Not at Night

Pre-War horror stories

The first great period of ghost and horror stories lasted throughout the Victorian era until the First World War and were constantly in print in popular volumes until the end of the 1930s. The M.R.James volumes  are especially prized, as are the anthologies compiled by the maverick priest Montague Summers, legendary authority on Gothic literature and the supernatural.

 In the 1920s though, a new era began in America, inspired by the pulp magazines that began to flourish and provide an outlet for the great crime, science fiction and horror writers who were able to hone their talents on the magazine’s voracious appetite for material. Most of these writers came into their prime in the 1940s and 50s, but their thirties pulp work, along with many other writers who never made it into the mainstream, is a cornucopia of fantasy, dystopian literature that informed the unsettled, angst-ridden world of the forties and fifties. The science fiction and crime elements are for another day, but this section is concerned with the horror stories that came of age in the 1930s pulp magazines.

There were 100s of different titles covering many genres, and the horror content was best served by the legendary ‘Weird Tales’. The magazine wasn’t available over here until copies were brought by the GIs during the War, and there were then also UK magazines, mainly Science Fiction, Adventure and Western.

I devoured the Victorian and Edwardian stories found in the volumes in the bookcase in my grandmother’s house, but it was some years before I could read the more modern American stories when the next publishing phenomenon came along. The pulps died in the mid-fifties as publishing trends changed and the paperback, which was growing after the war, became dominant. The great science fiction and crime writers who began by publishing their short stories in the pulp magazines, now published their novels largely in paperback originals. Some published in hardback as well, but even Raymond Chandler, who had all his novels published in hardback, had his short story collections published as paperbacks. 

It was the late 1950s before I became aware of this new literary treasure trove, and that was down to an explosion of American paperbacks flooding into the country. Every newsagent would have a spinning rack of paperbacks replenished every few weeks or so with an amazing variety of literature. I read all the science fiction and horror I could find, but such was my passion for reading that any colourful cover was likely to be given a chance. It was in this way that I first discovered James Farrell and the ‘Danny O’Neil’ tetralogy, which led to the great ‘Studs Lonigan’ trilogy, a favourite of mine and one of the great works of American literature I think, although little read today. These and many other classic works were given the lurid paperback treatment, alongside the more generally pulp material that I sought out.

It was in this way that I, again by accident, was introduced to the huge inventory of classic new horror writing that had flourished between the Wars in America. 

I took almost any horror titles that looked interesting and so read ‘Not At Night’, purely at random, but immediately realised that this was Horror writing of a different kind than the stories I had grown up reading. I soon discovered that there were two more books in the series, read them as well, and so I discovered by pure chance the world of Weird Tales and H P Lovecraft.

It was many years before I became aware that these three little paperbacks were simply extracts from a seminal series of books published in this country in the twenties and thirties now known as the ‘Not At Night’ series. They were the brainchild of an editor of genius at Selwyn and Blount, Christine Campbell Thomson, who also wrote short stories   

under the pseudonym Flavia Richardson, some of which she smuggled into various volumes of the series. The series itself ran to twelve volumes from 1925 to1936, reprinting mainly stories from Weird Tales, otherwise unobtainable in this country, and publishing Lovecraft stories in book form for the first time, pre-dating American publication by some years.

They were cheaply printed two shilling editions, so priced for the admirably democratic ideal that they would appeal to time-pressed travellers at railway stations, who could pick them up and throw a coin on the counter without pausing; an idea which must have had merit as they  sold a quarter of a million copies over 11 years. The stories were handpicked by the ever-discerning editor, and the dustjackets featured wonderfully grisly pulp images that must have made them irresistible to casual buyers; but they were very cheaply made and those hundreds of thousands have dwindled to a diminishing core of very desirable collector’s items, especially with the very fragile jackets. The set I am illustrating is far from perfect, but it is a set, and sets require a great deal of effort and expense to assemble.