Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 1 (2013)

Darkness, Mist and Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper: Volume 1  (2013) by Basil Copper, edited by Stephen Jones.

Once he turned to fiction writing in his late 30's, Basil Copper was pretty much a professional's professional. He wrote a lot of stories of horror and the weird, collected here in their entirety in three thick paperbacks by PS Publishing. He also wrote over 50 hard-boiled detective novels set in a Los Angeles he never visited in real life, non-fiction books, and several continuations of August Derleth's Holmes pastiche, Solar Pons. Like I said, a professional writer.

And as a professional writer who wasn't a great writer, he's a good study for aspiring writers -- especially those who start publishing relatively late. Copper may not be great, but he wrote several great stories and many that were very good. Keep plugging!

This first paperback volume covers roughly the first 15 years of his fiction-writing career.

• Introduction  by Stephen Jones.
• The Spider (1964): Creepy little gem involving arachnophobia.
• Camera Obscura (1965): Excellent period piece with more than a touch of Ray Bradbury. Faithfully adapted for Night Gallery.
• The Janissaries of Emilion (1967): One of Copper's most-anthologized works is a study in dreams and paranoia. You'll see the ending coming, but the details and vaguely dream-like quality of the story make it stand out.
• The Cave (1967): A fine ghost story 'recounted' in the tranquility of a men's club. The story owes a debt to M.R. James, as it riffs at the end on a bit from James' "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook."
• The Grey House (1967): The forgettable title is the only problem with this slow-building tale of misguided home ownership. Builds to a near-Grand Guignol finale with a touch of Jules de Grandin -- which is to say, flame-throwers versus the living dead!
• Old Mrs. Cartwright (1967): Almost reads as if Copper were riffing on Roald Dahl in this cruel tale of an old aunt and her disturbing young nephew at the zoo.
• Charon (1967): Less Bradburyesque than Serlingesque -- as in, a gentle fantasy that could have been an episode of The Twilight Zone.
• The Great Vore (1967): A delightful romp that's a self-aware homage to Sherlock Holmes that also works as a satire of detective stories.
• The Academy of Pain (1968): Cruel little story goes exactly where you expect, unpleasantly.
• Doctor Porthos (1968): A deft revisionist vampire tale.
• Archives of the Dead (1968): Solid tale of witchcraft in the modern world.
• Amber Print (1968): A nice horror piece about movie obsessives and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
• Out of the Fog (1970): The first of what I think of as Copper's 'Paul Harvey' pieces, in which the story builds to reveal that it's about a real, historical personage. This one at least has a nice twist.
• The House by the Tarn (1971): Straightforward, mysterious horror in the British countryside features another bad house.
• The Knocker at the Portico (1971): Psychological horror and obsession collide.
• The Second Passenger (1973): Over-long supernatural revenge piece seems like Copper's rewriting of A Christmas Carol at points.
• The Recompensing of Albano Pizar (1973): Refined tale of revenge with a bloody climax.
• The Gossips (1973): Chilling, very much M.R. Jamesian ghost story about a trio of very unpleasant Italian statues.
• A Very Pleasant Fellow (1973): A bit of a science-fictiony dud that could have been published in 1913.
• A Message from the Stars (1977): Twist is telegraphed in an unconvincing story about alien invasion.
• Cry Wolf (1974): Weak twist story involving werewolves.
• The Trodes (1975): See "A Message from the Stars."
• Dust to Dust (1976): Solid but unspectacular ghost story involving messages from the dead written in the dust on a windowsill. 

Overall: The strongest of the three Copper Collected volumes has a few duds -- though all of them solidly written -- and many greats. The volume also offers Copper at his most chameleonic as the stories riff on a number of prominent antecedents, most notably the great English ghost-story writer M.R. James. Highly recommended.

Not After Nightfall by Basil Copper (1967)

Not After Nightfall by Basil Copper, containing the following stories: "The Spider", "Camera Obscura", "The Cave", "The Grey House", "Old Mrs. Cartwright", "Charon", "The Great Vore", and "The Janissaries of Emilion" (Collected 1967): Basil Copper, who just died in the past year, was a stand-out British writer of horror and detective stories (primarily the Solar Pons series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches in the latter category) for 50 years.

This is Copper's first collection, and it contains several stand-outs, though none of the stories moves particularly far into the neo-Lovecraftian cosmic horror he would practice later in his career that would lead to such indispensable works as The Great White Space and "Shaft Number 247." Instead, Copper's first collection reminds me of a variety of different writers at certain points, though it also establishes Copper's gift for building suspense and mystery through the patient and increasingly unnerving accumulation of detail.

"The Great Vore" gives us a Holmesian occult investigator, while "Old Mrs. Cartwright" nicely evokes the nasty horror shorts of Saki. The cool Copper tone is already evident, though later stories would seem more of a totality and less suggestive of homage ("Charon", for example, reads like a British version of a gentle Bradbury fantasy or even a Twilight Zone episode).

"The Great Vore" is tense and detail-packed as it follows Professor Kane's attempts to thwart the murderous operations of an occult cult in Great Britain some time in the middle of the 20th century. "The Grey House" is the story most reminiscent of LeFanu, while "The Cave" suggests some of Algernon Blackwood's traveller's horrors of wandering into dark places in Europe.

"Camera Obscura," an interesting fantasy of justice, was filmed for the 1960's TV show Night Gallery. "The Janissaries of Emilion" is reminiscent of some of Lord Dunsany's and Lovecraft's dream stories, but it achieves its own nasty bit of unsettling business through the patient accumulation of detail -- it's not 'dreamy' but rather very specifically described. Really a very fine first collection of stories. Recommended.

The Mighty Matheson

The Shores of Space by Richard Matheson, containing "Being," "Pattern For Survival," "Steel," "The Test," "Clothes Make The Man," "Blood Son," "Trespass," "When Day Is Dun," "The Curious Child," "The Funeral," "The Last Day," "Little Girl Lost," and "The Doll That Does Everything" (1957): Thanks to his own television and movie work, and adaptations of his stories for those media by him and others, and all the parodies and homages and outright steals of his ideas by the makers of movies and TV shows, Richard Matheson has become one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century when it comes to popular culture. And he's still alive. It's a remarkable career, but it all started with the printed page, and an astonishing and prolific run of stories and novels in the 1950's and early 1960's, a time period from which this collection hails.

　
I suppose Matheson's closest 'lookalike' is Robert Bloch, about ten years older but with a similar pedigree in several media. Bloch's most famous achievement was writing the novel from which Alfred Hitchcock adapted Psycho. Matheson's biggest moment is a bit harder to pin down. The panicky airline passenger played by William Shatner in the Twilight Zone series and John Lithgow in the 1983 TZ movie? That's Matheson's creation. Recent movies based in whole or in part on Matheson's stories and novels include I am Legend, Real Steel, and The Box.

　
His novella "Duel" supplied pretty much a shot-by-shot blueprint for his own screenplay for Steven Spielberg's TV-movie breakthrough of the same name; his story "Little Girl Lost", adapted for Rod Serling's Night Gallery, supplied Spielberg's Poltergeist with its girl who vanished in her own living room. His novel The Shrinking Man spawned two adaptations; the novel I am Legend spawned three official ones and at least one acknowledged unofficial one (Night of the Living Dead) making Matheson the grandfather of the entire zombie genre and of the scientifically plausible vampire sub-genre).

　
The stories here show Matheson in solid, genre-crossing form. Science-fictional horror occurs in "Being" and "Trespass"; nuclear apocalypse spawns both satire ("When Day is Dun", "Pattern for Survival") and elegy ("The Last Day"); at least four stories here would be adapted at least once for television and/or movies ("Steel", "Blood Son" (itself suggesting an unacknowledged source for George Romero's vampire film Martin), "The Funeral" and "Little Girl Lost."

Matheson established his plain prose style, shot through with startling images and turns of phrase, pretty early, but it was his ability to find new horrors, and new combinations of horrors, thrills and genre concepts, that made him so invaluable -- he helped firmly establish the American supernatural tale both in terms of pure science fiction and in terms of finding new ways to present old horrors such as vampires and werewolves and haunted houses. And he could be funny, as he is here in "When Day is Dun", "Pattern For Survival" and "The Funeral." A brilliant, influential writer caught at the prolific beginning of a half-century career. Highly recommended.