Vampires & Victorians

NOVELS OF MYSTERY FROM THE VICTORIAN AGE (678 pp.)-- Edited by Maurice Richardson--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($3.95).

I saw a large black object . . . crawl . . . over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up to [my daughter's] throat, where it swelled, in a moment, into a great palpitating mass. . . .

I sprang forward, with my sword in my hand. The black creature suddenly contracted toward the foot of the bed . . . and [fixed me) with a glare of skulking ferocity and horror. ... I struck . . . with my sword. ... I pursued, and struck again. But [the "vampire] was gone! and my sword flew to shivers against the door.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla

When the servant had brought in the lamp and drawn the thick curtains against the night, there was nothing that so pleased the Victorian as to lay back his head on the antimacassar and curdle his comfortable blood with fiction about fiends in human form. So Victorian Novelist Wilkie Collins, who dispensed such fiction, was not displeased, one moonlit night in the 1850s, when a beautiful lady, robed all in white, ran up to him on a lonely road, screaming for succor. She had escaped, explained the white lady, from a fiend who had held her in durance with the help of hypnotic powers and a kitchen poker.

Unlike the average Victorian hero, Author Collins did not let an angry flush mantle his high brow, and rush off to thrash the cad with a riding crop. Like a sensible novelist, he gently escorted the lady to his house in Harley Street (where she was to live as his mistress for many years) and made haste to turn their fortunate meeting into Chapter I of his next novel, The Woman in White. This novel, and its thrilling successor, The Moonstone, made Wilkie Collins one of Victorian England's richest and most popular writers.*

Mixed & Murderous. The Woman in White takes three-quarters of the space given to the four mystery novels in this collection. It kept Thackeray reading all through one night although Collins used neither professional sleuth nor police to unravel his chilly horrors. "In our own over-specialized, disintegrated times," notes Editor Maurice Richardson, "there are the rigid categories of detective story, thriller, and ghost story, with several subdivisions to each . . , but in the last century they could all be lumped together as Tales of Mystery and Imagination." Along with The Woman in White in Editor Richardson's omnibus are Robert Louis Stevenson's* famed Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Notting Hill Mystery, written by an unknown disciple of Wilkie Collins, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, in which a deadly vampire lady passes her days snugly in a blood-filled coffin, her nights with her pearly-white incisors sunk gently into a sleeping victim's throat.

A Stitch in Time. Readers may find the Victorian plots and solutions sensational and sometimes clumsy compared with the tooled precision of today's murder mystery. But they will also find a far higher standard of prose, and richer characterizations--as well as enough gory retribution to convince them of the folly of a fiendish career. "I set myself against it in toto," Thomas (Confessions of an English Opium Eater) De Quincey had said, in his famous essays on murder early in Victoria's day. "For, if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time."

* They still sell well. Both novels are available together in a Modern Library Giant, and separately in Everyman's Library. * Whose Kidnapped, Weir of Hermiston, The Master of Ballantrae, Travels with a Donkey and three short stories, plus a first-rate essay on Stevenson by V. S. Pritchett, have just been reissued in Novels and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson (Duell, Sloan & Pearce; $3-95).

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