Mark Valentine
Tartarus Press
What is the secret of the house of days? Who are the
shadowy figures gathered along an old green road? What is the winged
thing seen flitting from an ancient church?
Herald of the Hidden collects
ten adventures of the occult detective Ralph Tyler, inspired by William
Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Algernon Blackwood’s John
Silence, and Arthur Machen’s Mr Dyson of The Three Impostors.
But Ralph Tyler is different. He is without
private means, or any special esoteric knowledge. Sometimes he doesn’t
play fair with his clients or his friend, the narrator. He smokes foul
cigarettes, slumps in his chair, and wears a threadbare jacket. And he’s
from an obscure shire in the darkest heart of England . . .
Mark Valentine’s Ralph Tyler stories first
appeared in hard-to-find small press publications. Three of the stories
in this volume are previously unpublished, including two newly written
for this collection. Along with six further supernatural tales, all the
stories are previously uncollected in book form.
The bulk of this collection consists of Mark's early experiments with the supernatural detective genre. I'm a huge fan of Mark's other detective tales (written with
John Howard) featuring the Connoisseur which are intense, artful and gloriously inventive and I've gone back to them several times over the years. These earlier stories follow the standard setup of a chronicler and a detective, here called Ralph Tyler, a shambolic everyman who lives in scruffy digs and smokes foul smelling cigarettes. He's a deliberate shift away from the gentleman adventurer type of sleuth, the man of means that can afford to go off spook hunting such as
Algernon Blackwood's 'Dr John Silence',
William Hope Hodgson's 'Carnacki' or even
Arthur Machen's 'Mr Dyson'. Tyler works for hire but does so in a way that satisfies his own conscience.
The stories flirt with themes that would come to define Mark's later work with the intrusion of other realms and the hidden histories of the countries of Britain. The stories here are a little more overt and perhaps muscular than I was expecting but that's perhaps down to youthful verve and whilst many of these stories could be - crassly - defined as folk horror Mark is - and apparently always was - too good a writer to fall down that particular rabbit hole and his stories embrace a far wider palette of influence than is often the case.
The book ends with several non Rex Tyler stories that date from a similar time. They are a more delicate affair showing Mark's love of Edwardian ghostly and weird fiction with ghostly cricket matches, artistic vision, dark magic and pastoral pagan traditions.
As can probably be inferred from his repeated appearances in these pages I adore Mark's writing. He draws from a heritage of writers that I find fascinating and marries it with a lively imagination, a curious nature and a writing style that embraces both the then and the now to produce stories that feel timeless.
Buy it here -
Herald of the Hidden
..........................................................................................
If
you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us
continue then we would very much appreciate a donation towards keeping
the blog going -
paypal.me/wyrdbritain
- or watch it below.
- or watch it below.
/ 
.
