Aleister Crowley’s Simon Iff Stories and Other Works

I’ve never made any secret of my love of occult detective stories. They’re one of my favourite genres. Aleister Crowley’s Simon Iff stories (collected in Wordsworth Editions’ The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works and written during the second decade of the 20th century) certainly belong to this genre but they do have a distinctive flavour all their own.

Simon Iff is an old man. He’s in his 80s but he has the vigour of a man half his age. He also has a characteristically ironic and eccentric view of the world. Simon Iff is the man Crowley hoped to be when he reached that age - he is essentially an idealised self-portrait of the artist as a grand old man.

Among occult or psychic detective tales the Simon Iff stories are rather unique. There are no supernatural elements whatsoever. Not even paranormal phenomena. The cases that Simon Iff investigates are all very human crimes. What qualifies these stories as examples of occult detective stories is the unique methods of Crowley’s detective. Simon Iff is a magus and he uses Crowley’s philosophy (or religion if you prefer) as the basis for his understanding of the world, and this understanding of the world is the key to his methods. Simon Iff also has a profound knowledge of human psychology although his ideas on what makes people tick would appear more than a little eccentric to most people.

Simon Iff believes that in order to solve a crime it is necessary to study the minds of the people involved. Minds are more important than facts. He has no interest in crawling about on the floor looking for clues. He is contemptuous of alibis and bloodstains. He does not even deem it necessary to visit the scene of the crime. All he needs is sufficient information on the persons involved to understand the workings of their minds.

This unusual method necessarily means that the structure of these stories is very different from that of conventional detective stories. There is no gradual uncovering of the sequence of events and there is no gradual accumulation of clues.

The greatest strength of these stories is Crowley’s writing. He could be a very amusing writer indeed and these tales give him the opportunity to display his talent for light-hearted tongue-in-cheek storytelling. The tone is occasionally grim but is more often satirical and even whimsical, or willfully but amusingly perverse.

Many of the stories were written during Crowley’s residence in the United States and have an American setting. Simon Iff’s view of the US (which was undoubtedly identical to Crowley’s) is certainly eccentric.

Crowley had a tendency to magnify his own importance and Simon Iff can be seen as a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy. Iff is a celebrity detective who wines and dines with the high and the mighty.

The major weakness though is that Crowley uses these stories to push his own philosophy, and it’s a fairly silly philosophy. Simon Iff’s continual trashing of conventional morality eventually gets tiresome and predictable. Like Crowley himself the detective is to a large extent contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. He also espouses some remarkably foolish and naïve notions about other cultures, all of which are assumed to be superior to wicked western civilisation.

This Wordsworth volume also contains Golden Twigs, a short series of stories inspired by Sir James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

Serious crime fiction fans may be dismayed by the lack of attention in the Simon Iff stories to most of the conventions of the genre but that is balanced by Simon’s attention to the psychological motivations of crime, even if those psychological motivations often turn out to be bizarre and unlikely.

Crowley buffs will of course enjoy this collection.

The Simon Iff stories (and this collection includes all twenty-three) are unusual but they are  fairly entertaining although Crowley is best enjoyed in small doses. Definitely off-beat and worth a look.

Doc Savage: Land of Terror

Doc Savage first saw the light of day in the early 1930s and appeared in hundreds of books as well as various other media. Most appeared under the name Kenneth Robeson but the main writer was Lester Dent, although other writers contributed to the series. Land of Terror, published in 1933, was one of the early titles written by Dent. In this adventure Doc Savage gets to battle dinosaurs!

A famous scientist, who happens to be a friend of Doc Savage’s, is murdered. All that is left of his body is his right arm. Doc realises immediately that he is dealing with some fiendish new weapon. His hunt for the killers, and for the diabolical criminal mastermind behind them, will lead him to an island near New Zealand. The island is a gigantic volcano with an immense crater. Inside the crater is a lost world of dinosaurs!

There’s all the action you expect from this pulp adventure series, with an alarmingly high body count. Doc and his team of five hand-picked assistants will have their work cut out for them. Their enemies are dangerous enough but this time they also have to avoid becoming dinner for a hungry tyrannosaurus and fend off attacks from flocks of pterodactyls.

If dinosaurs aren’t even for you there’s also a pirate ship that serves as the bad guys’ headquarters. This naturally affords the opportunity for Doc to demonstrate his prowess with a cutlass.

The dinosaurs are actually a good idea. Doc is such a formidable adversary that there is a danger that you could end up thinking the villains don’t stand a chance, but at least the dinosaurs even the odds a bit.

Each of his assistants is an expert in some field, although Doc’s own knowledge embraces every field of science and medicine that can be imagined. Doc is of course also a physical marvel, a man whose athletic abilities defy belief. Doc is not quite a superhero, in the sense that all of his powers are in theory quite natural. They are simply developed to an extraordinary extent. In fact they’re developed to an extent that stretches credibility but that’s all pat of the fun of pulp fiction.

The style is as pulpy as you could wish.

It’s all tremendous fun. If you haven’t discovered Doc Savage then you’ve missed one of the classic pulp heroes.

Benefit Performance

Richard Sale had a successful Hollywood career as a screenwriter and to a lesser extent as a director. He wrote several crime novels and not surprisingly used Hollywood as a setting. Benefit Performance, published in 1946, is a particularly good example.

Kerry Garth is a big-time movie star. His career is going just great until the day his publicist and Friend Casey Jones informs him that he is dead. Kerry Garth was murdered the night before.

How can this be? The answer is fairly simple. Kerry wanted a holiday very badly, and he particularly wanted to avoid attending the premiere of his latest movie. So he persuaded his stand-in, Joshua Barnes, to take his place at the premiere. Barnes has such an uncanny resemblance to Kerry that he had no problem convincing people that he really was Kerry Garth. And at the premiere someone shot Joshua Barnes dead.

As Casey Jones explains to the shocked star, the bullet that killed Barnes was obviously meant for Kerry Garth. Someone wants Kerry Garth dead, and when that someone discovers that he or she has killed the wrong man they’ll be coming after Kerry. Casey tells Kerry that he would be well advised to vanish for a while. When you’re a famous movie star disappearing is not that easy, but in this case it should be very easy indeed. All Kerry has to do is to pretend he is Joshua Barnes. Since Joshua Barnes had no difficult in passing for Kerry, Kerry should have equally little difficulty in passing for Barnes.

So far so good, but then Kerry Garth makes an unpleasant discovery. John Barnes was not exactly a nice guy. In fact he was such a swine that there are any number of people who would like to see him dead. Including a racketeer to whom Barnes owes ten grand. Kerry has taken on the identity of a man with many dangerous enemies.

He also discovers that Barnes was something of a ladies’ man. He’s been having affairs with many women, including one affair with a married woman that was likely to end in murder. To avoid being murdered Kerry has now put himself in a position where he seems very likely to become involved with a quite different murder. Or possibly several.

It’s a clever plot and Sale handles it with great skill. He really puts his hero through the mill as Kerry Garth’s impersonation of his stand-in almost becomes much too successful.

Sale gives us a colourful cast of supporting characters. Until quite close to the end there are numerous possibilities as the murderer of Joshua Barnes but none appears to be especially likely. This is not really a crime novel in which a detective plays a major role. Detective-Lieutenant Shane Harker will play his part but for the most part Kerry Garth is left to solve the mystery on his own. He certainly has a strong incentive to solve it since his life depends on it.

The Hollywood background is great fun and Sale clearly enjoys writing about that world. He shows us the glamour, and the emptiness and heartache that so often lurks beneath the surface.

A fast-paced and thoroughly enjoyable murder mystery, Highly recommended.

The Iron Pirate

Max Pemberton’s adventure novel The Iron Pirate was a major bestseller in the 1890s. It is a pirate tale, but an unconventional one.

Sir Max Pemberton (1863-1950) was a journalist and novelist and was a noted dandy. He wrote crime fiction as well as tales of adventure and was for a time the editor of a boys’ magazine.

The novel starts with a chance meeting, a meeting that is perhaps not as random as it seems. Mark Strong is a wealthy young man, or at least he had been a wealthy young man. At the age of 25 he has run through most of his inheritance. He meets a man named Martin Hall. Hall appears to be something of a fool but appearances are deceptive. Hall is no fool, although he is certainly engaged in a very risky undertaking. He believes he is close to success but if he fails it will mean his death. He leaves some papers with Mark, with instructions to open them in the event of Hall’s death. He also asks Mark to meet him again in three days in Plymouth.

Most of what remains of Mark’s fortune is tied up in his yacht, the Celsis. He sets out in the yacht for Plymouth but what he finds, under horrifying circumstances, is Hall’s body.

The manuscript Hall had left with him tells a bizarre story. Hall had been a spy engaged in naval intelligence. At a shipyard in Italy he spotted a very striking ship. His instincts tell him he has uncovered something big, and his instincts are correct. The unnamed ship (we never do discover its name) is owned by an American millionaire.

That a private individual should own a warship is unusual enough but this is a very extraordinary warship indeed. It’s immensely well-armoured due to its construction from a very rare and expensive alloy, it’s well-armed, but most significantly it is powered by gas rather than coal. And it is fast. In fact it’s the fastest warship afloat, and being powered by gas it is much less dependent on coaling stations than the average warship of the 1890s. Why would a millionaire have such a ship built for him? The reason is simple. The owner, Captain Black, is a pirate.

The great days of piracy are over, but Captain Black believes he can bring them back. No warship can catch his ship.

Mark Strong now takes on Martin Hall’s mission, to track Captain Black and his mysterious ship to their lair. When he finds the pirate he discovers that things are not as straightforward as he’d thought.

This is Victorian adventure at its best, with a dash of science fiction as well - there’s some wonderful techno-babble about Captain Black’s ship (which will delight steampunk fans). There’s also a surprising level of violence, some of it rather grisly.

Captain Black is the villain but he becomes a sort of anti-hero. Even Mark Strong, repelled though he is by the cruelty and casual violence of the pirates, is strangely drawn to Captain Black. And of course the pirate has a secret that explains his strange choice of career. You might expect the villain in a Victorian adventure tale to be a simplistic villain straight out of melodrama but that’s not the case here.

There’s plenty of action, there are sea battles, there’s everything you could want in an adventure novel. Highly entertaining. Recommended.

Headed for a Hearse

Headed for a Hearse, published in 1935, was the second of five crime novels featuring private detective William Crane written by Jonathan Latimer (1906-1983). Latimer would go on to write some of the classic film noir screenplays, including The Glass Key, The Big Clock, Night Has a Thousand Eyes and The Unholy Wife.

Latimer is regarded as being a member of the hard-boiled school of crime writing, but Headed for a Hearse is in many ways rather uncharacteristic of that school. The style is hard-boiled, but combined with generous helpings of humour. And as far as content is concerned this is pure golden age detective fiction, with the typically convoluted and ingenious plot and the obligatory ending in which the detective explains the mystery.  

Headed for a Hearse opens on Death Row, with three men facing execution in a week’s time. They are an odd assortment of convicted murderers - Vachera is a psycho sex killer, Connors is a labour racketeer while Robert Westland is a wealthy stockbroker and a prominent member of Chicago society convicted of killing his wife. Westland had been resigned to his execution, but now he’s changed his mind. He’s decided he wants to live.

He manages to persuade the warden to let him contact a new attorney, an experienced criminal lawyer and an old crony of Connors. And he manages to persuade this lawyer, Charlie Finklestein, not only that he is innocent but that there is a chance of proving his innocence. It’s a very slim chance, but the case appeals to Finklestein. The lawyer realises that the only way to save his client is by finding the real murderer, and to do this he calls on the services of private detective William Crane and his assistant, ‘Doc’ Williams. Crane has just six days to solve the case.

In standard golden age detective story style there are half a dozen possible suspects, there are alibis that may or may not turn out to be breakable and the timing of the murder turns out to be crucial. And more than that, this is a classic locked-room mystery. 

William Crane is a delightful detective hero. He provides most of the story’s considerable comic elements whilst still remaining a fairly hard-boiled detective. In the course of attempting to solve the case Crane will consume prodigious quantities of alcohol, but as he explains at the end there’s nothing like a hangover for encouraging clear logical thinking.

Latimer manages the trick of combining humour with hard-boiled style surprisingly well. 

Highly entertaining and recommended.

The Shadow on the Blind and Other Stories

Wordsworth’s The Shadow on the Blind and Other Stories actually comprises two short stories collections by two different authors - Louisa Baldwin’s The Shadow on the Blind and Other Stories and Lettice Galbraith’s The Trainer’s Ghost and Other Stories.

Louisa Baldwin (1845-1925) was the mother of Stanley Baldwin, who served as Prime Minister of Britain on three occasions during the 1920s and 1930s. She was also Rudyard Kipling’s aunt. Louisa Baldwin was a novelist and poet.

Her collection is a fairly routine set of ghost stories. Some are quite good, some are mediocre, and none reach any great heights. The Weird of the Walfords, The Uncanny Bairn and Many Waters Cannot Quench Love are perhaps the strongest stories. Most of her tales are fairly predictable although quite competently written and reasonably atmospheric. For those who simply cannot get enough Victorian ghost stories they provide adequate if not thrilling entertainment.

Lettice Galbraith is a rather mysterious figure. She wrote a novel and a number of short stories during the mid-1890s and then promptly disappeared from the literary stage.

Galbraith’s stories are to my mind somewhat more interesting than Louisa Baldwin’s. They’re also mostly fairly conventional but on occasions they offer us something slightly more interesting.

The Case of Lady Lukestan hinges on the vexed legal question - can a jury be persuaded to accept evidence from a dead man? This is an exceptionally interesting story, the strongest in the whole book. In The Ghost in the Chair a mining company is saved from ruin by a man who is already dead.

Revenge is the theme that seems to run through most of her stories. Her ghosts are usually seeking some kind of redress for a wrong done to them. In some cases they wreak their revenge on the guilty; in others it is the innocent who suffer.

The Trainer’s Ghost and Other Stories is a serviceable if short collection that fans of the ghost story will find it worthwhile to seek out.

The book as a whole is not one of Wordsworth’s best offerings but it is, like all their books, very cheaply priced and there are a few stories here that are probably enough to justify the purchase price.

The Duke of York’s Steps

Henry Wade’s The Duke of York’s Steps was published in 1929 and it’s a fine example of the golden age detective tale.

A wealthy banker, Sir Garth Fratten, dies suddenly on The Duke of York’s Steps in London. Sir Garth had an aneurism and his death comes as no surprise to his doctor. Sir Garth had had a very minor accident (a man had jostled him) and his doctor is satisfied that even a fairly mild shock such as that would have been more than enough to cause the aneurism to burst. He unhesitatingly makes out the death certificate stating that Sir Garth died of natural causes. There are no suspicious circumstances and it all seems so straightforward that there is not even an inquest.

Despite this Fratten’s daughter Inez is not entirely satisfied. She places an advertisement in the London newspapers, seeing the man who had stumbled into her father shortly before his death. The advertisement comes to the attention of the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. He decides the matter should be looked into, purely as a matter of routine. He is in fact quite convinced that there is no question of foul play in Fratten’s death, but he assigns Inspector John Poole to make a few inquiries.

Poole soon realises that there is at least one person with a very strong motive for murdering Sir Garth. There are also some financial affairs connected with the deceased banker that seem worth looking into. Poole becomes more and more convinced that this is a case of murder, but the circumstances of Fratten’s death seem to make that impossible. Nonetheless Poole is now very interested.

It becomes apparent that there are in fact several people with strong motives. But Poole still cannot discover any possible means by which the banker could have been murdered.

Needless to say Poole does eventually uncover the evidence he needs. His investigation leads him into a world of high finance where things are not as they seem, and a sordid world in which rich young men make fools of themselves over chorus girls.

This novel boasts a very ingenious murder method indeed. This is in fact one of the strongest points in the book’s favour.

Inspector Poole is something of an intellectual, at least by the standards of official police detectives, having been educated at Oxford. After university he had been called to the bar and spent a year practising as a barrister before joining the Metropolitan Police. Poole is very ambitious, his aim being nothing less than to become Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. Such a position requires broader experience than would usually be gained by a straightforward police career. His immediate superior is rather sceptical of Poole’s abilities.

Despite his Oxford education Poole is not in the style of aristocratic detectives like Lord Peter Wimsey. His father was a country doctor and he comes across as a reasonably straightforward sort of person, educated but not one to parade his education to any degree. He’s a likeable and interesting enough detective hero.

Henry Wade was the pseudonym adopted by Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, 6th Baronet (1887-1969). He wrote quite a few mysteries between the late 1920s and the late 1950s including seven Inspector Poole novels and was a founding member of the Detection Club.

The Duke of York’s Steps is a classic golden age detective story. The plot stretches credibility but outrageously intricate plotting part is part of the charm of this school of crime fiction. Highly entertaining and recommended.