Bernard C. Blake

Bernard C. Blake (b. reg. Gosport, Hampshire, July-September 1882; d. 9 April 1918, Cocques, France) 

Bernard Cecil Blake was the third son (of three children) of John William Blake (1846-1920), who owned a yacht-fitting shop in Gosport,  and his wife Emma Julia Collins (1846-1934), who were married in 1867. His older brothers were Stanley James Blake (1870-1941), who worked alongside his father, and Victor John Blake (1873-1925), who became a medical doctor. 

Little is known of Blake's youth and education. In early 1892, he sent contributions (evidently letters or puzzles, which appear uncredited) to "The Children's Page" of  The Lady's Pictorial, and a photo of the boy at age nine, with his dog, appeared in the issue for 14 May 1892. He wrote letters to The Boy's Own Paper about five years later.  His first fiction was published in the local Hampshire newspaper (to which his father was a frequent contributor) in 1899. 

His first of three books was At the Change of the Moon (London: Greening & Co, [June] 1902). It contains nine stories, most of which are fairly short, and most of which concern madness or lunacy of some kind. There is a frame story of a competition witnessed at an inn by the narrator over a ten day storm in the 1870s,  whereby two men, Dr. Hermes, a retired brain specialist, and a small shriveled bald-headed man, nicknamed "Pharaoh" by the narrator, try to one-up each other with successive tales. None are atmospheric and rarely hint of the supernatural. Some of the contemporary reviews overpraise the work (e.g., "Mr. Blake has the touch of a fine artist, and knows the value of a suggested horror as against a plainly elaborated one. All who like weird literature and are fond of thrill should read this book" Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, 29 June 1902). 

Blake published five stories, two poems, and a piece of nonfiction in a short-lived small magazine Vectis in early 1903, but his next major work was a epistolary novel, The Peculiar History of Mary Ann Susan: Told by Herself (T. Fisher Unwin, [October] 1903). It is made up of letters from a young lady to her aunt, an amusing and humorous contrast to what Blake notes in a brief preface as novels written "with a purpose." 

In his entry in The Literary Year-Book for 1906 Blake listed himself as a contributor to Punch and to M.A.P. [Mainly about People, edited by T.P. O'Connor].  

Blake's final book was Cain's Wife (Walter Scott Publishing, [16 May] 1906). On publication it was attacked for daring to take on its Biblical subject matter. The Saturday Review called it "a vulgar melodrama" (19 January 1907). Another fairly negative review in the East Anglian Daily Times is worth quoting at length for it gives details about the novel and makes it sound highly interesting:

Mr. Blake does not follow the lines of the Biblical story. He adopts the theory that co-existing with Adam, the Creator put upon the earth another race of women and men, and that amongst the latter were some who possessed attractions for the "sons of God," as Adam and his sons were called to distinguish them from the less favoured "sons of the earth." Cain and Abel play prominent parts in the story: the elder is described as a giant of vast strength but of hideous features, whereas his brother is a magnificently handsome being. Amongst the daughters of the earth are sister patricians named Silave and Naamah, dark and light respectively physically and by nature. The love tangle which sets the four at cross purposes is made responsible for the commission of that crime of fratricide which caused a curse to descend upon Cain. The erring brother, though fierce and elemental, is averse to taking Abel's life until his temptation by the sensuous and revengeful Silave becomes irresistible. The description of that terrible period, and of the dire consequences of the sin of Cain is excellently done; indeed, the power of these portions must atone for the disappointment caused by other chapters. . . . Mr. Blake's greatest fault is his modernising of the actions and language of the actions in the great drama. (16 July 1906) 

After Cain's Wife, Blake apparently ceased publishing, and went to work at his father's shop, until it was sold in 1911. After the War broke out in 1914, he joined the Army and served in North India for two and a half years. Back in England in 1917, he asked that he serve in France in place of a married officer whose wife and family were in India. Incidentally, Blake's last known short story (mentioned in a 1914 newspaper article) appeared in The Regiment--it concerns the misery of a soldier and a woman who rush to marry. Blake himself never married. On April 9th 1918 he was shot in the chest at the Front, and died during subsequent medical treatment. 

Johnny Mains has championed At the Change of the Moon, publishing in 2025 with Mislaid Books an expanded edition (including all the items from Vectis), including a well-illustrated biographical account of what is known of Blake's life.  

 

Eric Ericson

Eric Ericson (b. Blaby, Leicestersire, 23 June 1925; d.reg. North Surrey, Oct-Dec 2006)

In the short span of five years, between 1978 and 1983, Eric Ericson published four books, and then the name disappears from the public record. Three are occult novels, and the fourth is occult nonfiction. The only known facts about him, for many years, were that he was born in 1925 (sourced from the US copyright registrations), and, according to the short biographical note on the rear flap of one of his books, that in 1981 he lived in Sunbury-on-Thames (in North Surrey). Many have suspected that the name was a pseudonym; that is correct. An online commentator has noted that Eric Priestley Towers left his research papers for his 1986 biography of Sir Francis Dashwood (1708-1781) to the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, and an accompanying biographical file records that he wrote novels under the pseudonyms Roderick Milton, Eric Ericson, and Tony Caxton.* I believe this is correct. 

Eric Priestley Towers was the son of Sidney Towers (1900-1968) and Winnifred May Priestley, who were married in Blaby in Leicestershire on 22 June 1924. The couple settled in nearby Wigston Magna. Eric was educated at Newton's Grammar School and at Jesus College, Cambridge. During W.W.II he served in the army in Italy and Austria, and supported the Allied Military Government in Vienna. His first known writings were all published under the name Roderick Milton. These include contributions (stories and articles) to Lilliput magazine throughout the 1950s. His first two books were published by Rupert Hart-Davis, Magic City: Three Stories of Vienna under Allied Occupation (1950), per the title on the dust-wrapper, and The Lightning That Struck Me (1951), the story of a man who wants to escape from behind the Iron Curtain. Tell Them in Sparta (Methuen, 1962) is a historical novel of the Battle of Thermopylae. It came out in paperback from the New English Library in 1964. 

author photo from a Tony Caxton book

 

Towers married Edith Alexandra Kuhnova Bartosch (1917-1977) in 1947, and after her death he married again in 1978 (his second spouse was named Helen: Towers dedicated two books to her). Towers worked professionally in corporate and public relations, so his use of pseudonyms for his secondary interest in writing may be seen as showing discretion. Certainly, for his next brace of books, with their details of the inner workings of sex-magic cults, a pseudonym would have been necessary. These are the four books published as Eric Ericson, three of which are mass market paperbacks from the New English Library. The first, The Sorcerer (February 1978), begins interestingly, with a young scientist introduced into a sex-magick cult by his latest lover. He quickly learns it is a coven of Satanistic witches, led by the sinister Frazer. The writing and plotting are over-the-top in many ways (particularly the sex scenes), but the supernatural powers are real and used mercilessly. 

The second Ericson novel, The Woman Who Slept with Demons (January 1980), continues along the same line, following a young veterinarian who sees a woman having sex with a demon. The book quickly becomes a kind of exploration of various types of sexual debauchery.

The third Ericson book is not a novel but a dictionary of people associated with the dark arts, from artist Aubrey Beardsley to Aleister Crowley, Gilles de Rais, Rasputin and Gerald Gardner. The full title is: The World, the Flesh, the Devil: A Biographical Dictionary (1981). This book was dedicated to Helen.

Master of the Temple (March 1983) is the final Ericson book, and its narrative is interrupted with various info-dumps of occult history (Ericson has even added eleven pages of notes about the story, chapter by chapter, at the end of the book). The main character is both a sales manager for a biscuit company and a sex magician. The narrative alternates between business meetings and sex with women, first in Europe then in America. Back in England it gets even weirder, about which the less said the better.

The three novels published in mass market format have rather garish covers (see below). One can't recommend any of them; they are pulpish, crude, cringe-inducing, and sexist in dated ways. The first two Eric Ericson novels were published in hardcover in the US by St. Martin's of New York. 

Towers published his next book under his own name, as by Eric Towers. It is a reconstructed biography of Sir. Francis Dashwood, an eighteenth century politician around whom legends of black magic and devil worship grew, making up the myth of the Hell Fire Club at Medmenham Abbey in Buckinghamshire. Dashwood: The Man and the Myth (1986) is the second book dedicated to Helen. 

For his last two books, Towers returned to St. Martin's Press of New York, who had published hardcovers of two Eric Ericson novels. These two mystery novels were both set in England, but published only in the US, under the Tony Caxton byline. Murder in a Quiet Place came out in July 1994;  Bowker's Bonfire in March 1996. Both feature Police Inspector Denis Bowler.

* This information appears in the Comments added by "Ged"  to a post on the Ericson novels located here.

Notes: Barry Hughart

Barry Hughart (his surname is pronounced  hew-gert) died in 2019 at the age of 85.  His career as a writer of fantasy was short-lived, but his work was acclaimed. His first novel, Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was (1984), was the co-winner of the 1985 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (along with Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock), and it won the 1986 Mythopoeic Award for Best Fantasy Novel. It was the first of three novels in a series. The second book was The Story of the Stone (1988), and the third, Eight Skilled Gentlemen (1991). Subsequently, all three were collected as The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox (1998). With increasing disappointment with his publishers, he left the field. He gave few interviews, and for the most part didn't say much publicly about himself. But these stray comments can be used, along with genealogical resources, to give somewhat of an overview of his life.

He, and a twin brother Peter, were born in Peoria, Illinois, on 13 March 1934. He had a sister one year older, and a half-sister from his father's first marriage. His parents were John Harding Page Hughart, Jr. (1899-1963) and Annie Veronica Barry (1907-1977), who were married in Chicago in 1931. In the 1930 US Census, his father was listed as the manager of a lumber company, and in the 1940 US Census as a salesman for a pipe manufacturing company, while Hughart's Contemporary Authors entry notes his father was "a naval officer." (The father became a Captain in the U.S. Navy in World War II.) His mother (known familiarly as Veronica), according to her obituary in the Arizona Daily Star for 4 August 1977, was an artist, architectural designer, and former journalist. She had attended school in North Carolina, and lived in Illinois and Connecticut before moving to Arizona in 1941, where she operated a guest ranch near Bonita, Arizona, beginning in 1948.  She and her family moved to Tucson in 1951. In the early 1950s she wrote a syndicated newspaper column titled "What a Woman Thinks." 

Barry and his brother are known to have attended the Greenfield school in Arizona, and Barry also attended Andover in Connecticut, in the class of 1952. He went to Columbia University (A.B., 1956), and served in the U.S. Air Force from 1956-60. From 1960-63 he worked with a military surplus weapons supplier in the Near East, and from 1963-65 in the Far East. From 1965-70 he was manager at the Lenox Hill Book Shop in New York City, after which time he became a writer.

Hughart characterized his early life as follows in the flap copy of the 2008 Subterranean Press edition of the omnibus of The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox:

Barry Hughart, Fear magazine 1989

When I got out of Andover in the 1950s I suffered from fairly severe depression, but this was back when the only such term recognized by the medical profession was 'depressive' following 'manic' which was one bad gig until some genius renamed it 'bipolar disorder' and after that it couldn't harm a fly. Since I wasn't lucky enough to qualify for manic and clinical depression didn't exist they diagnosed schizophrenia and packed me off to a booby hatch. (Which was not entirely a bad thing. Man, the scene at Kings Count Psychotic Ward was like awesome!) Then I was promoted to a slightly less odorous asylum where Doctor Oscar Diethelm expounded upon the delights of going snickety-snick on my frontal lobes, and while it would take too long to explain I managed to escape to Columbia University. There I found myself groping through weird landscapes obscured by clouds of pot behind which pimpled prophets of the Beat Generation shrieked, 'Our minds destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, dragging through black streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, or what the fuck, something like that. Yo, daddy-o!' and I said to myself, 'Barry, you have found a home.' 

When I wafted back into the world a few years later my depression was still there but I was allowed to prove my sanity by blowing things up for the U.S. Air Force. No, not Vietnam. Planting ingenious and mostly illegal mine fields around the eternal DMZ in Korea. Time passed but not much else. I moved to the Arizona/Sonoran Desert where I could live quietly, surrounded on all sides by prickly pear, cat's claw, devil's horns, barrel cactus, jumping cactus, and illegal immigrants. I still occasionally dreamed of bright flashes followed by BOOM! which was a shame because I had other memories of the Far East: good memories, warm memories, and in 1977—ten years before Prozac—I decided to use those and whatever else I could come up with to create an alternate world into which I could creep on dark and stormy nights and pull over my head like a security blanket. So I read a lot and scribbled a lot and gradually the land of Li Kao began to take shape. But the first draft of Bridge of Birds didn't really work and I couldn't see what was wrong, so I dumped it into a drawer for a few years. Then one day I read Lin Yutang's The Importance of Understanding and found the prayer to a little girl that I mention in a footnote in the final version. It made me realize that while I'd invented good things like monsters and marvels and mayhem the book hadn't really been about anything. I opened the drawer. 'Okay!' I said to myself. 'This book is going to be about love.' And so it is, and so are ones that followed

The original draft of The Bridge of Birds is online here.  It was printed as a standalone trade paperback volume to the slipcased edition, limited to 200 copies, of the 2008 Subterranean Press omnibus, The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

According to Hughart, the rewritten Bridge of Birds was turned down by 17 publishers before it finally sold to St. Martin's Press as a straight novel. A reader at Alfred Knopf returned the manuscript with a haughty comment: "This is not historically accurate!"  Hughart noted: "Paperback rights were sold to Del Rey thanks to Anne McCaffrey, who was solicited for a comment on the hardcover, loved the book, and later pressed it on to Judy-Lynn Del Rey in a New York taxi" (Locus, December 1985). Thus, rather reluctantly, he became a fantasy author, though he felt that his books were more adventure or detective stories. 

In an interview with Jerry Kuntz from January-February 2000, Hughart reflected: 

The master Li books were a tightrope act and hard to write, but not, alas, very remunerative. Still, I would have continued as originally planned if I'd had a supportive publisher: seven novels ending with my heroes' deaths in the battle with the Great White Serpent, and their elevation to the Great River of Stars as minor deities guaranteed to cause the August Personage of Jade almost as much trouble as the Stone Monkey. Unfortunately I had St. Martins, which didn't even bother to send a postcard when I won the World Fantasy Award; Ballantine, which was dandy until my powerhouse editor dropped dead and her successors forgot my existence; and Doubleday, which released The Story of the Stone three months before the pub date, guaranteeing that not one copy would still be on the shelves when reviews came out, published the hardcover and the paperback of Eight Skilled Gentlemen simultaneously, and then informed me they would bring out further volumes in paperback only, meriting, of course, a considerably reduced advance.

That put an end to the series, and one can't really blame Hughart for stopping.

There remain some mysteries of Hughart's bibliography yet to be solved.

In the Locus profile from December 1985, it states: The Bridge of Birds was “the first novel Hughart published under his own name, but he had previously written two pseudonymous novels which he now dismisses as ‘terrible—I’ve done with them and want to forget them.’” He clarified this a bit in his 1992 Contemporary Authors entry, noting he was "also author of screenplay for Bridge of Birds, and 'a couple of early novels under pseudonyms: out of print, unlamented, and the author prefers to forget them." But what are they about, and what are the pseudonyms?

In the profile of Hughart in the May/June 1989 issue of Fear, it is noted: “Despite the odd-job existence in the Far East, Hughart enjoyed writing: he did not intend to be a novelist but would have liked to have been a poet and, indeed, some of his verse did see publication.” Publication where? His Contemporary Authors entry notes that he was a "contributor of articles to periodicals, including Village Voice."  But none of these contributions are known.

Also in his Contemporary Authors entry, Hughart noted that he “worked as dialogue writer for films, including Devil’s Bride, Honeymoon with a Stranger, Man on the Move, The Other Side of Hell, Welcome Home Johnny Bristol, Snow Job, Special Effects, and When the Bough Breaks.  Some of these were released as films---e.g., Honeymoon with a Stranger (1969), Welcome Home, Johnny Bristol (1972), Snow Job (1972), but Hughart’s input was likely minimal. 

He did, however, write three known screenplays in this time period, whose copyright was registered with the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C.  These include “The Idol’s Eye” 68 pp., October 1970;  “Sing along with Billy Blake” 121 pp., including lyrics for one song, November 1971; and “Enemies of the People”  150 pp. March 1973.  All three are unproduced.

Again from his Contemporary Authors entry, he noted as his "work in progress": "Writing a novel, Dancing Girl, and preparing a screenplay for the work; continuously researching ancient China."  None of these ever appeared.

Finally, a recommendation for the Barry Hughart Bibliography, a website maintained by Mike Berro, an invaluable resource.  See here.  And it also hosts the interview with Hughart by Jerry Kuntz, January-February 2000, cited above.  Accessible here.