Randalls Round: Nine Nightmares by Eleanor Scott
(British Library, 2021)
Reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller
The 1920s were a rich period for ghost story writing, exemplified by the stories that appeared in Cynthia Asquith’s Ghost Book series, the first volume of which came out in 1927. That featured work from familiar names, such as Algernon Blackwood, Oliver Onions, Hugh Walpole, and May Sinclair. Other writers producing work at this time included E.F. Benson, H. Russell Wakefield, and William Fryer Harvey. M.R. James himself was still occasionally publishing short stories, and a collected edition of his short stories would appear in 1931.
In the midst of all this, in 1929, without much fanfare, the publisher Ernest Benn issued a collection of nine short stories by Helen Leys, writing as Eleanor Scott. Randalls Round was described as a collection of ‘weird and uncanny’ stories but marketed very poorly so that it sank almost without trace. Needless to say, copies of that edition are not easily come by. Scott’s fortunes were revived, to a degree, in the 1970s and 1980s, when Hugh Lamb and Richard Dalby included some of her stories in their anthologies but it was not until 1996, when Ash-Tree Press produced a new hardback edition of the collection, that it was possible to properly see what the fuss was all about. Now, nearly thirty years later, the British Library has published a reasonably priced paperback edition and a new generation of ghost-story aficionados can see what the fuss is all about.
Eleanor Scott was never a bad writer—she came from a family of people who earned their living by writing so she thoroughly understood the nature of her craft. All of the stories in this collection, including two stories under the pseudonym ‘N. Dennett’, are well told, solidly plotted, and a pleasure to read. But what we do see in this collection is a writer who was learning her craft as a writer of weird tales, and Scott’s influences are not always lightly worn. ‘The Twelve Apostles’, for example, owes a heavy debt to James’s ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, using a similar mechanism of clues to a treasure hidden in inscriptions on stained glass. But whereas the guardian of the treasure in James’s story is repulsively amorphous, Scott’s guardian is more clearly tentacular in nature, as though Scott doesn’t yet trust her readers’ imaginations. Similarly, ‘Celui-La’, a stronger story in my view, has more than a passing flavour of ‘A Warning to the Curious’ and ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ about it. I’m inclined to think that Scott was actually slightly more in sympathy with Algernon Blackwood—‘The Room’, ‘The Cure’ and, albeit more weakly, ‘The Tree’—are all shaped by an awareness of a deeper natural power that is the hallmark of much of Blackwood’s work, such as ‘The Willows’.
It's clear, though, that Scott was steadily working towards her own particular style. For all it riffs on Walter de la Mare’s ‘Seaton’s Aunt’, and the notion of the elderly ‘relation’ who is drawing their strength from those who come into their orbit, Scott’s ‘The Old Lady’ is notable for the way in which the strong, capable heroine determines to rescue Adela Young, her university acquaintance from the clutches of her vampiric ‘aunt’, and the way in which marriage, the bane of the young university woman of the 1920s, becomes actualised as a threat.
However, it is ‘Randalls Round’ itself that is Eleanor Scott’s masterpiece. There are hints of its genesis in ‘The Cure’, with the presence of Murky Glam, the village unfortunate who is also the guardian of an ancient rite, but the idea of a ritual persisting into modern times is more fully explored in this story. Heyling, an overworked student has gone to the village of Randalls for some peace and quiet. His friend Mortlake has suggested that Heyling might look into an old dance or ceremony called Randalls Round, which seems to be associated with a nearby piece of derelict land containing the remains of a long barrow. The land’s owner refuses to allow Heyling to prospect for treasure, which should have been his first clue to leave well alone, but Heyling determines to visit the mound under cover of dark.
Which he does, only to find himself caught up in the last act of a ritual which has, over the last day or two, been playing out around him in the village. The story itself is once again well told, with more Jamesian resonances (again ‘A Warning to the Curious’, and also ‘Martin’s Close’) but it’s Heyling’s experiences in the field, spying on the men of the village as they enact an ancient ritual, and his subsequent encounter with something very economically sketched, that sets this story apart. There is a sense that Scott has finally found a subject of her own (a feeling echoed in ‘The Menhir’, by N. Dennett, whom Richard Dalby believed to be Helen Leys under another pseudonym. The style is certainly similar.
The mystery then is why Helen Leys published no more stories in this vein, at least that anyone has been able to find. Would she have continued to turn out stories in a Jamesian vein or might she have moved into more psychological territory as a number of other female writers were to do, Elinor Mordaunt and May Sinclair being prime examples? Or was it simply that she looked at the market and judged that there was money to be made in other genres, such as detective stories, which she also wrote. We’ll never know. Instead, we are left with a volume of enjoyable stories and tantalising hints of what might have been.
Review from BSFA Review 18 - Download your copy here.