The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes. Bernard Capes

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       FOREWORD

      These words are the culmination (so far, at least!) of a series of events which, together, tell a story that would have appealed hugely to Bernard Capes. It is a story of coincidences and timing, and the odd ounce or nanogram of good luck – all essential tools for an author. We could add, for the spookilyminded, a dash of the metaphysical to properly set the scene.

      What made me go on to the Internet? Well, nothing other than ego: I wanted to see whether a book I’d written a few years ago could be purchased today. Without even a hint of surprise, it wasn’t listed anywhere; so I proceeded, with little confidence, to look up my grandfather ‘Bernard Capes’. And, lo! (I’m not sure why we use this expression, when we mean the exact opposite) there he was! Bernard E. Capes, At a Winter’s Fire, 1969 – seventy years after it was first published. Why on earth would someone reissue a comprehensively-forgotten (I thought) author, and then not in his own country?

      The journey had begun!

      I then wrote, for the Amazon Books site, a brief piece about my grandfather which – lo! again – drew a response from John in Connecticut, who’d come across a single phrase in Bloody Murder by Julian Symons: ‘… Bernard Capes’s neglected tour de force The Skeleton Key’.

      Shortly after, I received an e-mail from Bruce in New York, who’d come across another Capes book that I didn’t know of, and – yet another lo! – he sent me a photocopy of the introduction to the original 1989 edition of The Black Reaper, another book I hadn’t heard of. It was a collection of short stories, and the editor was identified only as ‘Hugh Lamb, Sutton, Surrey, England’.

      This wasn’t much to go on, but Lamb’s words (I almost said ‘tales’) told me so much that I didn’t know about my grandfather that I simply had to write to him. Indeed, until I read Hugh’s introduction, which filled in many gaps, all I knew about my grandfather was that my mother had adored him, that he had quite a sense of humour, that he died in a ’flu epidemic twenty years before I was born, and that his work was peppered with peerless similes.

      Would my letter reach Hugh Lamb? Would he still be alive? And would he reply?

      Yes, my letter was delivered. Bless Royal Mail!

      Yes, he was still alive. Bless … well someone!

      And yes, he did reply. Bless Hugh!

      In his introduction, Hugh talks about my grandfather’s contrarian angel, and the bad luck he must have experienced, which led me somewhat to consider the parallels in our lives (his and mine). I’ve been fortunately deprived on the bad luck front and over-supplied on the good. However, bad luck is relative. To win second prize in a $30,000 competition at age forty-three, and first prize a year later, is luck of a kind that I would quite happily contribute half of my pension to receive! (From an Australian perspective, as well, being unable to breed rabbits would, to us, have been nearly as valuable as the Gold Rushes.)

      The portrait of my grandfather that has been built up ought to give heart to other authors engaged in the eternal struggle to get published. Not many can say that they started at an age when many would have given up, and then actually had work published at an average rate of two books a year over a twenty-year period; and in fields ranging from poetry (two volumes) and history to detective stories, mysteries, romances, and – in numerous magazines – inventive tales of ghosts and other things which, deliciously, still go bump in the night.

      Hugh speculates that Bernard probably had to bear his share of literary snobbery, but he might have had a bit of his own. His daughter (my mother) said that he made some disparaging remarks about authors of detective or crime stories – ‘Anyone could write that sort of stuff’ kind of thing – and was obviously called out by his publishers, William Collins. In something akin to petard and hoist, the result was The Skeleton Key, now recognised as the first original crime novel issued by that legendary publishing house.

      My 1990s search for my name on the Internet – even before Google! – now brings up fourteen books, including Four Hander: Paths to Murder, which was directly inspired by HarperCollins re-issuing The Mystery of the Skeleton Key in 2015 and now The Black Reaper. Being the fourth generation in our family to have been published, it appears to me that there’s something in this gene thing. Or maybe it’s due to a clammy, twisting English Channel mist rolling its indefatigable, irresistible way through unsuspecting generations of veins across the Seven Seas and over more than a few black-cragged threatening mountain ranges …

      And so, thanks to the Internet, some un-met friends in the States, two highly professional libraries (Sutton, England; Mercantile, New York), several happy coincidences, impeccable timing, Hugh Lamb, the oft-maligned postal service, several tons of good luck, and – above all – the spirits who inhabit those worlds so often visited by Bernard Capes, I commend to your reading this new edition of some of the work of my grandfather, (very) late of Winchester, England. I hope the old stories entertain you, and whip the odd tingle up your spine, more than a supernatural century since they were written. He would be amused.

       Ian Burns

      Melbourne

      July 2017