("It belongs to those short, perfect books that are rarely...)
"It belongs to those short, perfect books that are rarely written in English." - Evening Standard
"This extremely odd performance is indicative of great power." - Gerald Gould, The Observer
"A right intriguing comedy and mystery. As entertainment during your insomnia, it is earnestly recommended." - Milwaukee Journal
"A perfect masterpiece of hair-raising horror. It may offend some of its readers, but it will not bore them." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A female killer stalks the streets of London, sleeping with young men before slashing their throats and mutilating their bodies. The crimes have baffled the police and enraged Londoners, who demand the murderer's arrest. Mary, Duchess of Dove, a gentle young widow who is beloved by all who know her, seems an unlikely suspect, but the clues all point to her. The police have a variety of theories - perhaps the Duchess has been hypnotized or drugged, maybe she has an evil double, or could it be a Communist plot to discredit the peerage? Inspector Basil Icelin is determined to solve the mystery, but the true explanation is far more shocking and terrifying than anyone could ever imagine.
Michael Arlen (1895-1956) became a rich and world-famous celebrity after the publication of his bestseller The Green Hat in 1924. Hell! said the Duchess (1934) is a delightfully bizarre book, telling a "bedtime story" in a light, humorous style that contrasts oddly with its gruesome and horrific subject matter. This first-ever reprinting of what Karl Edward Wagner has called the best supernatural horror novel ever written includes an introduction by Mark Valentine.
(This book was converted from its physical edition to the ...)
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(
The Green Hat perfectly reflects the atmosphere of the ...)
The Green Hat perfectly reflects the atmosphere of the 1920s—the post-war fashion for verbal smartness, youthful cynicism, and the spirit of rebellion of the "bright young things" of Mayfair. Iris Storm, femme fatale, races around London and Europe in her yellow Hispano-Suiza surrounded by romantic intrigue, but beneath the glamour she is destined to be a tragic heroine. A perfect synecdoche, in fact: as the hat is to the woman, so the words of the title are to an entire literary style. The success of the novel when it was first published in 1924 let to its adaptation for the screen, with Greta Garbo starring as Iris Storm.
(Noel Anson and I had been great friends in our first yout...)
Noel Anson and I had been great friends in our first youthful days, but our lives and ambitions had led us so contrarily that we had not seen each other for more than six years when, on the night two weeks ago, we happened to meet at the Club. We had both, of course, so much to say that, as often happens, we babbled on quite inartistically, spoiling many a good story in the gay, breathless exchange of reminiscence and experience; from all of which, however, clearly loomed out these great cardinal facts of our lives, that we had both married; my wife, who was a perfect woman, I explained, I had had to leave behind in New Zealand to take care of her old father; while his wife, who was also a perfect woman, he chivalrously insisted, had thought fit to divorce poor Noël some six months before.
12 But there was one story, anyway, which Noël Anson did not hurriedly spoil. He kept it long inside him—until that hour after ten when our corner of the smoking-room was entirely our own, and until he safely knew that I had talked enough to be able now to remain comfortably silent and attentive. Dear Noël, he dearly loved to tell a story!
"You are the very first person to hear this," he began untruthfully; and the calm grey eyes of my friend Noël Anson merged into the luxurious stare with which the raconteur hypnotically fixes his prey all the world over. Even thus must the gentle Marlow have transfixed his hearers as he led them inexorably through the labyrinth of Lord Jim's career, and through many another such intricacy of Conradian imagination.
"It's old, older than the stuff that hills and Armenians are made of," he said. "The ageless tale of the inevitable lady sitting alone in the inevitable box of the inevitable theatre to which our inevitable young man has gone to wile away a tiresome evening. History supplies the formula, it is only the details for which I'm personally responsible.
"There I sat, one night years ago, alone13 in a stall at the old Imperial; grimly smoking, and watching the footlight favourites 'getting-off' with a stage-boxful of rowdy young men who hadn't the grace even to try to imitate the few gentlemen who might at one time have been good enough to know 'em—until, on a moment, my eyes circled round the upper boxes and fixed on a marvellous lady in white, amazing and alone and unashamed....
Michael Arlen was a British essayist, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and scriptwriter of an Armenian origin.
Background
Michael Arlen was born on November 16, 1895 in Ruse, Bulgaria, the son of Sarkis Kouyoumdjian, an importer. The family had fled Turkish persecution in Armenia in 1892 and in 1901 settled in Southport, England, where there was a large Armenian colony.
Education
Dikran was sent to Malvern College in Worcestershire to prepare for Oxford and a business career.
He chose medical school at the University of Edinburgh instead, but after a few months in 1913 realized that it had been "a silly mistake. "
Career
After a brief vacation in Switzerland, he moved to London, where he lived on a small allowance. Feeling exiled and lonely, he befriended writers, artists, and the young society people who frequented bohemian quarters. In 1916 Dikran began writing for Ararat in support of Armenian causes and for New Age, a weekly subsidized by the Fabians and edited by Alfred R. Orage. He also published informal essays, book reviews, short plays, and--encouraged by Orage, D. H. Lawrence, and George Moore-romantic fiction.
A series of sketches about his youth became The London Venture (1919), published under the pseudonym Michael Arlen, the name of one of his characters. He legally changed his name in 1922, when he became a naturalized British subject. Combining a highly artificial manner with an essentially romantic spirit, Arlen's fiction quickly won the approval of the London café society that he mocked and admired.
Such stories as "When the Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" and "Introducing a Lady of No Importance and a Gentleman of Even Less" suggest the extent to which manner, for Arlen, was all important. In 1924 he published his best-known work, The Green Hat, the cynical and sentimental romance of Iris March, "a young woman careening in canary-colored motor cars between Deauville and Nice, " who leads a notoriously promiscuous existence but dies "for purity. " Celebrated, parodied, attacked on both sides of the Atlantic, and translated into eight languages, the novel set a new standard for titillating indecency and earned its author a small fortune.
His dramatic adaptation of the novel starred Katherine Cornell in New York and Tallulah Bankhead in London; Greta Garbo played Iris March in the film version, A Woman of Affairs (1928).
After producing three more popular romances, Arlen wrote Man's Mortality (1933), a serious speculation about the state of the world in the year 1987. It was influenced in part by H. G. Wells, then a neighbor. "I'm through with women in love, " Arlen said. "My new novel is about politics. " Although it was not a popular success, the book was Arlen's best work, free of stylistic affectation yet characteristically witty and sometimes profound.
After returning to England in 1939, Arlen wrote a column in the Tatler for six months and then aided the war effort as public relations officer for the western Midlands region. When a question was raised in Parliament in January 1941 as to the suitability of a "foreigner" in that important post, Arlen resigned, deeply hurt. Having already sent his family to the United States, he left England, spending a few years in Hollywood as a screenwriter before settling in New York City in 1945 or 1946. Arlen kept in touch with a wide circle of writers and celebrities, but his writing dwindled to almost nothing.
One of his last stories (1941), "Gay Falcon, " was the basis for fourteen films and a popular radio series about a romantic rogue. Arlen became an American citizen in June 1952, four years before his death in New York City.
Although Arlen's fiction may still be enjoyed for its wit and charm, the significance of his career rests heavily on the role he created for himself, a role he sustained entertainingly and carefully, rivaling the most sophisticated and wealthy people of his day. Yet he was always conscious of being an exile and was never quite secure behind his brilliant mask. Some of his famous remarks about himself hint at this: "Every other inch a gentleman" and "a case of pernicious Armenia. "
Arlen's numerous literary friendships included Richard Aldington, Osbert Sitwell, and Noel Coward in England, and William Saroyan, Thornton Wilder, and John O'Hara in the United States. Ernest Hemingway remembered that Arlen had introduced him to the Englishwoman who inspired the character of Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, although he dismissed Arlen's fiction as "hurried" and "second-rate, " knew the plots of all his works by heart.
Near the end of his life Arlen suffered from writer's block. He died of cancer on June 23, 1956, in New York.
Arlen had always looked "spruce, elegant, debonair, " as a friend observed. Even for his detractors, Arlen came to represent the skillful professional who makes the most of his opportunities, never bewails his lot, and seldom takes his writing so seriously as to put it ahead of stylish living.
Connections
On May 1, 1928, Arlen married Atalanta Mercati, a Greek-American countess. They had two children and lived in a villa near Cannes for the next decade.