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These are the things that keep me awake on a hot summer day
I have begun re-reading Margery Allingham's Albert Campion mysteries for the first time since the editions we gave my mother to replace her previous collection drowned by a burst pipe were reprinted about fifteen to ten years ago. I had forgotten just how much more conventional and sensational the first few novels are than later experiments like the wartime espionage of Traitor's Purse (1941), the London noir of The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), the generational drama of The China Governess (1962), or the honest-to-God science fiction of The Mind Readers (1965), but in my eternal quest for the signposts of folk horror before it was a codified genre, I appreciate the following passage from Look to the Lady (1931):
They were unusually silent for the best part of the way but just before they entered the clearing Penny could contain her fears no longer.
"Professor," she said, "you know something. Tell me, you don't think this—phenomenon, I suppose you'd call it—is definitely supernatural?"
The old man did not answer her immediately.
"My dear young lady," he said at last, "if it turns out to be what I think it is, it's much more unpleasant than any ghost."
He offered no further explanation and she did not like to question him, but his words left a chill upon her, and the underlying horror which seems always to lurk somewhere beneath the flamboyant loveliness of a lonely English countryside in the height of summer, a presence of that mysterious dread, which the ancients called panic, had become startlingly apparent.
I had also forgotten that Campion on waking at half past four in the afternoon following an exciting night is told sternly by his ex-burglar manservant, "Pull yerself together. You remind me o' Buster Keaton when you're 'alf awake," which is a fascinating image in its own right and tantalizingly made me wonder—I advance this theory with a certain amount of self-skepticism—if there's either an error or an in-joke buried in this invocation of American silent comedians, because on no account could anyone call Keaton's face forgettable, but Harold Lloyd's was defined entirely by his horn-rimmed glasses.
They were unusually silent for the best part of the way but just before they entered the clearing Penny could contain her fears no longer.
"Professor," she said, "you know something. Tell me, you don't think this—phenomenon, I suppose you'd call it—is definitely supernatural?"
The old man did not answer her immediately.
"My dear young lady," he said at last, "if it turns out to be what I think it is, it's much more unpleasant than any ghost."
He offered no further explanation and she did not like to question him, but his words left a chill upon her, and the underlying horror which seems always to lurk somewhere beneath the flamboyant loveliness of a lonely English countryside in the height of summer, a presence of that mysterious dread, which the ancients called panic, had become startlingly apparent.
I had also forgotten that Campion on waking at half past four in the afternoon following an exciting night is told sternly by his ex-burglar manservant, "Pull yerself together. You remind me o' Buster Keaton when you're 'alf awake," which is a fascinating image in its own right and tantalizingly made me wonder—I advance this theory with a certain amount of self-skepticism—if there's either an error or an in-joke buried in this invocation of American silent comedians, because on no account could anyone call Keaton's face forgettable, but Harold Lloyd's was defined entirely by his horn-rimmed glasses.
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I started from the beginning and am re-reading the same way, partly because I enjoy watching the series figure itself out, but