A certain distance because of his heavy pseudonym ( Sax = Seaxe [ dagger ], Rohmer = Wanderer ), and I think his style as bad as Upton Sinclair’s could be ( “Hi !” he laughed. — “I need a favor !” she returned. “Of course !” he laughed. ), but he had a fine imagination.
Hm Face in the Abyss is good, I am fond of Burn Witch Burn because it was the first thing of his I read [and had been made into movies twice as I recall]Seven Footprints to Satan is also interesting.
I started reading the purple prose more frequently because I had the aldiko app on my phone that pulls ebooks off of feedbooks, and many of the free ones come from Project Gutenberg, and they had a lot of the turn of the 19th to 20th century books. Smetimes they can be a crap shoot, but I did discover Barroness Orczy,Le Fanu, William Hope Hodgeson, Thomas Hanshew, R E Howard …
Burn Witch Burn was the source for The Devil-Doll (1936), a horror classic I’ve never seen, even though I own it in a DVD collection…was it ever remade?
Or are you confusing it with Fritz Lieber’s Conjure Wife, which was filmed a couple of times, including in 1962, when it was released as…wait for it…Burn Witch Burn.
It was done once as a silent and once as The Devil Doll, and then it was used as the kernal of the idea for a Twilight Zone [or was it one of the other series? - basically evil person makes people into little dolls and sends them out to do nasty crap and steal =)
Though Conjure Wife was pretty good, I do like Lieber =)
John Dickson Carr, either as himself or as Carter Dickson, had a **number **of books including the words Witch, Burn, *Fire *in the titles, and rather too often, Death.
I know (and love) Orczy and Howard; I don’t know Hodgeson or Hanshew, but they’re now on my radar scope! Thank you!
Gutenberg was where I found Robert W. Chambers, perhaps most famous for “The King in Yellow.” Most of his books are about rich New York elites having trouble with alcoholism, but his book “The Lost Children” was set in the same pre-Revolutionary War New York frontier as Fenimore-Cooper’s Deerslayer stories…and was a couple of million per cent better than anything Cooper ever wrote.
(He even slipped in a couple of Cooper’s characters for cameo appearances!)
More recently, I found Meredith Nicholson, who writes whimsical romances (and sometimes very straight romances) with a particularly loving touch. One of the most genteel writers I’ve ever stumbled across.
I love just “throwing a dart” at Project Gutenberg and savoring what comes up. It is a wonderful mine full of gems!
H. Rider Haggard’s period is chock-full of wonders and treasures. Alas, Haggard himself is simply not among them.
Picking up on this, somewhat trivially – but, to mention a silly thing which sticks in my mind. I recall reading of the above-mentioned correspondence between the two ageing, increasingly gloom-and-doom-beset authors: in which they solemnnly agreed that planet Earth was, with absolute certainty, “one of the Hells”. They indeed had a very low opinion of the political Left generally – especially of what was then going on in Russia. Not to suggest that IMO, they were wrong about this very last issue: but their published correspondence moved a British leftist at the time to a bit of light verse which has always tickled me: running in part, as follows.
" ‘Every Bolsh is a blackguard,’
Said Kipling to Haggard;
‘And a blooming outsider,’
Said Rudyard to Rider –
‘And given to tippling,’
Said Haggard to Kipling.
‘Their domain is a blood-yard,’
Said Rider to Rudyard…
‘It is true what you say,’
Said the author of They –
‘I agree, I agree,’
Said the author of She."
Haggard is a great adventure writer; King Solomon’s Mines is probably his best work. I certainly did not find it “dull”. I don’t think that is the general consensus, either, but there is no arguing about tastes.
He did write innumerable books, many of which were repetitious.
One of his lesser known books which I quite liked was Nada the Lilly, which featured an adventure in which all the heroes (and titular heroine) were Black Africans. Though still occasionally groanworthy by modern standards on racial issues (did he absolutely have to mention that the beautiful Nada was ‘comparatively light of skin’ just to appeal to his audience? Apparently so!), it is still an impressive feat for his time to have an entire book lack a White European hero.
Very loosely based on the rise and fall of Chaka Zulu.
Indeed, his works are an odd mixture in racial matters, which probably has inspired many a PhD thesis. In King Solomon’s Mines, he is careful to have his narrator/mouthpiece say how much he dislikes anyone calling Africans by the n-word, because in his opinion Black Africans are just as likely to be “gentlemen” as Whites - which is a pretty advanced notion for his time.
I haven’t read much Haggard, but I think I’ve done a fair initial survey. “King Solomon’s Mines” was the best of all I’ve read so far. “She” was also pretty good.
“Moon of Israel” and “Montezuma’s Daughter” were painfully episodic, with VERY long speeches, and far too much telegraphing of plot elements. He spends way too much time telling you the outcome of parts of the story – “And I would never see him alive again…” “If I had known what woe would befall…” “But that, as we shall see, did not come to pass…” – and I hold that to be a very significant shortcoming in an adventure writer.
His imagination is pretty good, and his characters have some strengths.
I definitely applaud him for having a social conscience in advance of the tenor of the times. He dealt with racial themes with much more liberality than many others of his contemporaries.
I’m just finding his literary sins to be difficult to overcome. His books aren’t exactly dull…but they have grave weaknesses.
But, yes, definitely, tastes are individual! If you’ve enjoyed his books, I’m certainly not going to say you’re wrong!
As a complete aside, I nearly fell out of my chair when watching True Detective on the TV and references to The King in Yellow featured prominently. I thought that was just about the most obscure reference possible.
I’ve read King Solomon’s Mines and the sequel to She that was set in Tibet, can’t remember the name. Neither was amazing, both were quite good though.
On that note, I’m curious if anyone knows the answer: in King Solomon’s Mines the villain is executed by single combat, since he’s a member of the royal family and can’t be killed in cold blood. Are there any historical examples of cultures that used that as a method of execution?
I read the the Classics Illustrated versions of King Solomon’s Mines and Cleopatra. Later on I read those and She. They were okay. In the 80s I bought cheap editions of the She sequels. I haven’t gone back to them, but now I may try the first 3 again.
Classics Illustrated never did an adaptation of She, unfortunately, but there was a now-obscure competitor, Famous Authors Illustrated, who did do an adaptation in 1948. You can find it online if you look.
I don’t know the answer to that, but the Mongols had an equally curious custom about killing members of any royal family: their blood could not be shed with weapons (unlike other folks), so they were always smothered or trampled to death.
In King Solomon’s Mines, he is careful to have his narrator/mouthpiece say how much he dislikes anyone calling Africans by the n-word, because in his opinion Black Africans are just as likely to be “gentlemen” as Whites - which is a pretty advanced notion for his time.