About this Item
24th impression. Originally published 1897. DESCRIPTION: White DJ with lady and beetle to front over brown cloth with black titles Language: English. Book Condition: Good: Sharp corners, edges and spine ends. Line of glue residue to rear spine margin. Tightly bound with toned intact endpapers and strong hinges. Lightly toned pages with heavier toning to text block edges. DJ Condition: Poor: Heavy wear to upper and lower edges. 2cm missing segment ot lower front spine edge. Multiple tears to upper rear edge with large tear to upper rear corner. See photos Pages 350. Size: 8vo 19cm by 13cm. AUTHOR: Richard Marsh (1857-1915) was the pseudonym of the British author born Richard Bernard Heldmann He is best known for his supernatural thriller The Beetle: A Mystery, which was published in the same year as Bram Stokers Dracula and was initially even more popular The Beetle remained in print until 1960, and was subsequently resurrected in 2004 and 2007 Heldman was educated at Eton and Oxford University He began to publish short stories, mostly adventure tales, as "Bernard Heldmann," before adopting the name "Richard Marsh" in 1893. BOOK RESUME: Published in the same year as Bram Stokers Dracula and it may come as a surprise that The Beetle initially outsold Stokers cult vampire novel, going into no less than 15 editions before the Great War. Like Dracula, Marsh imagines a supernatural entity unleashed in Victorian London, except that the monster here is no vampire, but an entity rather more difficult to pin down: a Nameless Thing which, although vaguely bearing the features of a hideous man, scarcely seems to be human. This Being, which calls itself one of the Children of Isis, appears to have mesmeric powers and the magical ability to turn into a beetle or rather THE BEETLE. Its main purposes is to haunt one Paul Lessingham, an upcoming politician who, in younger days, made the fatal mistake of visiting a dubious Egyptian establishment, ending up a prisoner of an ancient esoteric cult. Lessinghams past has caught up with him with a vengeance and threatens to put his and his fianc es life in mortal danger. In common with other Gothic novels of the era, each one of The Beetles four books features a different first-person narrator. In The House with the Open Window, unemployed clerk Robert Holt seeks shelter in a seemingly abandoned house, only to fall under the mesmeric powers of the Egyptian fiend. In The Haunted Man, the story is taken up by eccentric, hyperactive inventor Sydney Atherton, an acquaintance of Lessingham and his rival in love. The object of their attention is Miss Marjorie Lindon, who seems to be the most wanted young woman in London and is also being pursued by the monster. Marjorie is also the narrator of the third Book: The Terror by Night and the Terror by Day. The novel ends with notes extracted from the Case-Book of the Hon. Augustus Champnell, Confidential Agent, a Sherlock-Holmes-like figure who tries to bring his detective skills to bear on the lurid mystery of THE BEETLE and leads a feverish hunt all over London for the elusive Egyptian insectoid. Seller Inventory # 9194
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