M.R. James. Gaston Leroux. Walter De La Mare. Sheridan Le Fanu. Classic ghost story authors of the pre-Poe days.

I must have bought this one after reading that list one time too many – although it could have just showed up in my e-collection, sometimes my eReader does that. So, while I was away last week, I worked my way through it.

It was not what I expected.

First, it was written in 1863, so the writing style is that somewhat dated style that books of that era have, like reading Treasure Island. That took a little bit of time to get used to, but no more than reading Popular Crime. There were some sections that got a little long – the ending, in particular dragged a little, but I skimmed over it and didn’t feel like I missed anything.

This book reminded me of reading a John Dickson Carr novel. It had comedy, romance, mystery, and horror all in turn. Wikipedia tells me that this is classified as one of Le Fanu’s “historical” novels¹ so if I bought it, I must have picked out the wrong one.

The book takes place in a small town about a day’s journey from Dublin². The narrator is a man in his nonage³ that grew up in this small town. The book opens with him comparing the town to what it was like when he was a boy, mentioning people and places that appear later in the book, and bemoaning their disappearance or how they are no longer the same as they were.⁴ Then he talks about the churchyard and remembers a time when he was a boy and his excitement when the sexton was digging a grave for somebody’s grandmother, and a skull fell out of wall of the grave from the neighboring grave!⁵ The boys who had all gathered around – perhaps in hope that something that exciting would happen – wonder at the condition of the skull which had been cracked apart by two mighty blows and is also pierced by a mighty hole. What, they wonder aloud, could have killed this person, was he shot in the head? But what of the blows?

Then a creepy old man reminiscent of Billy Bones in Treasure Island appears and announces the hole is actually from a trepanning. The boy and his uncle, the vicar, are on tenterhooks; so, as soon as the grandmother has been buried, they call the man in for tea and encourage him to tell his story. The narrator goes on to say that, as a grown man, he later researched the story and came into possession of interviews, court papers, diaries, and letters that told the story in full beyond what the piratical man told him that day, and that the story he is about to recount is an amalgamation of those sources, as well as the old man’s tale.

The creepy old man starts by saying that he witnessed these events when he was a boy of 14⁶, drummer boy in the local company of the Royal Irish Artillery⁷. The artillery certainly livens up the town, with the periwigged and powdered officers, with their brightly colored uniforms and polished buttons and buckles, holding parades and going to local dances to the joy of the local maidens. Much of the book shows them sitting around an inn, drinking, or wooing the ladies that they love. Their work is overseen by an elderly general who is friends with the local lord of the manor⁸ The lord’s elder spinster sister lays down the law to him and attempts to lay down the law to his marriageable daughter, who has a mind of her own and goes her own way. The daughter is friends with the local Pastor’s daughter, who is too sweet and good for this world – and is offset by another local maiden, a brassy middle class girl with a chip on her shoulder and a mouth on her. The book is truly character-driven with probably another 20 or 30 fully-fleshed out people who play important roles in one way or another. I’m only going to mention three more: the lord’s agent⁹; a doctor who secretly longs to replace the agent – the two of them are constantly trying to undermine each other and are often on the verge of a dual; and a mysterious young man with dark hair and eyes, and an air about him, who arrives in the dead of night, accompanying a coffin, and swathed in a dark cloak and a tri-corn hat.

I’m not going to go into everything that happens in this book – that would be a very long post indeed – but I will explain why it reminds me of John Dickson Carr and give a few examples from this book.

To start, it mixes farcical humor with suspense, something Carr does a lot.¹⁰ For example, in one chapter, two of the Artillery officers are practicing singing to the accompaniment of a lute to win the hearts of the ladies they have set their sites on, up at the manor. They practice diligently, get dressed in their finest clothes, and – because they are all dressed up and carrying instruments – decide not to walk along the town’s main street and over the bridge to reach the lord’s manor because their comrades will see them and make fun of them. Instead they plan to skulk along a side path and take a ferry just out of town over the river. But when they reach the ferry, the ferryman is nowhere to be seen. Well, no problem, they’ve taken the ferry a number of times, has observed the ferryman in action, and are clearly superior people by their breeding; they don’t need no stinkin’ ferryman, they can do it themselves. So they board the boat and hold onto the line that crosses the river.

And, of course, they lose the line and go sweeping down river on the flood, arguing all the way about whose fault it is, and trying to bail water out of the boat. Finally the boat spins about and one of them falls out into the water, then the boat spins about again and races away from him, his friend losing his hat in the process. He is treading water, calling desperately for help, certain he will drown, until a bystander tells him to stand up, and he realizes how shallow the water is. He makes his way to shore, grabbing the hat from where it floats near him. He is helped home, where he is stripped of his wet clothes, wrapped in a blanket, feet in a tub of hot water, and handed a hot toddy. Only then is he able to make people understand what had happened: the boat has disappeared into the current, his friend surely drowned, witness his hat! Well-wishers rush to the river and begin dragging it for the other fellow.

Who has, meanwhile, been rescued just outside the other side of town by some bystanders, who rush him back to the hotel where the company is staying and he announces, through tears, that his friend has fallen into the river and surely drowned. The officers rush out, calling for assistance, and also begin searching the water for the first guy. The two search parties meet up and exchange cross-talk about who they are searching for before finally recognizing their error and the two friends are reunited.

It is so funny to read that you don’t realize Le Fanu’s deft hand until you think about it after you’ve finished the book: someone else is later thought to have drowned in the river and his drowned body is found to the distress of his wife; and one of the two officers involved in this hilarious incident witnesses something during his rescue that becomes essential to the story later on.

This is then, like in many of Carr’s books, contrasted with a spine-chilling incident that happens soon after.

The use of spooky stories in the book also reminds me of Carr’s works. To tell the truth, I thought this whole book would lead up to a ghost story. So, when they introduced the ghostly tale in an early chapter, I was delighted. This guy can really induce shivers.

The tale tells of the house located next to the churchyard, but the churchyard¹¹ is not where the trouble comes from. It comes from the old orchard behind the house, overlooked by the study, an orchard which people avoid walking in at night, with branches that grab at your hair, and mysterious noises, and the feeling that you are being followed although, when you look, there is no one there; and there was that one person who disappeared from the orchard one dark night… There is the spine-chilling incident when the servants opened the door one night and something low to the ground and dark rushed past them into the house; they searched but could not find it again. And, after that, mysterious knockings and furniture moving, and unexplained whisperings. Followed by another night when, on the study window, a white hand appeared, pale as death, and moved steadily across the window, followed by a knock at the door. The master of the house grabbed a stout cane and the servants gathered other improvised weapons and they surrounded the door. The homeowner opened the door, cane raised, and blocking it with his free arm – and something pushed his arm up and dove into the house beneath it. The house became vacant soon after and remained so for many years, until the mysterious young man in the dark cape and tricorn hat took a lease and moved in.

I kept waiting for the story to come back to the haunted house – through the machinations of the two men fighting for the agent’s job, the wooing of the three maidens, the elderly aunt’s furious determination to marry her niece to a wealthy but unattractive suitor, a mysterious and manipulative fortune teller who inserts herself into the story, and continued hijinks of the military company, including a duel that ends hilariously.

And then the story returns to a dark and stormy night in the haunted house, the mysterious young man is sitting alone in the darkened study, lit only by the firelight and a candle by which he is examining papers he has found in the house, casting them into the flames. A white hand appears at the window overlooking the orchard. And then a pale face. “Open the door,” a ghastly voice demands. He does and a man blows in on the blizzard, disappearing then into the dark shadows of the room, whispering out secrets and demands. You aren’t sure at first whether the visitor is spirit or living… And later, servants of the man whose drowned body was found downstream, see his apparition in a different house, behaving oddly and walking through locked doors.

Like Carr, although there is a tale of ghosts in that early chapter, the frightening things that happen in this story are all the work of humans, including the terrible trepanning that happens towards the end of the book, and the ghastly scenes that follow.

In the end, all is explained, and the book ends with three weddings, two redemptions, and a conviction.

If you haven’t tried Le Fanu, give this one a shot.

Just be prepared for XCIX chapters, some very long, others only a page or two. I recommend a cold and stormy night, a dark room, a crackling fire¹², and a single reading light casting down on the pages from above.¹³

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1. Whatever that means. ↩︎
2. Despite his name, Le Fanu is Irish. ↩︎
3. Nonage means “in his 90s”. ↩︎
4. Make Ireland Great Again! ↩︎
5. It takes so little to make a boy happy. ↩︎
6. This puts the book at about 1763 maybe or 1700. Perhaps that’s why it’s “historical.” ↩︎
7. An Irish battalion of the British Army. There a few Irish soldiers in this battalion but most of them seem to be British. ↩︎
8. An Englishman, of course. ↩︎
9. The guy who collects rents for the lord. ↩︎
10. Especially with Merivale, at the expense of his golf instructor, his singing tutor, or whatever strong-minded lady tries to pass judgement on the lifestyle of someone in the book – often, his. ↩︎
11. Which is where they buried the bodies, if you didn’t know. ↩︎
12. Or maybe that Yule Log video. ↩︎
13. Or read it on e- and skip the reading light. ↩︎