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Synopsis

Haunted for generations, the Hammand family has grown accustomed to tragedy. Early deaths, suicides, and gruesome injuries plague their family tree, and they have long been regarded as pariahs in their rural English community. When Oliver Hammand survives a vicious attack while walking in the woods one night, his sister Swanhild resolves to put an end to the ancient curse. Seeking the guidance of Luna Bartendale, a powerful psychic, Swanhild convinces her brother to join her on a journey of discovery and danger to not only free their family from its dreadful cycle, but to save their own young lives.

Together with Luna, they scour ancient archives, investigate ruined graveyards, and search for whatever clues they can find. As they delve deep into the heart of their family's mystery, Oliver falls deeply in love with Luna. Led to the edge of existence itself, the trio find themselves face to face with a horror too terrible to imagine.

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

The Worlds of Jessie Douglas Kerruish

In 2023, the British Library's series Tales of the Weird published its first novel in the form of The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson. Hitherto the series has published either anthologies of stories by various writers or single-author collections, but now it expands on to a greater canvas--The Undying Monster is the forty-sixth volume, and the second novel, republished in the series. It has been five years since the series began with my anthology From the Depths followed by Haunted Houses, Andrew Smith's compilation of two short novels by Charlotte Riddell. The series has brought back into print both classic and little-known works, and revived interest in both well-known and forgotten writers. Its subject matter has ranged from weird weather to botanical horrors to child ghosts to creepy-crawlies and even tattoos. Amongst them has been my anthology of occult detectives, The Ghost Slayers, and with the following volume we encounter one of the earliest female occult detectives, Luna Bartendale--the Supersensitive.

The writer who created Luna Bartendale is one who had become lost in the shadows of old tomes, so it is good to welcome back Jessie Douglas Kerruish. She must have been something of a super-sensitive herself, because she had been deaf since childhood, and yet you would not know that from her descriptions of the nightmarish and provocative sounds that pervade this novel or the regenerative power of music. Little has been written about her life before, so this is an opportunity to bring her back into the daylight.

Jessie Douglas Kerruish--I'll call her Jessie from now on--was born in the village of Seaton Carew, just south of Hartlepool, in County Durham in the spring of 1884. Both her parents were seafarers but may have known each other for years--indeed, their respective families lived next door to each other. Her father, Moses Kerruish, was a merchant sea captain--he became a Master Mariner. He had been born on the Isle of Man and his Manx heritage can be traced back many generations. He had married Margaret Kell in 1876 and the two travelled the world. Their first child, also called Margaret, was born on the captain's ship, the Black Watch, in October 1877 moored off the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. A second child, John, was also born at sea, in August 1879, while the ship was homeward bound. Unfortunately a third child, Mary, who was born on land, in Seaton Carew, died when only three months old, in 1881, and it may have been felt that the mother should stay at home, to avoid any possible stress through travelling.

Jessie was their fourth child, and though born in Seaton Carew, it did not remain her home for long. Her mother was increasingly ill and the family moved down to Kent settling first in Charlton, before moving to Dover and eventually along the coast to Hove, next to Brighton, in Sussex. It was there that a final child, Harry, was born in 1895.

Their father continued to work at sea and died at Antwerp in Belgium in December 1899. Jessie was fifteen. Her mother's health was failing and to add to the burden, besides her deafness, Jessie found her eyesight was becoming poor. Thankfully she never lost her sight, but it put a stop to her hopes of studying art. Instead she turned to writing and managed to sell the occasional story to magazines from 1907 onward. Her eldest brother, John, had married and settled in Liverpool, so Jessie and her sister Margaret had to look after both their mother and help raise young Harry. Her mother died in August 1914 aged 56, just after the outbreak of the First World War. Harry, now aged 19, volunteered for army service, joining the Royal Sussex Regiment. He served in India where he was killed in March 1917.

Jessie and her sister Margaret stayed together in Hove for the rest of their lives, caring for each other. Margaret worked as a dressmaker and seamstress whilst Jessie wrote. She had a vivid imagination inspired by the stories told her by her parents about their travels, and the Manx legends. Her childhood memories of Seaton Carew brought with them tales of smuggling and lost treasure, and she became fascinated by the world of make-believe and adventure. Amongst her earliest sales were three booklets for W. T. Stead's series Books for the Bairns. The Gambler Prince appeared in December 1909 and The Raksha Rajah in December 1912, both showing her fascination for the stories of the Arabian Nights and the world of the Middle East. The third book drew upon her father's tales and Jessie's subsequent research, Tales and Legends of the Isle of Man (1913).

It is not easy tracing her stories because she sold mostly to the smaller weekly magazines and papers which were too ephemeral. It is likely that other stories may yet be discovered. Her main market during the War years was a small magazine, the Weekly Tale Teller, where she first appeared with a tale of accursed treasure, "The Gold of Hermodike" for 7 November 1914. It was followed by her first attempt at a story of an occult detective, "The Swaying Vision" (16 January 1915) which I reprinted in Fighters of Fear (Talos, 2020).

She found her metier, though, with a series of stories which ran through October 1915 under the general heading "Babylonian Nights' Entertainment", though there were only six tales unlike the 1,001 Nights. They were evocative of distant lands and showed her fascination with other cultures of the ancient past. This held her in good stead, because in 1917 she entered her novel, Miss Haroun-al-Raschid for Hodder & Stoughton's astonishing 1,000 guineas competition, and she won. Her share of the prize money was £750 which is roughly the equivalent today of over £44,000. It provided her and her sister with a significant financial cushion to help them through the years. She continued to write, despite her failing eyesight, and in 1918 Hodder bought her next novel, a romance, The Girl from Kurdistan, which implies they were satisfied with the sales of her earlier book.

It was now that Jessie turned her imagination closer to home and drafted The Undying Monster set in the South Downs just north of Brighton and Hove. Unaccountably the book failed to sell, despite the post-war interest in spiritualism and occultism. Perhaps Hodder had now type-cast Jessie as an author of oriental adventures or perhaps they felt the book too violent--there is, after all, a reference to the monster "eating babies". They were not known for publishing tales of the supernatural. Whatever the reason, the book was rejected and slowly made its way round a circle of publishers until being picked up by a relatively small firm, Heath Cranton, who published it in March 1922. It must have sold reasonably well because it was reprinted within a month. It also received good reviews, The Westminster Gazette calling it "...an absolutely first-rate mystery tale, which combines the hold of a good detective story with that of the horrible." The reviewer also perceptively remarked that he believed the book would have "a tremendous effect as a play". It would, as you will see, have been a challenge to adapt for the stage and remain effective, but twenty years after its publication it was adapted for the screen by John Brahm for Twentieth-Century Fox. The film, like so many of its fellows from the 1930s, capitalising on the success of The Wolfman and other such movies, does not stand up well today, but its cardinal sin was that it dropped the character of Luna Bartendale and replaced her with a male Scotland Yard detective.

Leaving the plot aside, as I do not want to reveal anything and there is so much to reveal--Jessie threw just about everything into this book, starting with a family curse, buried treasure and some fearsome monster that has haunted the family down the generations, and her knowledge of matters occult and Nordic mythology suggest somewhat more than mere reading, however much her failing eyesight would allow--but perhaps the strongest feature of the novel is Luna Bartendale, a "Super-sensitive" as she calls herself, with a profound understanding of the supernatural and an admirable ability to deal with it. Her explanation that our threedimensional world is surrounded by a fourth dimension, which we know of as the supernatural, but which is in turn surrounded by a fifth dimension with its links to the human mind, provides the book with a surprisingly rational basis for the events that are unfolding.

Miss Bartendale was not the first female occult detective in fiction. The research of Tim Prasil has unearthed the character of Lady Julia Spinner in an anonymous story, "Wanted--an Explanation", serialised in Household Words in 1881. There was also Diana Marburg in a series of stories by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace which ran in Pearson's Magazine in 1902, though her detective skills revolved primarily around palm-reading. Then there was Alwyne Sargent, a medium, who helped Jack Hargreaves in a series by Allen Upward which ran in The Royal Magazine in 1905-6 and, most significantly, there was Solange Fontaine, created by F. Tennyson Jesse, who appeared in a series in The Premier Magazine in 1918-19. Fontaine isn't really a detective. She gets feelings and premonitions which compel her to investigate, but you could classify her as a "sensitive", if not "super-sensitive", and I would not be surprised to learn that Jessie had read these stories. Finally, there was Shiela Crerar, who regarded herself as psychic and appeared in a series by Ella Scrymsour in The Blue Magazine during 1920. So Luna Bartendale certainly cannot be classified as the first female occult detective, but I would argue she is the first important one, partly because she demonstrates skills and knowledge that none of her predecessors possess, and partly because she has no qualm about thrusting herself right into the heart of the problem as a fearless and determined investigator. There's the added fact that all her predecessors had appeared only in magazines whereas Miss Bartendale was the first to appear in a novel-length book.

Despite the critical reception of The Undying Monster it did not result in a sequel or any further adventures of Luna Bartendale, which is unfortunate, as much could have been made of the character. Instead Jessie Kerruish returned to her favourite subject of lost treasure. The Hull of Coins, which was not published until 1931, is a ripping yarn of treasure hunting on an old wreck. She then revived her earlier Babylonian Nights' Entertainment and added several new stories for book publication in 1934. Each of these later books came from a different publisher suggesting that sales had not been encouraging. The Undying Monster was reprinted in 1936 from Philip Allan, a publisher who had excelled in presenting weird fiction through the Creeps Library, edited by no less than Charles Birkin. It was through this printing that an American edition appeared the same year, and it was doubtless that which brought the book to the attention of the film studios.

Jessie continued to write stories including several for the Not at Night series edited by Christine Campbell Thomson, who acted as Jessie's agent. Jessie had three stories in the series including "The Wonderful Tune" in At Dead of Night (1931) which I reprinted in the Tales of the Weird anthology Queens of the Abyss. The idea of an infectious tune which leads to uncontrollable dancing is an interesting subject for someone who was deaf.

Jessie sold other non-supernatural stories to magazines, most still drawing upon her passion for the exotic East, but what may well have been her final weird story, "The Badger", appeared in The 20-Story Magazine in 1932. There was one other strange story, "The Seven-Locked Room" in Thomson's Keep on the Light (1933) but it may be that thereafter her eyesight made it all but impossible to write. There was a later crime story, "The Country House Fire" published in one of those ephemeral small wartime pocketbooks, Tales of Murder and Mystery (undated but possibly 1945), but it's difficult to know when it was written.

Jessie Douglas Kerruish died at her home in Hove in September 1949, aged 65. Her sister outlived her by nearly ten years and died in March 1959, aged 81. She was the last of her branch of the Kerruish line. Their brother John, who had moved to Liverpool, had died in 1928 and his only son Thomas, had died less than two years later, in March 1930, aged only 22. One might be drawn to think that a curse had permeated the Kerruish family, but if so, it was one that Jessie fought valiantly and produced a body of work that should be far better remembered. The Undying Monster is her legacy, and an undying one at that. -- Mike Ashley

Copyright © 1922 by Jessie Douglas Kerruish

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