Mount TBR #31

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Tales of Terror and the Supernatural - Wilkie Collins

Collins (1824 - 1889) was a contemporary and associate of Charles Dickens and the author of novels such as No Name and The Moonstone. He also wrote stories for the magazine market, often for Christmas annuals. The title of this collection is misleading since only a couple feature ghosts; Tales of Mystery and Suspense would have been more informative,

The Dream Woman (1854): A cognitively disabled ostler has a horrific vision of being murdered by a demon woman. Like all good sons would, he tells his mother about his experience, describing the ghoulie carefully. Imagine mom’s perturbation when one fine day he brings home his fiancé, the very spit and image of the spooky woman in the vision. Collins goes the extra mile with bleak description of a troubled marriage – he was always persuasive with spouses not getting along.

A Terribly Strange Bed (1852): In a dodgy Parisian casino, a carefree young gentleman doesn’t know when to quit while he’s ahead and thus finds himself in trouble deep. Collins’ examination of the denizens of a gambling hell brought to my mind a casino I once visited in Macau. It’s worth quoting because it gives a feeling for the sensational tone of these stories.

The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose sunken eyes fiercely watched the turning up of the cards, never spoke; the flabby, fat-faced, pimply player, who pricked his piece of pasteboard perseveringly, to register how often black won, and how often red--never spoke; the dirty, wrinkled old man, with the vulture eyes and the darned great-coat, who had lost his last sou, and still looked on desperately, after he could play no longer--never spoke. Even the voice of the croupier sounded as if it were strangely dulled and thickened in the atmosphere of the room. I had entered the place to laugh, but the spectacle before me was something to weep over. 

The Dead Hand (1857): Another carefree young gentleman, hard up for lodgings during a race weekend, is tricked into sharing a room with a corpse.

Arthur looked closer at the man. The bedclothes were drawn up to his chin, and they lay perfectly still over the region of his chest. Surprised and vaguely startled, as he noticed this, Arthur stooped down closer over the stranger; looked at his ashy, parted lips; listened breathlessly for an instant; looked again at the still face, and the motionless lips and chest; and turned round suddenly on the landlord, with his own cheeks as pale, for the moment, as the hollow cheeks of the man on the bed.

Four – ly adverbs no less. The corpse, however, doesn’t seem to be down with being dead.

Blow Up with the Brig! (1859): I don’t what a sailor’s yarn is doing in a collection of eerie tales, but as a suspense it works well enough as a change of pace and indicator of the kind of rousing sea story periodicals printed back then. See The Frozen Deep. As a story of trussed-up would-be victim watching a fuse burn down to a bomb, it’s okay, but pales compared to Woolrich’s Three O’Clock.

Mr. Lepel and the Housekeeper (1884): A pair of college buds attend an opera with a plot of an over-the-top love triangle. Later they find themselves living out the exaggerated story with one angle being the 17-year-old daughter of a lodge keeper’s widow. Besides the nutty premise (and the Victorian complacency about the middle aged male and the not or barely legal maid that makes us postmoderns wince rather), this is worth reading because in this late-career story, Collins experiments with the unreliable narrator.  Mr. Lepel’s cluelessness about his housekeeper is a hoot.

Miss Bertha and the Yankee (1877): Unexpectedly becoming an heiress, a very young woman from the colonies finds herself in a love triangle with an intense English Army officer and a gentle Yankee. At first the two men are friends but love for the unintentionally indiscreet beauty comes between them to the point where they fight a duel. An overheated story that should appeal to fans of melodrama.

Mr. Policeman and the Cook (1881): A young homicide detective finds himself in a moral quandary. This is a serious, almost gloomy story, of what the conflict between love and duty will drive people to.

Fauntleroy (1858): One of those “life is complicated” stories that remind us not to judge harshly since we don’t know all the facts. For Collins, unlike his friend Dickens, people were seldom all good or all bad.

A Stolen Letter (1854): A story told in the voice of a sharp lawyer hired by a distraught rich guy to recover a letter that will wreak havoc on the reputation of his fiancé. The lawyer is a city rascal with few illusions and a keen eye for appearances.

Ah! but she was one of my sort, was that governess. Stood, to the best of my recollection, five feet four. Good lissome figure, that looked as if it had never been boxed up in a pair of stays. Eyes that made me feel as if I was under a pretty stiff cross-examination the moment she looked at me. Fine, red, fresh, kiss-and-come-again sort of lips.

I imagine a lot of Victorian papas would have torn this kind of thing from their daughter's fair hands.

The Lady of Glenwith Grange (1856): A sad story of a selfless older sister taking care of her ungrateful younger sister. The Victorians liked stories with imposters. Though impersonations were easier in days before modern communications and bureaucracy, they still seem unlikely to me. As he sometimes did in his novels, Collins puts in a brief appearance of a person with a disability, a rare thing for writers of that era.

Mad Monkton (1855): Dickens turned this story down, thinking that it wasn’t suitable for the family-friendly magazine Household Words. We heartily agree when we read this unflinching account of a guy with monomania looking for his reprobate uncle’s unburied corpse in Italy, egged on by the uncle's spirit that won't go away.

The Biter Bit (1858): A comic detective story that gives Collins a chance to smack two things he liked to smack: overweening self-confidence and middle-class pretensions. Probably the best story of the collection.

Many other stories of Collins can be found at Westminster Detective Library.