Not After Midnight ~ Daphne du Maurier

I don't often write about the same author in one post after another, but I'm on a Daphne du Maurier kick at the moment, so I'm going straight from The Apple Tree to Not After Midnight (which was published in the States as Don't Look Now). 

Not After Midnight was first published in the UK by Victor Gollancz Ltd. in 1971, with a dust jacket illustrated by Flavia Tower, du Maurier's daughter. The collection contains five tales: Don't Look Now, Not After Midnight, A Border-Line Case, The Way of the Cross, The Breakthrough.

'Don't Look Now' is the most famous story of the collection, having been made into an excellent film, starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, in 1973. John and Laura are on holiday in Venice, trying to come to terms with the death of their five-year-old daughter, Christine. They are having dinner in a restaurant when they encounter a pair of elderly twins, one of whom is blind and psychic. The psychic twin tells Laura that she can see little Christine, and later issues a warning that Laura and her husband must leave Venice at once because there is danger for them if they stay. Receiving news that their son is in hospital, Laura immediately books a flight back to England to be with him, leaving John to drive their car back home. But following his wife's departure, John is convinced that he has seen her in Venice with the twins, and a search for her ensues.

The narrator of 'Not After Midnight', Timothy Grey, is a rather timid English schoolmaster and amateur artist. He's on a solo painting holiday in Crete, hoping to capture the Aegean seascape on canvas, when he encounters a strange American couple, the Stolls. Having surrendered to his own curiosity, Grey follows the odd pair and ends up receiving an invitation to visit the Americans in their chalet... but not after midnight.

'A Border-Line Case', which has no supernatural element, is the one tale in this collection that I'm not all that keen on. Shelagh Money, her father having just died suddenly, sets off for Ireland to find an old friend of his, Commander Nicolas Barry. Having arrived at a village near Barry's home, she finds herself being forcibly escorted to the island on which he lives as a recluse. It starts out well, but becomes too predictable, and though I know that some readers do find it to be filled with tension and atmosphere, I am not one of them.

'The Way of the Cross', like 'A Border-Line Case', has no supernatural element. It concerns Rev. Edward Babcock and a group of eight pilgrims on a twenty-four hour excursion from Haifa to Jerusalem. Each one, aside from the youngest member of the group, suffers some form of humiliation and has a dreadful time.

The narrator of 'The Breakthrough', Stephen Saunders, is transferred to Saxmere, a facility on the east coast, to assist with the research of James MacLean and his small team. MacLean is trying to tap Force Six, as he calls it, the untapped source of energy within all of us that awaits release. But he wants to tap it at the point of death, to extract the vital spark - what some call the soul - and use it for the benefit of the living.

I found this collection to be a bit of a mixed bag. 'Don't Look Now' is, for me, the best story in it; 'A Border-Line Case' and 'The Way of the Cross' are the weakest. A fine copy of Not After Midnight, complete with a fine dust jacket, costs about £70 at the moment (approx. $105). There's a modern paperback version, entitled Don't Look Now and Other Stories, published by Penguin, and that costs £9.98. And there's a Virago Modern Classics Kindle edition for £8.99.

The Apple Tree ~ Daphne du Maurier

Dame Daphne du Maurier (1907~1989), granddaughter of the artist and writer George du Maurier, and daughter of Gerald du Maurier, the most famous actor-manager of his day, began writing short stories in her early twenties. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931. She is best known, and best loved, for her three novels Jamaica Inn (which immortalised an actual inn on Cornwall's Bodmin Moor), Frenchman's Creek and Rebecca. Daphne du Maurier was a very private person, but you can watch a rare interview with her at the BBC web site.

The Apple Tree was first published by Victor Gollancz Ltd. in 1952. It contains six tales: 'Monte Verità', 'The Birds', 'The Apple Tree', 'The Little Photographer', 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger', and 'The Old Man'.

I won't go into detail about 'Monte Verità', as it's difficult to say much at all without giving too much away. It is a haunting tale about the quest for truth... a fantasy, the mystery at the centre of which is never explained to the reader. It concerns a love triangle between two men and one woman: the unnamed bachelor narrator, his friend Victor, and Victor's beautiful wife, Anna, who appears to possess unearthly qualities. The narrator begins his story by disclosing the outcome of events, then we travel back to the run up to the First World War, to Victor's marriage to Anna, their subsequent journey to Monte Verità, The Mountain of Truth, and Anna's disappearance when she climbs to the summit alone to fulfil her destiny. Apparently, Victor Gollancz was bewildered by this tale and insisted that the ending be changed.*

'The Birds' is the most well-known of the tales in this book, because it was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1963. But the movie and the original story, aside from being about birds attacking people, have little in common. Apparently, du Maurier didn't like Hitchcock's adaptation, in which he transported the tale from the cold, bleak English coastline to a Californian setting, and transformed du Maurier's farmers into polished city folk.

Du Maurier's tale takes place in winter in an isolated spot on the Cornish coast. In it, Nat Hocken, who was injured during the war, works part time on a farm. During his lunch break, he sits on the cliff's edge and watches the birds. He understands the rhythm and ritual of their lives, and he knows when there's something not quite right about that ritual. An east wind has turned the weather bitterly cold, and brought with it a change in the birds' behaviour. Finches and robins, sparrows, gulls and birds of prey... 'birds that by nature's law kept to their own flock and their own territory', seeming to respond to each turn of the tide, have joined together in their urge for battle, and Nat and his family find themselves prisoners in their small cottage, boarded in and under relentless attack, and cut off from the rest of the country. With the birds persistent and relentless, drawing back with every retreating tide, then recommencing battle with a vengeance on each returning one, there is an ominous rhythm to Du Maurier's tale that Hitchcock's film just doesn't have.

In 'The Apple Tree', a recent widower is enjoying his new found freedom, following the death of his wife Midge, whose purpose in life, according to him, was to put a blight on everything. But he begins to believe that one of his apple trees resembles her, with its 'martyred bent position' and 'stooping top', and the tree begins to disgust him as much as his late wife did. Then, after years of being barren and presumed almost dead, the tree begins to sprout buds, and then fruit. And as the tree flourishes, his hatred for it grows, until he becomes obsessed with its destruction.

In 'The Little Photographer', a wealthy and extremely conceited French Marquise, on holiday with her children but without her husband, fantasises about having a meaningless fling with a stranger. She begins an affair with a crippled photographer, toying with his genuine devotion to her whilst her own emotions remain entirely untouched. Quickly bored with the arrangement, she begins to torment the photographer in order to recapture the excitement she felt at the outset of her little adventure. But there are consequences when you treat a person cruelly, as the cold-hearted Marquise discovers.

The narrator of 'Kiss Me Again, Stranger', a shy car mechanic who's never had any real interest in girls, or much experience with them for that matter, takes a fancy to an attractive usherette when he goes to the pictures one evening. He follows her when she leaves work, daydreaming about making her his steady girlfriend, but there's more to the quiet young woman than meets the eye. There's no supernatural element to this tale, but it's a creepy little gem all the same.

The narrator of 'The Old Man' suspects his neighbour of having killed his own son. I usually have the ending of a story figured out long before I get to it, but this one took me completely by surprise.

I love this collection of stories. 'Monte Verità' is probably the best of them, but if I were to pick a personal favourite I think it would be 'The Apple Tree'. Ask me next week and I'll probably change my mind, but I do tend to go back to that tale over and over again. It's certainly a collection not to be missed.

A fine copy of The Apple Tree, complete with its lovely dust jacket, costs about £200 at the moment (approx. $300). There's a Virago paperback, The Birds and Other Stories, priced at £8.99, and that contains all the tales from The Apple Tree. There's also a Kindle version by Virago for just over four pounds.

* See Margaret Forster's Daphne Du Maurier: The Secret Life of the Renowned Storyteller (1993).

Ghosts from the Mist of Time ~ R. Chetwynd-Hayes

Ronald Henry Glynn Chetwynd-Hayes (1919~2001) was born in Isleworth, Middlesex, the son of Henry Chetwynd-Hayes (a Master Sergeant and cinema manager) and May Rose Cooper. He attended Hanworth Council School, and until 1973 he worked as a furniture showroom manager in Berkeley Street, London. He grew up a film fan and appeared as an extra in a few films, including Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). His first published short story was 'The Empty Grave', which appeared in Reveille in 1953. His first novel, The Man from the Bomb, was published six years later. He went on to write around two hundred short stories and a dozen novels, and his books were always in demand at lending libraries.

A number of Chetwynd-Hayes' short story collections and anthologies edited by him were published by William Kimber & Co. during the 1970s and 1980s. Kimber published Ghosts from the Mist of Time, with a dust jacket designed by Ionicus, in 1985. It contains seven tales: Time Check, The Wanderer, Prometheus Chained, Doppel-gänger, Cold Fingers, The Echo, Shona and the Water Horse.

The first story, 'Time Check', is set during the inter-war years. It's about five-year-old Rodney Winston, who is just starting Week School. He lives with Mrs Balcombe, who he calls Mumma, and her daughter Rose, who's a religious fanatic. Mrs Balcombe is paid to look after him, because his father ran off before he was born and his mother, who's 'a beautiful brainless butterfly', can't afford to keep him. But little Rodney is special, because he can see and hear things that haven't happened yet... tragic things.

'The Wanderer' is set in Clavering in 1665. Clavering Grange has always had its ghosts... the shades of those who haunted the place in life, who seem unable to detach themselves from it in death. But now it also has a wanderer - a ghost who does not belong, who is drawn to the Grange because of the tainted ground upon which it was built, and who wanders the planes of time only to bring disaster.

In 'Prometheus Chained', Stephen Markham is a writer of weird stories. It is 1984 and Markham is walking along a street when he stumbles and falls... and gets up someone else, in 2164, in a world where fiction has become reality.

In 'Doppelgänger', Matthew Bayswater, a rather famous writer, is driving home from a party when he spots his double at the doorway to an old-fashioned hardware shop. A couple of days later, he sees him again, standing against a gate in the vicinity of the house of Sir Henry Handel. But is double is thinner, down on his luck, and shabby... an unsuccessful, miserable mirror-ghost of the well-off author. And as he continues to appear, the line between reality and unreality begin to blur.

In 'Cold Fingers' Paul Etherington is an archaeology student who, in need of lodgings, answers an advertisement in the Comet, placed by the elderly Miss Partridge. The place seems ideal, and the rent is cheap, but during his first night in his new room he feels cold fingers against his throat... cold fingers that gradually tighten their grip.

In 'The Echo', Oliver and Anne, old friends who haven't seen each other for six years, meet by chance by the riverside. He invites her back to his musty old house, a place where words echo strangely, where 'Nothing can get out... Sound, energy, emotion.' He collapses after declaring his love for her, and she promises to return the following day. But Oliver has a secret... a sinister, deadly secret.

In 'Shona and the Water Horse', a tall young man turns up at the house of Reverend Angus Buchanan claiming to be the legendary Water Horse, and tells him that the devil walks the moor again and intends to take the whole Highland village that very night. The good reverend is having none of it... but then darkness falls, and the mist rolls in...

If I were to pick one of the stories as my favourite, it would have to be "Cold Fingers', partly because I like the humour in it. 'Doppelgänger' is the creepiest, but 'Prometheus Chained' comes a very close second. They're all very entertaining, and I do like Chetwynd-Hayes' sense of humour.

A fine copy of Ghosts from the Mist of Time goes for about £30 ($45) at the moment. But, as with all the Kimber-Ionicus books, it's not all that easy to get hold of one. They tend to turn up a bit dog-eared or as ex-library books.

I've put together a section all about the William Kimber books with jackets designed by Ionicus, and you can access it by clicking here.

B. M. Croker ~ A Photographic Portrait

I had just finished typing up 'Number Ninety' for my last post when I came across this photograph of the story's author, B. M. Croker. It was taken by F. J. Garrison, of 14 St George Gate, Doncaster. It is undated, but its creator, Francis John Garrison (b. 1861), appears to have moved to St George Gate in 1901, having previously worked at Sydney Studio in Goole. In old advertisements, F. J. Garrison described himself as a 'portrait, animal and landscape photographer', offering 'instantaneous portraits of children'. I think this portrait of Croker and her cute canine chum must have been taken between 1901 and 1910.