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Reviews
August 2020
MIST And Other Ghost Stories reviewed on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=GMhA4Uu2mv4
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Richmal Crompton is best known for her popular William books, frequently reprinted, published 1919-70; amusing tales for children, the 38 titles display an accomplished adult sophistication in terms of plotting, characterisation, dialogue and style; witty satires on English middle class village life in the mid twentieth century, with echoes of an author she admired, Jane Austen. Her keen insight into social mores is apparent in her novels, numbering an astonishing 41; and in her short stories, written for monthly periodicals like Hutchinson’s Magazine, appearing in nine collections. Crompton had a lifelong interest in the supernatural but used the subject directly in only two books: The House (1926), issued in America as Dread Dwelling, a haunted house novel; and the short story collection. Mist & Other Ghost Stories (1928). The macabre and ghostly surfaces, often indirectly, in her other writing, including the William books. ‘William’s Midsummer Eve’ uses the motif of an avenging scarecrow; ‘A Witch in Time’, a witch and her black cat familiar; ‘William and the Ancient Souls’, reincarnation and evil spirits; and two stories concern a ghost, another an eastern curse. While such motifs are employed as parody, they display the author’s familiarity with genre conventions, and a feel for the mysterious and macabre (not unlike, say, Daphne du Maurier). Only one of the stories in Mist has ever been reprinted, ‘Rosalind’, in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories Vol. II (ed. Richard Dalby, 1991). Anyone liking that tale will not be disappointed, as all the stories in Mist are of a similar standard. Considering her past popularity, other than the William books, Crompton’s titles are surprisingly scarce; possibly the rarest is Mist. Dalby notes that, since acquiring a copy long ago, he has never seen another despite decades of collecting. In the past 10 years I have seen only one offered for sale: at $1000 by supernatural fiction dealer, L.W. Currey of New York State; it sold immediately. Almost as rare is The House/Dread Dwelling, especially the British edition, which I have never heard of anyone finding. The first reprinting since 1928 of Mist is thus a welcome achievement.
Mary Cadogan in her fine biography. The Woman Behind William: a Life of Richmal Crompton (1986), notes the author’s fascination with the motif of the macabre house. It surfaces in the William books, and in her novels, such as Frost at Morning (1950), which has a sinister room; an idea also present in her first novel. The Innermost Room, where the protagonist gazes into ‘nightmare depths beneath the clear calm surface of life’. As Dalby states in his perceptive introduction to Mist, the 13 supernatural tales also convey a strong sense of ‘nightmare depths’. Country houses feature frequently in Mist as settings for supernatural phenomena: Bletchleys in ‘The Oak Tree’, where an ancient tree exhibits strange properties; Tallis Court, location for a Pan-inspired fantasy, ‘Strange’; Denvers in ‘The Bronze Statuette’; and the eponymously titled ‘Marlowes’ and ‘The Haunting of Greenways’. Another story is ‘The House Behind the Wood’, and there is a tale, ‘The Sisters’, set in a boarding school called ‘Fairlands’. Crompton brings to her natural scenes the same skill as to her houses. Typically in her stories, young people, often in romantic contexts, find themselves caught up in disturbing episodes that subvert their cosy middle class mores. Crompton uses an eclectic range of motifs, including ghosts, nature spirits, possession and hypnotism, testifying to her interest in the field; but although she employs themes which might tend towards cliche, a commendable feature is the way she develops her narratives in counter-intuitive directions; thus we have stories that both satisfy our liking for genre convention and offer a fresh, original spin. Her plotting is excellent (as it is in William) and the same applies to her characters. While they may appear dated to contemporary readers, they accurately portray a vanished society, middle class England between the Wars; while the underlying psychology is as relevant as ever; and there is a sense of humour that by contrast underscores the macabre, adding credibility; here as in all her writing Crompton displays shrewd understating of the human condition. Underpinning her talent as a story-teller, indeed the bedrock of her success, is style. Though the stories are short and slight, they have a notable subtlety. Above all they are an enjoyable read, a welcome reminder of the golden age of the ghost story.
From A GHOSTLY COMPANY Newsletter 52, Winter 2015 (aghostlycompany.org.uk)
Review by Peter Bell (Author of two fine collections of mystical, mysterious and magical tales: Strange Epiphanies and A Certain Slant of Light).
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Kindle edition customer review:
“I
came across this collection by Richmal Crompton, whose ‘William’ books
I had loved as a child. So I purchased this book more out of curiosity
than anything else. What a gem of a book! I think some of these stories
are comparable with those of E.F. Benson and M.R. James. They are of
the period in which they were written, between the wars, and are gently
disturbing and eerie. They are worth a read and I am so pleased to have
found them. If you enjoy Benson and James you will enjoy these stories.” — Beeswax on 10 October 2015
An extract from a review by Mark Andresen in The Pan Review:
“If the content appears over-familiar in 2015,
derivative they are not. Most admirable in these tales, from a world of
middle-class cosiness, is the emotional honesty and lack of faux
sentiment in the best. Their perspective, from a stoic, independent woman, adds
a modernity in the narrative voices strengthening what might otherwise have
solely survived as period charm alone. There may be a sameness in each, but
subjective imagination can easily compensate for what is left out. The simple
exposition and crisp matter-of-factness of Crompton’s prose-style – oddly
reminiscent of the ‘Williams’ – is another of those less-is-more object lessons
to the rest of us on how to write today. (At least for the first draft). Those
presuming her out-of-date should take a second look.”
(To be transported to read
the full review please click here)
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A
review in The Daily Telegraph by Tim Martin
One
wouldn’t necessarily peg Richmal Crompton
(1890-1969) as a keen writer of ghost stories, not least because of the
short
shrift that spiritualism and the supernatural got in her Just William
series of
children’s books. In one memorable sequence from More
William (1922),
the
11-year-old urchin decides to do a good turn for his credulous Cousin
Mildred,
an occult dabbler who longs for “some psychic revelation” during her
short stay
with the family. After midnight, then, William creeps helpfully into
her
bedroom, dons a bedsheet and staggers from the shadows:
“Oh,
speak!” pleaded Cousin Mildred.
Evidently
speech was a necessary part of this performance. William
wondered whether ghosts spoke English or a language of their own. He
inclined
to the latter view and nobly took the plunge.
“Honk.
Yonk. Ponk,” he said, firmly.
Cousin
Mildred gasped in wonder.
“Oh,
explain,” she pleaded, ardently. “Explain in our poor human speech.
Some message –”
But perhaps it takes an enthusiast to know
one.
Crompton seems to have felt her William stories to have been potboilers
–
boiling 12 million copies in the UK alone – and
preferred to be judged by her books
for adults. These included THE HOUSE, a novel about a haunted mansion,
and a
collection of ghost stories called MIST which went through a single
edition in
1928 and has become impossibly rare on the second-hand market. Now the
small
Sundial Press, which publishes work by such forgotten talents as A N L
Munby, T F Powys and
David Garnett, is bringing it back to life (MIST and Other Ghost Stories, £17.50).
Crompton’s stories are
more restrained and less
deliberately invasive than the work of hardened old shockers such as M R James,
Algernon Blackwood or Arthur Machen, but they’re all interesting and
one or two
are excellent. In “Strange”, a mysterious, beautiful young man turns up
at a
country house and bewitches everyone, including the narrator’s
girlfriend, with
his “curious long eyes” and his deft touch on the Pan pipes. In “Harry
Lorimer”, a man visiting his friend in the country discovers, to his
horror,
that his host appears to have had a soul transplant. One of the book’s
most
uneasy moments comes with the odd rupture of social custom that ensues, as the men sit talking by the fire late at night:
“I did not for some time realise the trend of
his
conversation. It was like going down a slope that is so gradual that
one is
down in a valley before one realises that there has been a descent at
all.
Quite suddenly I realised that he was talking the most unimaginable
filth. He seemed
to savour all the obscenities he touched on lingeringly like an
epicure.”
Sundial is also
publishing FROM ANOTHER WORLD and Other Ghost Stories, which selects a number of
ghost stories by Rosemary Timperley
(1920-1988). Timperley was an intensely prolific novelist and editor,
but
published her supernatural stories only in magazines, papers and
anthologies.
Roald Dahl was so impressed by them that he included her twice in his
1983
Macmillan anthology of spooky tales, but there has not, until now, been
any
collection of her work in the genre . . .
© Tim Martin
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