Eldritch Tales (85 page)

But there was still one final glitch to overcome before the collection could go ahead. At 6:00 p.m. on November 22, a frantic Gollancz cable-phoned Derleth:

Derleth wrote back to John Bush two days later: ‘I was sorry to learn by cable yesterday that the copy of
The Lurker at the Threshold
I had dispatched almost a month ago had not yet reached you. I sent off another copy by first-class airmail, and this ought to come to hand at about the same time as this letter.’

Not only did this replacement copy of
Lurker
arrive at the Gollancz offices on November 27, but the other edition Derleth had dispatched in October was also finally delivered on December 5.

‘I’m glad to know that at least one copy of
The Lurker at the Threshold
turned up!’ Derleth wrote in a letter dated December 2, 1967. ‘Arkham House books are such collector’s items over here that books are frequently stolen from the mails – evidently by postal service personnel who recognize the label on the parcel.’

At the same time, over and above his usual author’s allowance, Derleth ordered an extra 200 copies of the forthcoming Gollancz collection, because, as he had explained in his letter of November 24: ‘Since it reprints material now out of print with us, we will probably want to order a larger number of copies when publication looms.’ According to a notation, these copies – presumably for re-sale through Arkham House – were apparently invoiced at half the cover price.

With publication set for May 1968, Gollancz for some reason sent a proof copy to their solicitors, Rubinstein, Nash & Co in London’s Gray’s Inn. In a note dated April 2, the legal firm’s consultant, H.F. Rubinstein, made the pithy observation: ‘This consists of stories previously published – presumably without libel trouble resulting.’

The book was issued under Derleth’s suggested title of
The Shadow Out of Time and Other Tales of Horror
at a price of thirty shillings. The front dust-wrapper flap candidly admitted: ‘When we published H.P. Lovecraft’s Dagon we made the claim that we had completed publication of his works. In this we were wrong. We received several letters from members of the public giving us names of stories that were not included in any of our three collections. On investigation, we found that there was a novel,
The Lurker at the Threshold
, and also two novellae [sic] and five stories outstanding, together with nine stories completed and edited by his friend, publisher and Literary Executor, August Derleth. It is these latter sixteen items that make up the present volume.’

Apparently, the Gollancz copywriter had got confused (or wasn’t very good at mathematics). The five stories and two ‘novellae’ by Lovecraft said to be in the book were actually six stories: ‘In the Vault’, ‘The Picture in the House’, ‘Cool Air’, ‘The Terrible Old Man’, ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ and ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’. The rest of the volume was rounded out with
ten
of Derleth’s so-called ‘posthumous collaborations’, as the dust-jacket blurb helpfully explained: ‘Among the papers left by Lovecraft, and found after his death, were various outlines for works which he did not live to write . . . the scattered notes were put together by August Derleth whose finished stories evolved from Lovecraft’s suggested plots.’

No doubt many Lovecraft purists would take exception to that last statement. The second half of the book consisted of ‘Stories by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth’: ‘The Survivor’, ‘Wentworth’s Day’, ‘The Peabody Heritage’, ‘The Gable Window’, ‘The Ancestor’, ‘The Shadow Out of Space’, ‘The Lamp of Alhazred’, ‘The Fisherman of Falcon Point’, ‘The Dark Brotherhood’ and ‘The Shuttered Room’.

After all the problems with obtaining a copy, and John Bush’s assertion to Derleth in his December 7 letter that ‘we shall certainly be including
The Lurker at the Threshold
’ in the book, that collaborative novel was notably missing from the contents of Gollancz’s new Lovecraft collection!

Back in his initial letter to Victor Gollancz in May 1950, August Derleth had mentioned that Museum Press had published
The Lurker at the Threshold
in Britain under both Lovecraft’s and his byline.

‘This is, however, decidedly inferior work,’ he added with unusual candour, ‘since 9/10ths of it was written by me from Lovecraft’s notes. Yet it has done well enough for them that, in the face of my refusal to permit their publication of the Lovecraft stories in collection, they have asked for a volume of my own tales in this genre, and this is at present being prepared in ms. by my secretary. (This, too, I hasten to add, is secondary work.)’

Interestingly, although no such collection of Derleth’s stories ever appeared from Museum Press, they did reprint one other Arkham House title –
The Hounds of Tindalos
by Frank Belknap Long – in 1950.

The Lurker at the Threshold
, published under both Lovecraft’s and Derleth’s names by Arkham House in 1945, was a slim novel based upon a fragment, ‘The Round Tower’, and other unrelated notes and story ideas discovered amongst Lovecraft’s papers following his death. Taken together, this material reportedly amounted to only around 1,200 words.

‘I constructed and wrote
The Lurker at the Threshold
,’ revealed Derleth later on, ‘which had nowhere been laid out, planned, or plotted by Lovecraft.’

The book was reputedly reprinted in Argentina in 1946 by Editorial Molino before Museum Press produced their own British edition two years later.

During the contractual problems about who controlled the British rights to the Lovecraft material, Derleth had complained to Victor Gollancz in his letter of July 3, 1950, that Otis Kline Associates had sold
The Lurker at the Threshold
to Museum Press through the Pearn, Pollinger & Higham literary agency ‘at a figure which did not inspire me with confidence in either of the firms which undertook to place material’.

After originally considering including the short novel in
The Shadow Out of Time and Other Tales of Horror
, John Bush apparently changed his mind and decided that, as they had done with
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
in 1951, the tale was strong enough to stand on its own.

As a result,
The Lurker at the Threshold
was issued as a separate hardcover volume in 1968 at twenty-five shillings (£1.25) and reprinted the following year. ‘Lovecraft did not himself finish
The Lurker at the Threshold
,’ admitted the jacket copy. ‘Notes and plans for the book were left at his death, and enough had been done to indicate the direction of the plot.’

Eighteen years after he had made his first approach to Victor Gollancz, August Derleth finally had a book of his own published by the yellow-jacketed imprint (albeit in conjunction with his late friend and mentor).

With the publication of
The Haunter of the Dark and Other Tales of Horror, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror, Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, The Shadow Out of Time and Other Tales of Horror
and
The Lurker at the Threshold
, Gollancz had finally issued all of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction in the United Kingdom. Or had they . . . ?

The publisher was still receiving letters from devout readers who continued to come up with missing titles from Gollancz’s Lovecraft canon.

One such was R. Denton (Mr) from Folkestone, Kent, who wrote to the publisher in February 1970 to point out that he had read another of Lovecraft’s ‘collaborations’ – ‘Out of the Eons’ by Hazel Heald – in a paperback edition of August Derleth’s anthology
The Sleeping and the Dead
. ‘Surely, as both your four collections and this anthology have in common August Derleth as editor, there is no excuse for this story’s omission from your collections,’ complained an obviously disgruntled Mr Denton.

He went on to mention the San Francisco rock band which had adopted Lovecraft’s name, and revealed that the album sleeve notes referred to the author’s poem cycle ‘Fungi from Yuggoth’. ‘Poems?!’ exclaimed Mr Denton. ‘This may, of course, be another one of those commercial “things”, or an attempt to identify H.P. Lovecraft (the author) as the original beat/hippy. Nevertheless, I feel you should investigate, and perhaps you will find it necessary to publish yet a fifth collection. I eagerly await your reply.’

Clearly exasperated, John Bush still took the time to respond: ‘We rather despair of ever being able to publish
every
story that Lovecraft wrote or had a hand in,’ he acknowledged in a letter dated February 9. ‘However much we believe – in conjunction with information given us by August Derleth – that we have really got every one, we seem to find that there is something we have missed out.’

Maybe, with this admission, it was time to let some other publisher take up the Lovecraft mantle in Britain . . .

Although Victor Gollancz would reprint new hardcover editions of its first four Lovecraft volumes intermittently during the 1960s and ’70s, the company had purchased English language volume rights throughout the British Commonwealth (excluding Canada) in its initial dealings with Arkham House.