Leading up to Halloween I finally picked up my 1998 Ash-Tree Press edition of Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer by Alice and Claude Askew and read through. A solid set of eight British occult detective tales, all published in two months — July and August 1914 — one installment per issue in The Weekly Tale-Teller.
The investigations of Aylmer Vance and his associate Dexter are smoothly written, with great touches of atmosphere. The uncanny threats faced are in no wise equal to those William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder encounters, and not as much fun as M.P. Dare’s Unholy Relics from 1947, in which the bachelor historians Gregory Wayne and Alan Granville stumble into some truly wild-ass shit. Dare’s tales are too much for many fans of the traditional ghost story, perhaps symbolized in the 1997 Ash-Tree reprint of Relics. For the frontis portrait of the author the least bizarre picture of Dare they could find shows him leaning against a fence clad only in something like a gold cloth Speedo.
And on the quieter side of ghost series I much, much prefer The Stoneground Ghost Tales by E.G. Swain from 1912, featuring the Reverend Roland Bachel and his haunted parish.
The Askews were only one pair of a number of prolific husband-and-wife writing teams of their era. In the Ash-Tree edition, the introduction by Jack Adrian gives a great summary of their lives and works.
(Adrian, one of those Brit guys like Richard Dalby and Hugh Lamb, who spent decades delving into old periodicals to dig up this stuff — me, I can barely find various reviews for use in my next eBook of selected essays and reviews, and I was there when they came out and have copies in my files.)
The Askews had a more dramatic end than most: the ship they were on was sunk by a torpedo in 1917 during The Great War.
