Call me shallow, but one of my criteria for a good read is whether the text has a good opening line.

For example, my alltime favorite is the laconic "Call me Ishmael" that opens Herman Melville's immortal MOBY DICK. Despite the novel's long discursions into whaling lore, it is a cracking good yarn--fact-based, and in the character of Captain Ahab gave us the most enduring object lesson on the dangers of obsession, which leads Ahab and the crew of the Pequod to watery graves, with the whale they pursued still living and Ishmael like Job's servants: ". . .and I only am escaped alone to tell thee" (Job 1:15-19).

Then there's Charles Dickens's flat declaration "Marley was dead, to begin with" which opens A CHRISTMAS CAROL. He goes on to let us know "this must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate" or words to that effect. He does have a point. That endless opening from A TALE OF TWO CITIES, often hailed as Dickens's best, frankly put me to sleep.

And then there is this gem, from Daphne du Maurier's classic REBECCA: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

Du Maurier was the granddaughter of George du Maurier, who created one of the most sinister characters in all of English literature, the Hungarian hypnotist Svengali, in his novel TRILBY. His granddaughter followed suit in REBECCA's Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper at Manderley, whose devotion to Rebecca de Winter has such dire consequences.

The plot is quite simple, although some of the conceits and conventions used in the story are not: Maxim de Winter, the widowed master of the great Cornish estate of Manderley, is staying in Monte Carlo when he meets and marries a much younger woman, hitherto the paid companion of a thoroughly repulsive American called Mrs. Van Hopper. This second wife, whose Christian name is never given and who is the narrator of the story that follows, finds that his beloved Manderley is haunted by memories of Maxim's previous wife, Rebecca, who is presumed to have drowned when the boat she was sailing capsized; much is made in the early part of the book that Maxim actually identified a body found up the coast as that of Rebecca.

As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that everyone at Manderley was affected by Rebecca in unhealthy ways. Us hillbillies would say that Rebecca was no better than she should have been and not near as good as she ought have been; she was charming, cold, and above all promiscuous. Mrs. Danvers aided and abetted her in her infidelities; Maxim ignored them as best he could until Rebecca throws it up in his face that she is pregnant, probably by one of her lovers, and that he will raise the child as his own to avoid scandal. In this respect, du Maurier harks back to the Victorian ideal; but Maxim's response to the news is not Victorian at all. He shoots Rebecca through the heart and sinks her boat to hide his crime.

The second Mrs. de Winter, all this time, is terrorized by Mrs. Danvers--who actually tries to get her to commit suicide--and intimidated by the notion that Maxim is still madly in love with the dead Rebecca. Her reaction, when all is revealed, is also less than Victorian; she confesses herself relieved when she learns that Maxim hated his first wife.

Maxim is exonerated from a possible charge of murder when a gynecologist whom Rebecca had consulted--using Mrs. Danvers's name and without telling anyone else--reveals that Rebecca had been suffering from an inoperable cancer and would not have lived above six months, thus making suicide a more likely alternative explanation for her death than murder. This revelation does not prevent the final castastrophe though; Mrs. Danvers, apprised of the news by a former lover of Rebecca's, sets Manderley afire and disappears.

But all of those Gothic elements--a mysterious death, a haunted atmosphere--are encapsulated in that lovely opening line. Mrs. de Winter dreams not of the haunted Manderley she knew, but of the shell left by the fire; of the encroaching woods that crept back over the lawns and gardens once the estate was abandoned. She and Maxim are living in a little hotel in Switzerland and, in du Maurier's version, are content to be together, even though they cannot return to his beloved Manderley. Later "sequels" written by lesser writers than du Maurier posit just that, with one going so far as to send them back, Maxim to commit suicide out of guilt.

Still gives me the same chills I got the first time I read that line, and read it again, whispering it out loud: "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

Among the treasures in my library of (hold your groans till the end, please) ghost tales is this 1947 volume by James Reynolds.

I have been unable to find any biographical information about Reynolds; the publication data page in my copy of GHOSTS IN IRISH HOUSES gives his birth year as 1891, but nothing else. From hints he drops in his books, I suspect he probably was American by birth. He collected stories from Ireland to the United States to continental Europe, and in the hardback originals did his own painted or charcoal illustrations.

Most of the stories predate the year 1900 and take no account of the history of "The Troubles"--the struggles that went on for centuries against what the native Irish regarded as English invaders and culminated in the formation of the Republic of Ireland in 1921. Of the twenty-three stories in the book, only one--"The Four Terrors," a story of spectral revenge against a brother who committed murder for the sake of an inheritance--takes place in the six counties of Northern Ireland; it is set in County Antrim. One wonders if, even in the years when he was collecting stories, Reynolds avoided the violent north; would he do more collecting nowadays, in a relatively settled country?

One of the fun things--for me, perversely educated brat that I am--about reading "true" ghost stories is seeing how closely the story comes to matching its historical era. Reynolds, unfortunately, plays pretty fast and loose with dates. One such instance would be the iconic Battle of Clontarf, which took place on Good Friday in the year 1014 and at which the most famous of all Irish kings, Brian Boru, was killed. This great battle, which crushed Viking attempts to control Ireland once and for all, figures in two of the stories. In one story, Reynolds dates the story to 1115 and refers to this as "the year after Clontarf": in another story he gives the date of Clontarf as 1100.

The stories are basically worthless as history, but fun reads. Some are of deathless love: "The Bridal Barge of Aran Roe," about a bridegroom killed on his way to his wedding and how his barge still sails off the coast of County Donegal, is my favorite of this genre. "Mickey Filler and the Tansey Wreath" is about the grandson of a famous Irish healer and historical character named Biddy Early.

My favorites, though, are of course the ones of revenge, some bloody Grand Guignol affairs, others psychological. "The Four Terrors" I have already mentioned. "The Headless Rider of Castle Sheela" is another; it is about an adulterer whose horse brought his master's headless body home, and whose hooves were heard on the castle stairs for many years. Of them all, though, my favorite is "The Bloody Stones of Kerrigan's Keep," which brings together a lot of Irish themes: war, revenge, parties, and one truly bizarre haunting, in which skeletons buried under the Keep rise up and pelt anyone who disturbs their mass grave with stones.

I have never been able to find independent verification of any of these stories, sad to say. The parapsychologist Hans Holzer once tried to track down the location of "Shallardstown and the Orloff Whip," only to learn that the local people had never heard of such a place.

Which begs the question: Was James Reynolds collecting genuine Irish ghost stories, or did he make these up from the whole cloth?

As for the facetious question I asked earlier, he affirmatively was not a storyteller, a seanchai (pronounced SHAN-ah-hee) in the traditional sense. He writes in a very literary style that tries a lot too hard to SOUND Irish, totally at odds with the colloquialism of say a James Joyce or Sean O'Casey.

For myself, I have my suspicions about how "true" these stories are, and the style can get annoying at times. But they're good reads all the same, for people who like ghost stories.

And I'm one of them. If anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

To be frank, I have done very little research into the phenomenon of the 1960s Gothic novel, although I can tell you that A) they were in a long and formerly honorable tradition--one that includes such revered literature as FRANKENSTEIN, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, JANE EYRE, and the most Grand Guignol of them all, DRACULA; B) that they came into vogue yet again in such works from the 1930s as Daphne du Maurier's REBECCA, and C) I read a good number of them as a precocious preteen in the late sixties and early seventies. The plots followed a fairly standardized pattern: deadly secrets, beautiful damsel in distress, handsome dominant hero, hissing villain, sinister secondary characters who turn out to be good guys, highly improbable methods of murder, damsel rescued from death (or that cliched fate worse than) by the wounded but valiant hero, and they live happily ever after with the cloud lifted from them. Some--like those of Dame Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, Dorothy Eden and Victoria Holt (aka Jean Plaidy, among other noms de plumes)--were surprisingly well written; others were merely lurid, as evinced by a subgenre in which the villains were all devil worshippers or madmen seeking to attain eternal life without actually dying and were therefore on the prowl for virgins to sacrifice.

And then, in a Reader's Digest Condensed Book, I ran across my first Barbara Michaels novel: AMMIE, COME HOME (1968), which combined the stock plots with my beloved ghost stories. (I can hear someone grumbling: doesn't this damned woman ever read ANYTHING but ghost stories? Yes, I do. Once in awhile. Remind me to blog sometime about Vicki Lewis Thompson's Nerd series.)

Barbara Michaels is one of two pseudonyms used by the professional Egyptologist Barbara Mertz, who uses her real name only for works on her archaeological discipline. She had written two previous Gothic thrillers (THE MASTER OF BLACKTOWER in 1966 and SONS OF THE WOLF in 1967), both set in Victorian England and stuffily conventional. With AMMIE, COME HOME she broke out of this mold altogether. Set in 1960s Georgetown, now a suburb of Washington, DC but originally George Town, a pre-Revolutionary war settlement named for George III, it tells the story of an 1830s-era house haunted by a tragedy that occurred in 1780, in an earlier house on the site.

Even with the truncations imposed by a condensation, the story was compelling: Ruth Bennett, a longtime Georgetown resident, inherits a house from an elderly cousin, and moves into it with her niece, Sara, a Georgetown University student. The juxtaposition of young Sara, her student boyfriend Bruce, and their anthropology professor, Pat McDougall, somehow taps into events from 1780. In that time, it's revealed over the course of the book, the builder of the first house on the site, the Tory Douglas Campbell, his daughter Amanda (Ammie), and her lover, Captain Anthony Doyle of the Continental Army, formed a deadly triangle; the incestuous Douglas ended by murdering his daughter and her lover. The haunting begins when Sara is overshadowed by Amanda during a seance, and plays out until Douglas's angry hateful spirit is finally exorcized, while Ammie and Doyle's bodies are located, removed from the cellar, and given Christian burial.

Barbara Mertz is an excellent writer, good with atmosphere; her descriptions of the old Federal-style mansions of Georgetown, its restaurants and shops, are masterful. To a critical eye, once the supernatural manifestations begin, they come a bit too thick and fast. The most affecting manifestations are the smell of lilacs, as they would have smelled in April 1780 (the story is set in October and November in roughly 1967), and the sound of a voice that moans, "Ammie, come home"--the only manifestation of Anthony Doyle. The more conventionally melodramatic flourishes are from the wicked Douglas Campbell, who shows himself as a column of smoke and an unnatural cold in one area of the living room--coincidentally, immediately over the pathetic graves of Ammie and Doyle.

In later books published under the Michaels name, Mertz made the supernatural occurrences fewer and more subtle, and her characters edgier and less cardboard gothic stock. Her best in my estimation is VANISH WITH THE ROSE (1992), with the most memorable ghostly event being the disembodied tinkling of an antique music box.

Ruth Bennett and Pat MacDougall, a middleaged couple who, like Sara and Bruce, end up with the conventional happily-ever-after, also appear in two other Michaels novels, SHATTERED SILK (1986), which dispenses with the supernatural altogether but repeats AMMIE's incest subplot; and STITCHES IN TIME (1995), in which the haunting results from a cursed quilt made by a slave girl in the pre-Civil War era.

Gotta say, though, probably because it was the first of her novels I ever read, AMMIE, COME HOME is still my favorite Barbara Michaels.

In fact, I'm reading it for the umpteenth time and am still overwhelmed by the scent of lilacs and the desolate wail "Ammie, come home."

Yeah, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

A masterful Sherlock Holmes parody/pastiche (I'm never sure which is the right word) the other day by my friend Anexplorer sent me back to my all-time favorite of the Holmes works: the novel THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, originally published in serial form in STRAND Magazine from August 1901 through April 1902. The plot turns on how an outcast member of a Devonshire family named Baskerville uses a legend of a death omen to try to eliminate the two lives that stand between him and a considerable estate.

When the novel was published in book form, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote the following dedication:

MY DEAR ROBINSON: It was your account of a west country legend which first suggested the idea of this little tale to my mind. For this, and for the help which you gave me in its evolution, all thanks.

"Robinson", it transpires, was a journalist friend of Doyle's: Bertram Fletcher Robinson, whom Doyle first met in early 1901. In the course of their friendship, Robinson is said to have told Doyle legends from his own Devonshire boyhood, including several from the complex of tales featuring Black Shuck, a giant ghostly black dog. There is some evidence to suggest that Robinson acted as Doyle's secretary during the composition of the novel. He almost certainly introduced Doyle to a driver named Harry Baskerville, whose family name was used in the novel as that of the doomed family haunted by a demonic hound.

Robinson died in 1907 at the age of thirty-six. At the time it was reported that he died of typhoid. And there the story ended.

Or did it?

The first hints that have led to speculation that Robinson may have been murdered, at Doyle's behest, surfaced in 1959. An enterprising reporter had traced the driver, Harry Baskerville, who was then in his eighties. Baskerville apparently proudly showed off an autographed copy of the novel--inscribed with apologies for the use of the Baskerville name--and told the reporter rather carelessly that Doyle had not written the novel at all; that he had stolen it from one Robinson had written on the same theme.

Still, the matter more or less lay for another thirty years, until a researcher named Rodger Garrick-Steele began an eleven-year investigation of the relationship between Robinson and Doyle. In the year 2000, Garrick-Steele voiced his suspicions that Robinson's death was not a natural one, and with several people who found his arguments persuasive, began a campaign to get Robinson's body exhumed for autopsy. It was covered at the time by CNN. (See http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/09/11/uk.conandoyle/index.html)

Garrick-Steele's argument goes something like this: by 1907, Robinson had begun to resent that Doyle's plagiarism, as he allegedly saw it, had become so popular, a resentment heightened by the fact that Doyle was carrying on an affair with Robinson's wife, Gladys. When Robinson threatened Doyle with exposure and legal action, Doyle persuaded Gladys to poison Robinson with the potent painkiller/sedative laudanum. Doyle, a medical doctor as well as a writer, knew that the symptoms of laudanum poisoning were very similar to those of typhoid.

If--a very big if--this were true, the plan went awry almost the moment Robinson died. In 1907 England, it's said, the law required victims of typhoid to be cremated. Robinson was not cremated; he was buried at St. Andrew's church in the town of Ipplepen. Moreover, his wife Gladys was later to claim that he died, not of typhoid, but of food poisoning following a visit to Paris.

Okay, you may ask: Fairweather, where do you come into the story?

I'm a devoted watcher of a BBC/LivingTV show called MOST HAUNTED, in which a team of mediums, parapsychologists and true believers investigate allegedly haunted sites. During their 2005 season the team went to the Old Church House Inn in Devonshire, which has some connection to the story of Bertram Fletcher Robinson. The show's medium, David Wells, corroborated Garrick-Steele's account of Robinson's grudge against Doyle and his death.

I frankly rolled in the floor over that one; this is after all the same medium who, during a visit to a pub at Haworth in Yorkshire, repeated the vile canard that Branwell Bronte, not his sister Emily, actually wrote WUTHERING HEIGHTS. (I don't believe that one either.) I was intrigued enough, though, to ask Willard (I didn't have a puter then) to do some research. It's for real--at least the suggestion that Robinson was murdered at Doyle's behest.

I've done some research of my own since then. It doesn't appear very likely to me at all, particularly in the supposition of an affair with Gladys Robinson. In 1907, following a conventional year of mourning for his late wife Louise, Doyle remarried--to a woman with whom he had been platonically involved for the last ten years of Louise's life. He and Jean, his second wife, were a deeply devoted couple for the remaining years of his life; when, after his son Kingsley died in World War I, Doyle became an avid if gullible researcher in spiritualism, Jean worked with him, exhibiting mediumistic abilities herself. Surely, if Robinson had had something to say from beyond the grave, he would have done so. Not to mention that there seems, from what I can find, no evidence before Harry Baskerville's 1959 bombshell of such rumors.

For more information, check out these sites:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article567525.ece

http://welcometolimbo.blogspot.com/2005/07/quite-three-pipe-
problem.html

http://www.bfronline.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=108&Itemid=9

As of January 2008, the Church of England has refused to allow the exhumation of Robinson's body.

What do you all think?

For that matter, what would Sherlock Holmes think?

Till somebody figures that out, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.

Once a month, Mom gets a box of books from a place in New York called Reader Service. They mostly deal in Harlequins, but several years ago Mom got into a grouping called simply Mysteries. They send a Harlequin in each box as a freebie. We pass the Harlequins on to my sister and then Mom settles in with the mysteries, which she passes on to me when she's done. (One such box yielded PRIMARY STORM, which I wrote about last time.)

It was in these boxes of mysteries that we were first introduced to Texas writer Bill Crider's series about Sheriff Dan Rhodes. Rhodes's Blacklin County is a relatively quiet one: no serial killers, so no excessive body counts; quirky characters, especially Hack, the county dispatcher, and Lawton, the jailer; and equally quirky minor characters, mostly gentle drunken eccentrics, faded high school football gods and beauty queens and the like. You could call it Mayberry with a Texas drawl.

I have an inveterate habit of "casting" books, just as if I were gonna make movies of them. So I see Matt Frewer (probably most famous for his 1980s series MAX HEADROOM, and most recently a member of the cast of Sci Fi's EUREKA) as Rhodes. Rhodes lives in the county seat, Clearview, with his wife Ivy, an insurance agent, two dogs, and most recently a cat. Rhodes acquired all his pets in the courses of investigations.

The series currently extends to fifteen books, the most recent of which is OF ALL SAD WORDS (published in February). I've read four of them and am always on the lookout for others. The first I read was A GHOST OF A CHANCE--obviously; murder, plus a subplot about a "ghost" that turns out to be an emu escaped from an exotic-animal farm.

Unfortunately, I've read the books in no particular order; the next one I read was A MAMMOTH MURDER, which involves the discovery of the bones of an extinct mammoth, and murder done by someone who wants to make more than scientific profit off the bones.

Next up, I read A ROMANTIC WAY TO DIE, and that one was a real goody: it's set at a romance writers' conference held in Blacklin County on an abandoned college campus (a place that reminds me of exactly such a place, Tehuacana's old Trinity University campus--although that may have been demolished or refurbished since I first heard of it); one of the writers, and a gorgeous local-boy-made-good named Terry Don Coslin, who is a male model for the covers of "bodice rippers", end up murdered, and Rhodes himself almost dies when someone sets fire to a campus building trying to cover up evidence. A ROMANTIC WAY TO DIE includes two would-be writers named Jan and Claudia, first introduced (as far as I know) in A MAMMOTH MURDER, who decide to begin a series about a handsome crimebusting sheriff using Rhodes as their model--a running gag ever since.

The most recent one of the series that came in the box is MURDER AMONG THE OWLS (2007)--not literally owls, but among the members of Clearview's Older Women's Literary Society, who read books and meet at the library once a month to discuss them. One member in good standing, Helen Harris, is murdered, and all the suspects seem to have a connection to her ne'er-do-well nephew, Leonard Thorpe. HMMM!

Frankly, I hope in the coming months we get another Rhodes mystery in the mystery box, or our local used bookstore turns up a few in their shelves. The writing is wonderful, done with an absolutely deadpan wit that makes you chuckle out loud; Hack and Lawton remind me of Roscoe and Enos from THE DUKES OF HAZZARD, although Hack and Lawton are a damned sight smarter than their counterparts; and Rhodes's pets are as engaging as any of the humans.

Till then, if anybody comes looking for me, I'll be in a corner somewhere with a book.