Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
A number of literary works have been produced by writers during periods of incarceration. These include such classics as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Other authors of “prison literature” include Oscar Wilde, Sir Walter Raleigh, Napoleon Bonaparte, Fyodor Dostoevsky, O. Henry, and E.E. Cummings, and in more recent times Martin Luther King Jr. with Letter from Birmingham City Jail, and Nelson Mandela, whose Conversations With Myself was compiled while he was imprisoned on Robben Island. One of the most remarkable of all these books was Missing Soluch by the Iranian writer Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, who, lacking pen or paper, fashioned this 400-page novel entirely in his head, copying it down from memory after his release in 1979.
Clearly captivity must affect different people in different ways, but it would seem that for a certain type of individual the imposed isolation focuses the mind and gives ample time to fully consider and express ideas and thoughts. Such creativity has had its extremes: St. Paul reportedly wrote several of his Epistles when imprisoned in Caesarea in the first century; Adolf Hitler composed much of Mein Kampf during his time in Landsberg Prison in 1924.
In the realm of speculative fiction, there do not seem to be any books brought into being during imprisonment apart from the supernatural stories of A.N.L. Munby (1913–1974), written in a prisoner-of-war camp between 1943 and 1945 and collected as The Alabaster Hand in 1949. Munby was a British Army officer in the 1st Battalion of the Queen Victoria’s Rifles who was captured at Calais by the Germans in the aftermath of the Fall of France in 1940; he was imprisoned at Oflag VII-C in Laufen until October 1941 when he was moved firstly to Oflag VI-B in Dössel and finally in September 1942 to Oflag VII-B in Eichstätt, where he remained until the Bavarian camp was liberated by the U.S. Army on 16 April 1945.
During his time in the camps, Munby’s life was far from difficult, as the Germans did in the main treat Allied officers well. The very fact of being imprisoned must have had a debilitating psychological effect as year followed year with no prospect of freedom, but at Eichstätt in particular there were many cultural pursuits to get involved in. There was a regularly printed magazine called Touchstone to which Munby contributed three of the stories he had written, starting with “The Four-Poster” in the Christmas 1944 issue. The blackly humorous editorial comment indicated that “Any self-respecting Christmas number should have a ghost story and this Tim Munby has supplied—the first we hope of several (ghost stories that is, not Christmas numbers).”
Munby was a keen bibliophile, and before the war he had been involved in the antiquarian book trade after graduating from Cambridge University in the mid-1930s. He had two nonfiction books of his own published, Letters to Leigh Hunt from His Son Vincent (1934) and English Poetical Autographs (1938, in collaboration with Desmond Flower), but had never turned his hand to fiction. He was very much an admirer of M.R. James, and The Alabaster Hand is dedicated to his memory, making no secret of the fact that the stories included were written in tribute to a man whose path he would never have crossed at Cambridge; both were at King’s College, but Munby was there between 1932 and 1935 while James had left in 1918.
Munby’s tales are crafted in the same carefully wrought prose as those of James, and they evoke the same milieu of bibliophilia and antiquarianism in what are in many ways ageless environments. There are few dates mentioned, but these are narratives that could with only modest adjustment take place at any time in the last two centuries; although Munby’s work generally lacks the studied sense of disquiet that James was so capable of instilling into his plots, his stories are enjoyable and capable additions to the realms of “Jamesian” ghostliness.
The Alabaster Hand comprises fourteen fairly short stories, the first being “Herodes Redivivus”; this is about a man who comes across a rare book on the infamous mass murderer, Gilles de Rais, a book that he has seen before. Prompted by memory, he tells his story. As a schoolboy 20 years earlier he was very nearly drawn into the clutches of a monstrous, satanic killer, only to be fortuitously rescued by a clergyman. He was then plagued by nightmares that ultimately resulted in the apprehension of the guilty man, who is ably depicted as repellent but charming, with the schoolboy’s ingenuous attitude well drawn in a narrative that has an underlying menace both impressive and lingering.
“The Inscription” is the salutary tale of an isolated old stone temple on the grounds of a mansion, the owner of which decides that he will demolish it and reuse the stone elsewhere. There is a warning in plain sight in the form of the inscription of the title, but it is misinterpreted with tragic consequences, although in practice it seems unlikely that even a correct reading of the relevant carved words would have altered either the outcome or the fate of Charles Winchcombe.
“The Alabaster Hand” is a lighter piece, not lacking in irony, with an Anglican clergyman terrified by the clutching attention of the eponymous hand in his Church. The hand in question is a part of an alabaster effigy atop a tomb from the sixteenth century, hidden inside of which is a relic of a martyred Catholic. This is a good story which succeeds well although the reader cannot help wondering at the way in which M.R. James might have dealt with the same subject matter; certainly there would have been a grimmer atmosphere, and a more malevolent intent, and the narrative would not have ended with the jocular final comment. This highlights the fact that Munby was not trying to emulate his literary mentor’s unmatched evocation of malign ghosts, but instead was producing his own concepts of both haunting and haunted.
An auction that never takes place is the subject of “The Topley Place Sale.” A man inherits Topley Place from an uncle, and he decides to sell off anything of worth, regardless of its pedigree or its intrinsic ancestral value. This includes certain items belonging to an irascible naval man who died more than a century earlier and whose spirit does not take kindly to what is happening and who consequently deals with things in a manner that is not only definitive but also fatal.
“The Tudor Chimney” is the longest of Munby’s stories. It powerfully relates how a ghost persists for centuries in the location of its demise until it is inadvertently released during renovation. This is an example of an apparition that causes no specific harm but its very presence is disconcerting and frightful; its eyes, for instance, “glowed...with a baleful, infernal light that radiated malevolence,” and there seems to be little question that it would only have been a matter of time before its malign influence would have caused deadly harm.
In “A Christmas Game,” a man pays for his misdeeds from decades earlier on the other side of the world as a wraith comes seeking him, drawn to him by something as simple as two peeled muscatelle grapes used innocently in a seasonal pastime, but which prove to be the harbinger of a deadly vengeance.
“The White Sack” utilizes Scottish folklore in a potent narrative of a man being pursued across a peat bog on the Isle of Skye by a “sac-ban,” an unearthly creature of the mists that seeks to stifle and murder him. The panic and terror of the protagonist is well depicted as he desperately seeks refuge while the pursuer relentlessly closes in on him. Interestingly, Munby was here using a little-known Scottish myth, but this only places the sac-ban at Creagan on the north shore of Loch Creran, some 60 miles southeast of Skye; presumably the author saw no reason why such beings should not travel from their customary habitat in furtherance of their dire purposes.
As mentioned earlier, “The Four-Poster” was the first of Munby’s stories to appear in the Touchstone Magazine. It tells of how a man staying at a friend’s house and sleeping in the eponymous bed dies of fright during the night. The fact that the bed’s curtains are in part a shroud from the corpse of a victim of grave robbers is particularly relevant to events. “The Negro’s Head” is about the murder of an innocent man, a crime which is solved many years later by the narrator’s diligent study of old records. The supernatural element lies with the death of one of the killers, who may or may not have been drowned by the specter of his victim.
“The Tregannet Book of Hours” is the story of what is revealed in one of the illustrations in the Book of the title and commandingly tells of post-mortem revenge. While Munby readily and successfully adopted such classic themes, he uses an intriguingly original concept in “An Encounter in the Mist.” This tells of the solicitous ghost of a hermit whose intent is to help lost travelers by guiding them to the correct path across the Snowdon mountain range. What he does not realize is that in the century and a half since his death, there has been a significant landscape change as a result of a huge landslide, and the supposedly safe path that he points people toward now ends in an abrupt precipice.
There are no such good intentions on the part of the spirit of “The Lectern,” which exacts a brutal and bloody revenge on the man whose actions caused death and destruction in its Irish village and which may still be lying in wait a century and a half later. “Number Seventy-Nine” is the shortest of Munby’s tales. It tells of a distraught man who will do anything to bring his dead fiancée back to life. Using an ancient grimoire, he succeeds only too well, but the happiness he had hoped for turns into utter horror in a manner reminiscent of the second wish in W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” from 1902. The final story in The Alabaster Hand is “The Devil’s Autograph” about an elderly rector who made an unholy pact with the Prince of Darkness in his youth and finds that the debt is now due for full payment. This is another short tale, but it is well told and generates an accomplished aura of trepidation and the palpable despair of the rector, who can do nothing but await his grim fate.
Munby’s stories are consistently entertaining and well written. If they are perhaps lacking in characterization, that is the result of their brevity rather than any literary shortcomings on the part of their author, who was telling straightforward narratives in a succinct and effective way, concentrating on plot development. In a departure from the normal style of M.R. James, all of Munby’s tales are told in the first person with the one partial exception being the bulk of “An Encounter in the Mist,” which is related in the second person.
Incidents from the past have particular significance in most of the author’s tales: there are things that have lain dormant for centuries and which are unwisely disturbed, and there is vengeance patiently awaiting its opportunity to strike. These are, of course, classic features of the standard weird tale, but Munby never fails to bring an element of inventiveness to his narratives, raising them above the many run-of-the-mill contributions that tend to proliferate in the genre.
After the war, Munby catalogued books at the London auction house of Sotheby’s before becoming the librarian at King’s College, Cambridge in 1947. He held this post until his death from cancer on 26 December 1974, the day after his 61st birthday, and he established an enviable bibliographical reputation during these years. He published several more books, notably his five volume Phillips Studies between 1951 and 1960, devoted to the nineteenth-century bibliophile and collector, Sir Thomas Phillips.
His fiction writing career seems to have lasted for just 1943 to 1945 during his imprisonment at Oflag VII-B, and there is no indication that he ever felt the need to reapproach the supernatural genre. The Alabaster Hand was reasonably successful, evidently selling some 10,000 copies in its hardbound edition, but evidently its author felt that he had no more to offer on the subject; his tribute to M.R. James had been completed during incarceration at Eichstätt, and the advent of freedom, with a new role as the King’s College librarian, would have made many demands on his time, something that would certainly have been lacking in his life as a prisoner.
Even if Munby had written his fourteen stories purely and simply as a way of passing a frustrating period of time, he did succeed in adding a lasting niche to the literature of the ghostly narrative, although he probably had not expected to do so. However, there is no question that his tales do endure and will continue to be appreciated by aficionados.
Mike Barrett lives in Wilmington, Kent.
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