coffee cups and cake dishes; placed in front of her on the nearest table is a glass of water on a folded napkin. Several waiters converse sotto voce nearby and look sniffily in her direction. Obviously, Miss Sheridan has a cash flow problem. This fact may be used to gain her early trust (by buying her a coffee and a slice of pie for example, and reassuring her that it’s “on me”) but may also incline the party to believe that her visions are more likely to be a stunt, staged for financial advantage.

Elsa Sheridan was born in Jamaica New York, and comes from a fairly normal middle-class family. An early brush with fame – where she played an adorable toddler in a short movie – inclined her towards the dramatic arts. She took dancing, singing and piano lessons while at school and then joined the Queensboro Society for Allied Arts and Crafts. During this time she wrote a three act play entitled “Jean Madison” which was first performed to encouraging reviews when she was only seventeen. To the assembled Investigators, she seems keen, intelligent if somewhat naive, and enthusiastic.

However, before the party gets to meet the subject of their Investigation, Dr. Windrush ducks out. He hands one of his visiting cards to a party member and tells the group that they must make their own introductions, telling them to say that he was unable to show up to meet her himself. If the party makes an objection, he declares that there might well be members of the Press around and that there must be nothing to link the Investigators at this stage to the ASPR. He absents himself brusquely to the Cloak Room, leaving the party to approach the girl themselves. Later, he will be seen to enter the Lounge and greet a tall bespectacled man with dark hair and a thick moustache, sitting alone to one side reading a newspaper. Neither of them pay the party or the girl any heed.

Elsa at first seems cowed by so many strange people greeting her unexpectedly, but her natural curiosity and eagerness soon take over and she tells the party that she is keen to help them in whatever way she can. The group should here reveal the ideas that they have to try and understand the source, range and capabilities of her talent: she will at all times be enthusiastic. If something they suggest seems rather risqué, she will at first be hesitant but then she will shrug her shoulders and say “what the heck?” At all times she appears forthright and go-getting.

The Wit to Woo...

Elsa Sheridan is an engaging and thoroughly likable character in a clear-eyed, P.G. Wodehouse kind of way. It would seem plausible then, that she might form an attachment with one on the young male Investigators. Should any of the players make this suggestion, play along with it – a little romance does wonders for a Call of Cthulhu adventure!

Down to Work!

What happens next is really a function of what the players have organised in terms of their experimental procedure. They may have set up a sleep laboratory in which they can observe the subject sleeping; they may have decided to hold a séance; they might well have decided to hypnotise Miss Sheridan. The Keeper need only follow along and make whatever responses seem appropriate with the one exception: Elsa is extremely resistant to hypnosis.

The main thing to focus upon is that, for Elsa’s sleeping mind to start seeing strange and bizarre entities from other worlds, she needs to be asleep in her own apartment. The answer to the strange riddle lies not so much in when, or how she sleeps, but where.

To be continued...

Rip It & Run: "Masks of Nyarlathotep"

Di Tillio, Larry, & Lynn Willis, “Masks of Nyarlathotep – Adventures to Thwart the Dark God”, Chaosium, Oakland, CA, USA, 1996.

A lot of people talk about this campaign online and, especially, they ask how on earth does the average Keeper manage to usher any sort of group through all of its ramifications and peculiarities? I’m wary of getting stuck into this issue because it’s such a beloved touchstone of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game but, even though it gets trotted out in different formats and updated for special anniversary releases, it’s still a bugbear that can break any gaming group, no matter how experienced.

(Warning! If you’re a fan of this campaign, you should probably stop reading now: I’m about to tear it six ways from Sunday. Why? Because I like Call of Cthulhu and it bothers me that so many people come to the game via this debacle, perhaps never to play the game again. It’s not a good campaign; it’s what there is. And many newcomers are led into the false belief that this is some kind of gold standard. It absolutely is not; there are better things in Chaosium’s stable and they do themselves a terrible disservice by not promoting them more. Or coming up with something better.)

The first thing to be aware of in proposing to your team that they try on this adventure series, is that it is deadly. It’s like “Tomb of Horrors” deadly, and just like that old AD&D chestnut, it feels like it was designed simply for that purpose. It will be unlikely that any character that your players generate in anticipation will make it through to the end – the mantra here is “don’t get attached”. The best strategy would be to tell them to put their favourite Investigators on hiatus and generate new characters for this gig, preferably several each per player: this has the added benefit of allowing you as the Keeper to set up all of the hokey “old buddy” connexions that the module requires without anyone feeling too short-changed on their character input. With squeaky-clean characters to hand, all you need to do then is just arrange a rationale which explains how these individuals are all connected – are they related? Do they all work for the same investigative organisation? &c., &c. This way, when – not if – they die, there will be some reason for the next character to take over.

The second thing to be aware of as Keeper is those two words of warning printed on the front cover, sinister-enough runes to make the most callow referee give pause: The words “Lynn Willis”. Mr Willis styles himself as the chief editor on most of Chaosium’s projects and he uses this position to add extra material to other peoples’ contributions, thus giving himself a writer’s credit for any work he’s involved with. I have direct experience of this: two of my friends contributed to “Blood Brothers 2” and their original material, after Willis had added to it and made many inexplicable alterations, barely conveyed the writers’ original intentions. ‘Butchered’ is not too fine a point to put on it. Basically, Willis can’t help himself: he has to play with material that he’s given, adding elements often to its detriment. And it’s certainly true in the case of “Masks”.

The main problem with this campaign is that, by definition, it’s huge. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – if you’re going to write a world-spanning adventure, it’s going to be big: just look at all the background material required for “Beyond the Mountains of Madness” and reflect that that’s just (just!) a trip to the Antarctic in the 1930s. The difference in “Masks” is that every section of the adventure is overlain with so many red herrings and other extraneous plot material that the main story is quite lost beneath a morass of stuff that serves no purpose. Conversely, information that should be provided – background information on places such as Shanghai or Nairobi, travel details, access to equipment in foreign locales – is often blithely skipped over, leaving the Keeper hanging. There’s simply too much plot and not enough information.

Approaching such a behemoth, you would think that streamlining the tale would generate clarity and allow the Keeper to add whatever colour they desire. Instead, cluttering up the stage, there are werewolves, demon cats, shapeshifted Serpent People, mythological Outback entities and ghosts, which only serve to derange and distract your erstwhile party. Most of these added distractions I’m laying at Willis’s doorstep: such stuff is all very well for someone who writes roleplaying material for a living, but for a team of players who get together at most once a month, it’s just confusing. Your Investigators will burn out and give up before they’re even halfway through.

So, first instruction for potential Keepers: pull out a (metaphorical) scalpel and slice away all of the dross. Anything that seems like a sideline, or which is just there to distract or throw off your players – get rid of it. Your players give you their valuable time to experience your Keeping skills; they don’t want to be blocked, confused, made to fail and to miss the boat. Unless of course you really don’t want them to come back for more.

My assumption (giving them the benefit of the doubt) is that the writers (Lynn Willis’s peccadilloes aside) loaded up the adventure with extra material to accommodate groups who were able to devote plenty of time and energy to the game. I assume that they thought Keepers would automatically edit the material to conform to their time constraints, but the format and the Keeper directions don’t make this explicit. Less experienced referees tend to assume that everything on offer in the text is crucial to the Investigation’s unravelling and inevitably bite off more than they can comfortably choke down.

The other problem that rears its head with this campaign is the fact that there are literally hundreds of NPCs involved. Once you’ve excised the extraneous material – keeping just the bare bones and anything else that takes your fancy – you’ve still got a large bunch of bit parts to play around with. What tends to happen is that your players will hear a name and, even if they’ve heard it a dozen times before, ask “who is that again?” Most likely, they will turn the name into a pun and remember them that way, often to comic and atmosphere-busting effect. When I played this game, there was a Japanese officer in the Shanghai section we all called “soggy taro” and, if he was supposed to be a menace, as a result of this phenomenon he absolutely wasn’t. So change the names to things that sound better to you or which are easier to recall – you won’t completely banish this effect, but it might minimise it from happening. (Just remember to Google the name first though, before you change it: some characters in these stories are based on historical people!)

You might try wearing different hats, or affecting certain poses or speech inflections when voicing a particular NPC, in order to focus attention; seriously, I’ve seen this done and it can be very effective. If you’re technologically savvy, you might – as one Keeper I know did – give each of the main villains a theme tune to play whenever they appear in the narrative, thus letting the party know when they’re on track.

This is a game that is notorious for its handouts. Take some time to visit the many websites that manufacture quality versions of these for those Keepers who really want to ramp up the atmosphere – “Propnomicon” is probably the best of these, specialising in faux documents dedicated to the “Masks” scenarios. Whichever ones you decide to use, think about colour-coding them according to the section of the campaign in which they appear – yellow for England; blue for Kenya; green for Shanghai, &c., &c. This will keep your players’ bits of paper organised and help keep the action focussed.

For keeping the information on track, using something like Excel, or building a wiki might be of valuable assistance. Asking your players to keep journals or sketch the characters they meet, will also focus their attention on what’s taking place as well as helping them form an attachment to the material.

One of my main beefs with this series of adventures is that it is very, very fuzzy. The goals of the evil-doers at each turn are vague and nebulous and the results of their actions are never obvious, nor do they logically or intuitively feed in to each other. A murder in New York; an hideous birth in Kenya; a ritual in Cairo; a Great Race librarian hanging out in an Australian desert; the actions of a bunch of piratical types in Shanghai: none of it makes sense or even links up into any kind of investigative chain. It reads like a bunch of disconnected stories mashed together and, to underscore this perception, I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s played this thing who knew what was happening at any particular stage. It suggests that whatever Grand Plan is afoot, it’s extremely obtuse; or else – which I suspect to be the case - there is no Big Picture in the Big N’s scheme. The project feels like the cramming-together of several otherwise unconnected tales sewn up with some extremely tenuous plot.

As an alternative to playing this all the way through, an erstwhile Keeper might well break up the package into its discrete components and play them each as standalone adventures: without the creaky, overarching frame, they make much better sense individually. And those sub-plots and red herrings which were cut out previously, they can also be teased out into individual adventures in their own right - for the most part - or built up into larger stories. As a single narrative, this is a clunky mess; as a source for many disconnected stories, it’s a goldmine.

I have a strong personal dislike for this campaign, and it’s based on many inaccuracies of portrayal which smack of poor research. I’ve studied Chinese history extensively, especially during the Republican era when this is set, and the portrayal here is very poor – no accurate sense of the place or the tenor of the times is revealed. There’s nothing to conjure the spirit of the city – it may as well have been set in San Francisco’s (or anywhere else’s) Chinatown. And yet there are webs of pointless sub-plots all over the place taking up valuable page space, instead of being used to pass on worthwhile information to the Keeper.

But it’s the Australian section that makes me grind my teeth the most. The Aboriginal cultists here use clubs, studded with bat’s teeth and dipped in their ichor, which transfer rabies to those upon whom these weapons are used. Excuse me? Rabies? A ten minute Internet search will reveal that Australia is one of the few places on the planet – for all its size – where rabies does not exist. And the Mimi spirits that show up in the tale are just wrong. There are vampiric creatures of Aboriginal legend with funky teeth but they’re not Mimis. Aboriginal tribespeople also do not use hieroglyphs, or depict objects in their art the way Westerners do, so having them tattooed with symbols of the Sand Bat is equally meaningless. The portrayal, as in the Shanghai section, is lacklustre and loaded with wrong assumptions and stereotypes that ring awfully hollow.

This is just two parts in a multi-part sequence, but I can’t help thinking that, if the research for these bits is so poor, then the rest of it must fall to the same standard. The sections set in Cairo and Kenya must also be approached warily, although there is now both a Kenyan and Cairene source book to fill in many of the blanks. I did originally think that Chaosium would do the logical thing and produce rules books for each of the relevant sections in “Masks”, but no – that idea seems to have evaporated. With all of the Lovecraftian potential that China provides, were they quick to set the scene? No: along came a source book on Japan (of all places!) instead. Perhaps with the next release of the “Masks” campaign more tie-in splat books will appear but no – who am I kidding? Something shiny will no doubt appear to distract those at the wheel.

Am I being too harsh? Possibly. So let me offer one last piece of advice for Keepers who are thinking of pushing their players through this meatgrinder:

Play “Shadows of Yog-sothoth”. It’s a much better vehicle, far better written, and your players will actually like it.

Curious...

I love the serendipity that working with books provides. This last week I was cataloguing a bunch of books when this fell on my desk: it’s the Rev. Jedidiah Morse’s The American Geography, published in London and dated 1792, with the intriguing subtitle A View of the Present Situation of the United States of America, as if this was something that needed to be monitored, possibly with the intention of being able to say “I told you so” at some later stage. Simply put, it is a ready-reckoner of all the American states at that time, their physical characteristics, quirks, notable features, governmental structures and various other claims to fame. Me being me, I of course turned to “Rhode Island” in the chapter listing and was intrigued to note that the few pages devoted to this state contained the heading “Curiofities” and that very few other states had deserved such attention. So obviously, I turned straight to the section in question.

There, I found this:

“About four miles north-eaft of Providence lies a fmall village, called Pawtucket, a place of fome trade and famous for lamprey eels. Through this village runs Pawtucket river, which empties into Providence river, two miles eaft of the town. In this river is a beautiful fall of water, directly over which a bridge has been built, which divides the Commonwealth of Maffachufetts from the ftate of Rhode ifland. The fall, in its whole length, is upwards of fifty feet. The water paffes through feveral chafms in a rock which runs diametrically acrofs the bed of the ftream, and ferves as a dam to the water. Several mills have been erected upon thefe falls; and the fpouts and channels which have been conftructed to conduct the ftreams to their refpective wheels, and the bridge, have taken very much away from the beauty and grandeur of the fcene; which would otherwife have been indefcribably charming and romantic.”

Possibly the most curious aspect of this observation is why he mentioned it at all, given that all he can do is whinge about how much Industry has ruined the landscape, but it did set bells ringing in my head so I poked around until I found this:

“The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening.”

Of course, this is H.P. Lovecraft – writing in the guise of the unfortunate Robert Olmstead, narrator of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – describing the first encounter with the Manuxet River falls and the bridge which crosses them. Leslie S. Klinger in my New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014) tells me that “Innsmouth” is the nom-de-plume of the coastal Massachusetts town of Manchester-by-the-Sea and that the closest rivers are the Merrimack, the Ipswich and the Rowley, none of which could easily be identified as the prototype of the fictitious Manuxet.

I think however, that Rev. Morse has unearthed the answer: isn’t it likely that HPL would simply have transplanted the Pawtucket River from Rhode Island into Innsmouth to decorate his fishy community? “Manuxet” and "Pawtucket" have very similar-sounding names and the falls – dramatic enough to be a feature of HPL’s fiction – are certainly dramatic enough to be listed by Morse among the local “Curiofities” of Rhode Island. And both writers note that the local industries have marred the natural beauty of the scene.

So, mystery solved, if indeed it ever was a mystery. As I said, working with books is a joy anyway, but these little discoveries on the side really make it something extra special!

Review: NOS4R2 by Joe Hill

HILL, Joe, NOS4R2, Gollancz/Orion Publishing Group, London, 2014.

Octavo; paperback; 692pp. Small bump to the fore-edge of the front wrapper; else near fine.

Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s architect for the Final Solution, had a “heart of iron” and child-bearing hips. No seriously: look it up. It was one of two things that caused others to look askance at him and think ‘this, is Der Fuehrer’s poster boy for the Aryan race?’ The other thing was the fact that he was Jewish (well, on balance, it’s most likely that he actually wasn’t, but who am I to cut him any slack on the issue now, regardless of the fact that he’s roasting in Hell?).

In fact, looking at the entire line up of the Third Reich’s top dogs, you’ve got to ask yourself ‘is this the best that they can do?’ Goebbels looks like a spiv; Himmler comes across as a feckless accountant; and the only contest I’d be worried about getting involved in with Göring is a wurst-snarfling one, complete with lederhosen und bier. One look at Heydrich and you’re thinking ‘this thunder-thighed sociopath with the mincing gait is the epitome of Teutonic manhood? Please.’ One look at a photo of the Third Reich’s gathered high command and you’re seeing a bunch of schlubs in bad-fitting uniforms and wondering if their combined IQ is reaching double digits. It just goes to show that you’ve got to look like Fox Mulder to rock a Hugo Boss ensemble and no-one in Hitler’s inner circle could pull that off.

And yet: look at the evil they unleashed upon the world.

What does this have to do with Joe Hill’s latest book? It’s this: in NOS4R2, Hill generates the same chilling disjunction between appearance and action that these guys did back in the day. The two villains of the piece – Charles Talent Manx III and Bing “The Gasmask Man” Partridge – are two dumb-looking losers who have little to nothing going for them and yet they unlock a world of carnage that is truly terrifying. It takes quite a lot for something to give me the kind of nightmares that make me want to return to sleep with the lights on, and that happened before I was even halfway through.

Anyone who’s even semi-regularly following this blog knows that I’m a fan of Joe Hill’s work. I’m happy to announce that, with this novel, he’s finally made the transition from short story writer to novelist. That sounds harsh but let me reiterate what I’ve said before: Heart-Shaped Box was a novella spread too thin; Horns was meatier, but could still have used an edit; NOS4R2, on the other hand, fits comfortably in the space provided for it. There’s none of Heart-Shaped Box’s tedious travel sequences - off to discover a random plot point from a distant second-string character - with associated brooding; there’s none of the endless brutalising of the protagonist to draw out scenes that punctuated Horns; each element of NOS4R2 clicks nicely into place to make a sweetly-humming whole. I would say it’s like a Swiss watch, but that would be resorting to cliché. None of this is to say that I wouldn’t, or don’t, recommend Hill’s books very highly; I do, it’s just that for all of his books’ energy, talent and chutzpah, there are flaws. Flaws which, I’m glad to say, have been overcome.

The basic premise of this new book is this: Victoria “Vic” McQueen, is given a pushbike as a child and discovers that with it she can drive through an old covered bridge near her house to the location of anything which she is trying to find. In this way she unearths her mother’s bangle, a friend’s stuffed toy, a treasured photograph and her neighbours’ dead cat. Doing so causes herself serious neurological damage, ranging from migraines to potential aneurysms, and this gives her cause to believe that the whole process is an hallucination of some kind - not least because the bridge she crosses demonstrably collapsed when she was very young. At age seventeen, while looking for a person to explain her gift, she encounters stammering Maggie Leigh, a librarian with a Scrabble bag, the letters of which tell her the answers to questions that she poses, and Maggie warns her to avoid seeking out “Manx”, claiming that an encounter with him at her early age would be too dangerous. Vic, tired of being told what she can and cannot do, an attitude fuelled by the collapse of her parents’ marriage, runs away from home and seeks Charlie Manx anyway.

The encounter, as predicted by Maggie, goes badly. Manx is intrigued by Vic’s ability, which he claims is not unlike his own, and, when he determines that Vic isn’t going to be part of his plans, locks her in his house and allows it to burn down around her. She barely escapes, fleeing to a nearby highway where an overweight biker takes her to a gas station and safety. While there however, Manx pulls up outside: the people at the petrol station try to detain him – Manx kills one of them horribly and the others apprehend him. Manx is revealed to be a child abductor and murderer but, as his guilt is declared, he falls into a mysterious coma.

Vic stays in Gunbarrel Colorado, a continent away from her east-coast family, where she shacks up with Lou Carmody, the geeky fat biker who rescued her, and they eventually have a son together. Her life starts to go off the rails as dead kids from “Christmasland” begin mysteriously phoning her, although no-one else can hear them. Her sanity riding a knife edge, she discovers that developing her latent artistic talents helps keep the children at bay. She pens a number of Where’s Wally-esque kids’ books that bring her fame and fortune, but nevertheless the voices break through: she burns down her house, separates from her de facto husband and child, and ends up in the loony bin.

Manx, in the meantime, goes about his business. All along, we have the impression that Manx is far older than he seems – his dialogue is punctuated by archaisms and his attitudes are prudish and antiquated. He employs Bing Partridge as his assistant and they drive around the country abducting children who – Manx says – will one day turn to bad ways or sordid ends due to the as yet un-manifested poor choices of their parents. Manx takes the children to “Christmasland”, where sadness is banned and every day waits in breathless anticipation of Santa, while Partridge - armed with tanks of industrial-grade, gingerbread-scented, knock-out gas and the gas mask that saved his father’s life in the Korean War - has his chillingly wicked way with their parents. They drive around the country in a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith with the vanity plates “NOS4R2”, a vehicle that is sentient and seemingly, an extension of Charlie Manx’s consciousness – move over Christine!

Manx dies in prison hospital and, after his autopsy and due to the intervention of a wayward morgue security guard who likes to take selfies with dead semi-celebrities, he revives, clobbers the guard with a hammer-like medical tool, steals the guy’s car and makes for a rendezvous with Bing. They whistle up NOS4R2, set out to find Vic McQueen, and orchestrate their revenge...

It’s not a premise that can be easily summed up in a paragraph.

There are multiple narratives overlapping and intertwining here and Hill keeps them all perfectly balanced and moving. The information we need as readers – Manx’s activities; various characters’ super-powers – is doled out easily and without ever seeming heavy-handed. It’s a slick piece of world-building that runs on rails. Points of view shift easily and the action moves as the characters change locations – every change of set signals the start of a new chapter, one chapter taking place entirely in a laundry chute. Location, activity and time are the fundamental engines of the tale and the narrative flows smoothly because of this focus.

Speaking of world-building, there is an energy to this work that puts it streets ahead of the premise established in Horns. Part of my issue with that book was that it harped (see what I did there?) too much on Christian mystical symbolism, with stage-y set-ups and pile-driver puns. Imposing the dogma onto the story necessarily threw a framework over the narrative which Hill was battling against in order to surprise the reader, practically from page one. In this new novel, the world is Hill’s to create – he isn’t pinned down by any outside pre-conceptions or logic, other than the ones he brings to his own table – and the story is fresh and exciting as a result. (Strangely enough, this is exactly the reason I dislike reading a lot of fantasy and sci-fi: I hate paddling around in other people’s views of how the world works and how it should be. With horror, you have to take the world as it is, before injecting the horrifying element into it.) I suspect that his experiments with the graphic novel form have had an inspirational effect on Hill’s plotting instincts.

(That being said, however, there are a few moments where he can’t help himself and lets loose with some extended shaggy-dog set-ups leading to awful punchlines. Most of these revolve around Tabitha Hutton, an FBI agent who shows up midway-through, and are mercifully short-ish, so the less said about them, the better.)

A thing I really like about this novel is the presence of strong and interesting female leads. The name McQueen threw me a little at first – given the motorcycle link later on – and I was wondering if Hill had started writing the protagonist as a guy, riffing off notions of Steve McQueen. I like the final choice however (assuming there was one), and the novel is more powerful as a result. A thing I do like about Hill’s stories is that he takes care with his characters: unlike James Herbert, Ramsay Campbell and, indeed, his father Stephen King, he doesn’t just set up a victim at the start of a passage only to eviscerate them gleefully by the end. This always leaves me frustrated, since I’ve had to invest time learning about a person only to see them killed off three paragraphs later. There are no fewer random deaths in Hill’s books; it’s just that these corn-chip characters are given some time to develop in earlier passages, not simply a quick “intro-then-cull”. I wouldn’t say that Hill’s secondary characters are incredibly nuanced, but they certainly have more depth than you’ll find in the average contemporary horror novel.

It’s his main characters that are the bonus however. In this case, Vic McQueen, Charlie Manx, Maggie Leigh, Bing Partridge and Lou Carmody are the gold. Each of them contributes substantially to the plot (Lou’s geeky adherence to comics literature overcomes much potential resistance to the belief that his wife has super-powers) and are finely-crafted individuals whose motivations are revealed in various subtle ways, not spelt out in heavy-handed blocks of text. Vic’s struggles with substance abuse and parenting confidence are tense and well-presented, never denigrated or judged; Maggie’s life story is revealed by the cigarette burns on her arms and her love of literature, more than anything overtly stated; and Partridge is a solid lesson (which the baddies never seem to get) in why evil guys are evil and can’t be trusted. Although he professes his undying adoration of Manx and his fervent wish to live forever in Christmasland, he can’t resist taking a shot at the back of Manx’s head when the opportunity presents itself.

There’s a lot happening in this book and the fact that the good guys’ motives are sometimes shaky and the bad guy’s motives are not so clear-cut make it that much more interesting. The one truly evil and inhuman character in the tale is, literally, not human: the Rolls Royce Wraith is as creepy as it’s possible to be, without the ability to speak or interact in anything other than a catch-and-carry capacity. At one point (after Manx is in prison) NOS4R2 is sold off to a car restorer at a federal auction and the hapless new owner is duly captured and deposited at Bing Partridge’s front door as soon as the repair work is complete. It’s interesting that Hill chose British automobiles as the mystical motors in his story – the Roller and, later, Vic’s Triumph Bonneville – instead of something more local like a Harley Davidson, say. I guess it’s an extension of that Hollywood thing where all of the baddies have English accents...

Fundamentally though, this tale works because the baddies are BAD and, despite the fact that they are neither intellectual nor physical powerhouses, they are just so single-minded about their goals and aims that they get the drop on everyone at every turn. As I inferred above, sentient automobiles and access to nightmare dimensions aside, these two are like the “Dumb and Dumber” of nightmare central and the rest of the cast simply underestimate them at every turn allowing them to get away with hideous slaughter. As villains go, these two are the scariest I’ve seen in ages. I winced every time one of the good characters fell into danger; these two, I was cheering them on to their own particular Nurembergs and wishing the very worst for them.

What didn’t I like about this book? Hmm. There is one thing that niggles, but only slightly, and much less so with this outing than Horns. Hill doesn’t hold people to any kind of exacting standard: he fully expects people to take the easy way; indulge their vices at each opportunity; lie, cheat, and steal if they think that they can get away with it: he has no illusions about where we’re all headed. In Horns, given Ig’s ability to know everyone’s darkest secrets, it was easy to trot out the expected stereotypes which the story demanded: of course the priest was sleeping with the church secretary; of course she was embezzling the church funds; of course the two local deputies were acting out their repressed homoerotic urges for each other on the local ne’er-do-wells. The demands of the narrative structure meant that these revelations were essential to the plot. There’s not so much of that here, but Hill does tend to place his characters into two distinct camps – white hats; black hats - and play to expectations as a result. Every now and then, things start to get a little rose-tinted and apple-pie-y (usually right before the baddies hit town). It’s nowhere near as bad as, say, some of King’s earlier books but there’s a treacley margin that Hill skates awfully close to on occasion.

That’s it. Do yourself a favour: go out and buy this – it’s too good an experience to miss. I’ll be having nightmares for a week! On top of that, I’m also hanging out for the movie and geeking out about the casting opportunities (please, please, please don’t cast Jack Black as Lou!).

Five tentacled horrors from me.

Review: The Alienist

CARR, Caleb, The Alienist, Warner Books/Little, Brown & Co. (UK), London, 1996.

Octavo; paperback; 616pp. Slightly rolled; some creasing to the spine and curling of the wrappers; text block and page edges lightly toned. Very good.

Once upon a time I was heavily in to Patricia Cornwell’s oeuvre. Don’t ask me why, because I really cannot account for it now – I think I was just in the mood for something ongoing, a series of books to read, something that would not run out in the short term, like Conan Doyle or Dorothy L. Sayers. Those are finite – since their authors are dead, there’s no more Sherlock Holmes or Peter Wimsey, unless you travel down the road of pastiche, and that way lies madness. Initially, I enjoyed the goings-on of Kay Scarpetta but, all too soon, I was being asked to accept too many coincidences and stretches of credibility, and finally I said, “you know what? That’s enough”.

Nowadays, especially at the bookshop where I work, people ask me about Cornwell’s books – which one should I start with? Which one is best? – and I have to shrug my shoulders. In fact, not a single work of hers (with one exception, of which, later) has stayed with me. I can recall the reason I gave up on them – the serial killer nemesis who was orchestrating other serial killers to attack Scarpetta, without them realising that they were being so manipulated – but as to other specifics? Nada. My crystal ball tells me that, in a generation or so, readers (if there are any still out there) will say “Patricia who?” in much the same fashion that they now discuss John Galsworthy, John Masters and Michael Arlen (go on: I dare you...).

The one book of Cornwell’s that I do recall is the brash piece of self-aggrandisement entitled Case Closed, in which she boldly claims to have identified Jack the Ripper, a cocky exercise which fails utterly to do the job it sets out to achieve. Given, as time has revealed, that the Metropolitan Police of London knew the identity of the Ripper but were hampered by a lack of hard evidence, and that those files are now coming to light, it puts Ms. Cornwell in rather an invidious position. Enough, I think on that score.

Another reason I stopped reading her books was that, at the time, serial killers had become something of a “flavour of the month”. Everywhere you looked – TV; movies; books; graphic novels – serial killers were hacking and slashing an exfoliant swathe through the jungle of popular culture and frankly, I was tired of it. Sadly, I had just purchased a copy of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, mainly on the strength of its unusual setting – fin de siecle New York. A few pages in however, the (mangled) viewing of a mangled body and the in-character discussion of how there was about to be a long, arduous investigation to unearth the psychological motivation behind such a blood-thirsty monster, and I put the book down.

Until now. Nineteen years later.

At work these days, each time we buy someone’s old books, the Patricia Cornwells go straight out the front to the “Specials” table, marked down to a handful of bucks each. This isn’t perversity on my part – they still sell, but if we put them on the shelf inside, no-one will look twice at them. Caleb Carr on the other hand, goes to the shelves if he’s in good nick; if not, on the Specials table. It was this staying power – the fact that he will still attract the punters for an appropriate secondhand price – that made me want to look at him again. I’m kind of glad that I did.

The opening chapter almost had me putting the book back down again, I must say. I blanched a bit at the thought that Theodore Roosevelt was a main character in the narrative and that initial description of the first murder victim put me on the back foot. Fortunately, Roosevelt, while ubiquitous throughout the tale, isn’t a constant presence and wasn’t overused: the focus is four-square on the made-up people which Carr presents to us and Roosevelt really only amounts to a hefty dose of historical flavour. But back to the body.

A dead person, bound at the wrists and ankles, propped up on its knees with its face on the floor, is, on first inspection, not going to give much away: it’s a dead person bound and tied. However, our main character – reporter, John Schuyler Moore – provides us, without moving the carcase, with a full description, the complete litany of damage to the victim: genitals removed, throat cut, abdomen slashed open, right hand removed, eyes gouged out, &c., &c. Given that the site of the discovery is an unlit maintenance pier on one end of a bridge under construction at 2.00am, my first thought was that Moore himself would turn out to be the culprit, because it would be impossible to see more than half of these wounds without interfering with the crime scene. He knows the intimacies of the victim’s wounds without seeing them; ergo: he caused them. As I read on, it became clear that this was simply a poorly-considered descriptive passage, and I steeled myself for a barrage of plain bad writing from here on in.

Fortunately, I was to be pleasantly surprised. Carr is actually a very good writer, capable of capturing his characters and their locales through deft and clever wordcraft. As well, he manages to inject vast quantities of historical flavour and information, useful to the understanding of New York at the turn of last century, without bogging down the narrative. Reading further, I became more and more enamoured of the tale, and I began to flip back to that opening passage about the first crime scene and to regard it as something of an anomaly.

Serial-killer stories are not really my cup of coffee. In the end, unlike other detective fiction, there is no real motivation for the killer – they’re just mad. They’re there in order for our intrepid detective to have something to do. They represent a faceless, motiveless, uncaring evil, perpetrating distressing random atrocities to disrupt the steady flow of civilisation. Look, if I want to read Lovecraft, I’ll read Lovecraft: the triumph of the serial-killer’s nemeses is just a bandage to convince people that everything’s alright now – good guys win; bad guys – as bad as they can get – ultimately lose. And if you believe that, I know a bridge you might like...

I prefer detective fiction where the killer is someone whom we get to meet and examine as part of the detective process – a cunning individual, driven to desperation and now cleverly covering their tracks. Give me Poirot any day, instead of the gloomy, cynical, gizzard-rummaging Scarpettas of this type of story. I’ll take my murders “country house”, thank-you, not police procedural.

Given this, The Alienist brings something fresh to the table: the locale. New York in 1896 is a bustling metropolis of disparate cultures and classes: crime and charity (the latter often obscuring the former) go hand-in-hand and Reform is tantamount to a dirty word. On top of this, the academic field of psychology is a new and untested science, frowned upon by the Establishment and its use is certainly discouraged amongst crime-solvers. This forces our detectives to appear to break new ground in designing procedures for investigating the crimes at hand (of course, Carr just takes a roundabout way of getting to the standard operating procedures that detectives use nowadays, but he deliberately underplays their effectiveness, or structures them differently. It’s profiling Jim, but not as we know it). Along the way his characters still earnestly try exciting crime-solving techniques such as the Bertillon System (in favour of the less-acceptable and fancy new fingerprinting rigmarole, which they also use, just for laughs) and checking to see if the victim’s last visual input can be lifted off their retinas. Watching them attempt to pin down the killer’s personality by means of his handwriting was also a hoot.

Ultimately though, the process whereby they determine who the killer is and where he’ll strike next is a sound one, based solely on the tenuous psychological, or “alienist”, principles of the period, which are also clearly enumerated. Along the way, facts are assembled and the blood sprays wildly; the fact that Carr keeps the myriad tiny clues and nuances of the killer’s motivations juggling is a real high-wire act and very satisfying to watch. Because it’s not just a process of putting pieces of a jig-saw puzzle together: as the group of detectives settles in to work, there are hidden motivations, skulduggery, misunderstandings and misdirections aplenty along the way, all of which is engagingly and satisfyingly resolved.

In the final analysis, this is a good entertainment – neither historical examination nor penny potboiler. It’s better than the Patricia Cornwells and the Kathy Reichs of airport fame, but it does smack of the melodramatic (which, given the prevalent entertainments of the day, might be intentional). There were some elements of sentimentality which I winced at, but on the whole, it kept me entertained throughout its 600+ pages.

I’m giving it three-and-a-half tentacled horrors.

How NOT to portray a character...

This last week, Geraldine McEwan (1932-2015) died. Many of you will not know who she was and, indeed, had I not known of one particular aspect of her career as an actor, I would be oblivious also. In her later life, Geraldine McEwan became familiar as the latest in a growing list of people who tried to portray Miss Marple in a television series based on Agatha Christie’s oeuvre.

For my money, you can’t go wrong reading Christie’s material (although maybe not her romance novels which she published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott). If you’re running a Call of Cthulhu campaign and you want to recreate the atmosphere of the 20s and 30s, it’s all right here in black and white: the language, the social mores, the furniture. And with it, is the evil that people do to each other. These are good stories, well told, and well worthwhile for those wanting to catch a flavour of the times. What you don’t want to do, is decide to watch the shows that the BBC have churned out over the past several decades: this is a minefield of misinformation which will definitely lead you astray. Remember the episode of “Seinfeld” where George tried to avoid the bother of reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s by watching the movie instead? Like that, but worse.

Agatha Christie was never happy with the attempts to film her two most beloved characters. She thought Peter Ustinov was all wrong as Poirot and she refused to acknowledge Margaret Rutherford’s portrayal of Miss Marple, the only two representations which emerged during her lifetime. Her loathing of the Rutherford Marple is easy to see, since it was a portrayal geared for a certain period taste, and, for those with some deeper knowledge of her work, for a host of personal and psychological reasons.

Christie was one of a handful of women who emerged in the 20s as the Dames of Crime Fiction. The list includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham; there were others but these will suffice. Each of them wrote stories in which the central mystery was unravelled by a detective – amateur or otherwise – who was invariably male. In their earliest stories, these detectives are arch and peculiar: it takes a few stabs before the rough edges get knocked off them and they become more acceptably real. Initially, Poirot reads like a Cubist painting; Roderick Alleyne is simply a name which no-one can pronounce; Lord Peter Wimsey is a badly-drawn Bertie Wooster and Albert Campion is a seething mass of Parkinsonian tics. Once their individual authors got comfortable with them, only then did they become ‘real’ people.

In Christie’s case, she began to loathe Hercule Poirot fairly early on. Even though he became psychologically more defined and interesting, she was never truly happy with him. Along with this she copped a lot of speculation that, as a woman, she couldn’t really be the author of such complex crime novels: the word on the street was that “Agatha Christie” was a male writer’s nom-de plume, and that this blowzy woman was merely some kind of marketing gimmick. In desperation, she turned to a new detective, Miss Marple, whose role was to demonstrate that crime – including murder, the most heinous crime of all – could take root in the most benign, bucolic landscapes, and amongst the most unlikely people. Having the crimes solved by a female investigator somehow made the possibility of the story having been written by a woman easier to swallow.

Along with this move, Christie also began to write herself into her novels. At one point we are introduced to Ariadne Oliver, a female writer of detective fiction who works alongside Poirot and Marple at various points. Both physically and mentally, Oliver is a caricature of Agatha Christie, even down to her obsession with apples. Again, this was probably a means of silencing her detractors who couldn’t reconcile the intricacy and precision of her plotting with the large, disorganised woman who claimed to be the author. This move backfired badly on Christie in filmic circles.

When the first Miss Marple movies were made, those doing the casting obviously had trouble finding a means of portraying their main character. Miss Marple is clearly described in the books: she is tall, reserved, and severe. However, the producers were trying to make a light film for a humour-hungry 60s audience. It’s highly likely that someone in the research department found a Christie novel in which Ariadne Oliver appears (probably 1961’s The Pale Horse) and suddenly Margaret Rutherford (1892-1972) as Miss Marple makes sense: Rutherford’s ‘Marple’ is ‘Ariadne Oliver’ dialled wincingly up to 11. No wonder Agatha Christie chose to pretend these movies never happened!

During World War Two, Agatha Christie engaged in war work which took her to London and her experiences there resulted in the writing of Taken at the Flood (1948). At that time, after hours, she also penned two other novels, both of which were finished and then locked away in a bank vault until her death, whereupon instructions in her will led to their being posthumously published. One of these novels was Curtain, the last case of Hercule Poirot; the other was Sleeping Murder, the final adventure of Miss Marple. There is a world of difference between these two books and in order to avoid spoilers, those who’ve not read them should skip the next three paragraphs.

Curtain (1975) signals the end of Poirot’s character arc. It is the novel in which he commits suicide, after being forced to kill a murderer who has managed to perform the impossible – commit a murder for which no evidence exists afterwards to convict him. The setting is Styles, a country estate turned into a rest home, the same place where the first Poirot novel – The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) - is set and in which Poirot is introduced to the world. From all this we can see that Christie had a definite timeline in mind when she set out writing about her Belgian sleuth: there was a time when she thought, like Conan Doyle, to retire her detective to the country; but popular demand would not allow it. And so, she wrote his death and locked it away for later. Poirot was always older than his creator; it was easy for Christie to describe his infirmities and to portray his aging. It was not so easy for her to do likewise with Jane Marple.

Sleeping Murder (1976) is an anomaly. If it is read as the last book in the Marple series, it is instantly shown to be anachronistic. The first Marple stories are homey and countrified, set in sleepy environments which make the horrors which unfold there more dramatic by contrast. As Miss Jane Marple progresses, she becomes more crystallised, no doubt as Christie began to learn how to articulate her inner mechanisms. In a way, Miss Marple was another alter-ego for Christie, just as Ariadne Oliver was, and this shows through in some of the earlier books; it’s not until after the break – when Jane Marple becomes her own entity and Oliver is confirmed as Christie’s avatar – that Jane Marple really comes into her own.

Unfortunately, there’s that final book. In Sleeping Murder, Jane Marple leaps into action: she jumps about, she elaborates intricate plans to trap ne’er-do-wells, she rockets from hiding to accost wrongdoers. All of this bounding about, is the antithesis of who Jane Marple becomes, but it’s exactly what Agatha Christie – writing during wartime - would have done in her shoes. The other elements of the book were all decades out of date by the time it was released in the 70s, so those tracking the spinster sleuth’s career are right to be confused when they hit this volume. Really, it’s something like Nemesis (1971) that is the ‘last Marple novel’, not this one.

(Welcome back spoiler avoiders!)

So, Poirot had a developmental arc for his career from the get-go; Miss Marple’s creation was a slow process of agglomeration, betrayed by her anachronistic “last” episode. Not only does this final novel do a disservice to Miss Marple’s fans it has also – with one exception - derailed the attempts to move Miss Marple to film. It is exactly the depth and complexity which Christie brought to the table that leads people astray.

Jane Marple is a cunning old so-and-so. She knows that people treat her in a certain way because she is what she is – an elderly spinster. People around her expect her to be incapable of action, woolly-headed, imperceptive and gossipy. She trades on this fact, and it’s what makes her so diabolical. However, underneath all of this ‘playing the old dear’, she has a razor-keen mind and a moral compass that brooks no deviation. She’s never surprised by the gruesome crimes which she discovers; only saddened to have her understanding of humanity’s failings routinely underscored. She has no sympathy whatsoever for wrongdoers: in her (chronologically) later books, she refers to herself as the incarnation of the Greek Goddess Nemesis and is ruthless in bringing her foes to justice. She may look like a sweet old thing, but under that facade is a cold and vengeful vigilante.

This is what television and movie producers consistently miss. There have been four major castings of Miss Marple (I’m discounting Japanese anime interpretations, Gracie Fields’ 1956 performance, and also Angela Lansbury’s 1980 role in “The Mirror Crack’d”): Margaret Rutherford from 1961 to 1965; Joan Hickson from 1984 to 1992; Geraldine McEwan from 2004-2007; and Julia McKenzie, from 2008-2013. Rutherford’s performances we’ve already looked at and seen how they’re not actually based upon Miss Marple as depicted in the books, but on Ariadne Oliver. Geraldine McEwan’s interpretation is the next one I’d like to look at:

It’s clear from watching her in these movies that the writers and producers took no notice whatsoever of the development of the Marple character. They made the false assumption that the ‘last book’ would reveal the character at its most developed and they went from there. As we’ve already seen, this is a catastrophic mistake. Far from being fully-formed, the Marple character in Sleeping Murder is still largely in utero and not completed at all. This accounts for all of the leaping and springing about that McEwan does in the role, and all of the cartoon facial tics which she brings to the screen, something that the real Miss Jane Marple would never do.

Moving on to Julia McKenzie (you can see where this is going, can’t you?) the writers and producers make another fatal error. Miss Marple is not a cute, fuzzy little hamster in a woolly cardigan. She may play the sweet old lady when it serves her purpose to do so, but it’s not her real nature. In these shows, the whole crew fall for the big lie and McKenzie plays the fluffy spinster to the hilt, without a suggestion of the core of steel.

That leaves us with the only time that the powers that be got it right. Joan Hickson (1906-1998) was the real deal. For starters, she was tall, as Jane Marple is supposed to be. She radiated intelligence and perception, and she played the character with the reserve and self-deprecation it required. If you watch her in these shows, you can see her turning the sweet old lady demeanour on and off like a tap, which is exactly what Miss Marple does in the books. And she brooks no argument from the bad guys: she sees them go down and she makes sure it sticks. Don’t mess with her. If you’re looking for Miss Marple on DVD, it will reward you to find these releases rather than the others.

As a final note, it’s wise to be aware that the BBC – who have been mostly responsible for the filming of Christie’s books – have a tendency to play fast and loose with the stories. In the earlier Poirot tales starring David Suchet, they messed with the endings and often with the characters, in the foolish belief that those who have read the books might be bored at finding the same old wrap-up as that which happened in the novel. This is a mistake. The filming of Cards on the Table (1936), for example, was a nightmare of Frankensteinian re-engineering involving Superintendant Battle turning gay and was horrendous to watch. The later Suchet stories are better, particularly the latest incarnation of Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

(Obviously, the only person who can play Poirot is David Suchet - no argument. Ustinov was barely passable and Albert Finney was a caricature, not a character, along with everybody else in his version of “Murder on the Orient Express”, with the possible exception of Vanessa Redgrave’s character.)

It might seem a small point to whinge about an actor’s portrayal of a role, even an iconic one such as the character of Miss Jane Marple, but characters are built up from foundations. If the actor can’t grasp the fundamentals of a character, they can’t do the role justice. It’s not enough to affect the comb-over, glower and wear the tight white pants: you can’t be Napoleon if you don’t understand Napoleon. I’m happy if the fundamentals are there – I don’t see why they can’t dye Daniel Craig’s hair and give James Bond black hair just like in the book, but, given the rest of his performance, it’s a small quibble. Suchet gets Poirot. Hickson got Marple. The rest are just actors wearing funny hats.

In the final analysis, do yourself a favour and read the books. Several of Dame Agatha Christie’s books are regarded as among the most important works written in English, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Death on the Nile (1937), Sparkling Cyanide (1945) and A Murder is Announced (1950). How can you possibly go wrong?