There is something a little different this week…

 On Good Friday, 2017, which happened to fall on April 14th, I was asked if I might be interested in contributing a little something to ‘The Hopeless Vendetta’. At the time I was enjoying a pub lunch, so I can only imagine that it was the heady combination of warm beer and Stilton cheese that prompted me to agree, saying that I would produce a few words in time for the next edition.

Appropriately for the island of Hopeless, Maine, my first effort was to write an obituary for an elderly actor manager of the Henry Irving variety, named Sir Fromebridge Whitminster. This proved to be an historic moment in the annals of Hopeless, bringing to public attention for the very first time an inn called ‘The Squid and Teapot’, Sir Fromebridge’s favourite watering hole. I think it was generally acknowledged that ‘The Squid’ would somehow take on a life of its own, and so the following week saw my scribblings appear under the banner ‘Tales from the Squid and Teapot’, and featured no less than W.S. Gilbert, of Gilbert & Sullivan fame (in ‘The Sound of the Cutlery Moving’). Gilbert was the first of several well known people to visit, including the blues musician Robert Leroy Johnson and his friend, Johnny Shines (ln ‘Spoonwalker Blues’) – after all, where better than Hopeless to meet the devil on the crossroads? Other guest appearances came from the ocean-going saints, Brendan and Malo (in ‘No Country for Old Mendicants); Captain Edward Smith of the R.M.S. Titanic (in ‘Scilly Point’); the Elizabethen alchemist Doctor John Dee (in ‘The Visions of Doctor Dee’ plus several other tales), along with his friend Edward Kelley and a brief appearance by a young Will Shakespeare (in ‘The Little Ship of Horrors, part 2’). The latest, and less obvious, famous face to be on the island is Adolf Hitler, who had turned up on Hopeless at some point, and had quite forgotten his past, reverting to the family name of Schicklgruber, which his father had changed to ‘Hitler’ in the 1870s. In the tale ‘Krampusnacht,’ Herr Schicklgruber is violently spirited away by the Christmas bogey-man Krampus, so, albeit belatedly, justice was seen to be done.

Occasionally, real-life events have inspired the tales, such as the Centralia mine fire, in Pennsylvania, which has been burning for over sixty years (in ‘Hell’s Mouth’); The legend of the Dutchman’s Gold, which was cited in the tale of that name. In ‘The Persian Runner’, a businessman named Garfield Lawnside attempts to buy Hopeless, not unlike the way in which Donald Trump had designs on purchasing Greenland in 2019.

 Several characters have arrived on the island, only to perish fairly soon afterwards. With this being Hopeless, of course, death is rarely the end and not always a disadvantage. Although disappointed and a little perplexed that things did not turn out as expected, the Jesuit priest, Father Ignatius Stamage, seems quite happy to haunt anywhere his hat is hung. When an attempt was made to bring Sir Fromebridge Whitminster back to haunt his scarf, however, he had to decline as he had taken up a position as the ghostly Man in Grey, the spirit who famously haunts London’s Lyceum Theatre (in ‘The Man in Grey’).

 Hopeless has experienced its share of fantastic beasts in the tales. Besides the ubiquitous ghouls, vampires and werewolves, the island has seen the terrifying Aboo-dom-k’n, who apparently consumed Sir Fromebridge; the Kraken, on numerous occasions; various Selkies (In ‘People from the sea’ and other tales); the charming, but hideous Argentinian monster, Manchachicoj (in ‘The Stowaway’); the native-American bird-god, Pamola (who  my spell-check, annoyingly, insisted on amending to Pamela); the demon, Buer, straight from the 16th-century grimoire, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, with his lion’s head, from which five legs radiated like the spokes of a wheel (in ‘Bog Oak and Brass’ among other tales) and, most recently, Mr Squash, the eloquent Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, who is visiting Hopeless.

 Part of the pleasure, and indeed the pain,  in creating these tales is the research – honestly, some of them do require quite a lot of research. Before writing for The Vendetta I knew little or nothing about the people of the Passaquamoddy tribe; Selkies; The workings of the Edison-Bell phonograph; The procedure required for distilling absinthe and other spirits; The Brendan Voyage; Francis Younghusband and the British invasion of Tibet; The Quest for the fabled North-West Passage; Night-Soil Men (yes, they really did exist); Downeasters; Balloonists; The Pseudomonarchia Daemonum; The haunted Salamanca caves of Argentina; The Danse Apache and the Can-Can – which, you may imagine, obviously took a great deal of YouTube research! (incidentally, some of you may have noticed that the name of the Can-can troupe who are shipwrecked on the island, Les Demoiselles de Moulin Rouge, is a direct steal from Picasso’s painting, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon). I could go on, but after seven years the list seems endless.

 I was fortunate in inheriting, from Tom and Nimue’s original vision, a wealth of marvellous characters, whom they kindly allowed me to use and abuse as I pleased. Best, of all of these for me, is Drury, the skeletal hound. Drury is a gift for any dog-lover to write. He has also given me what I consider to be my best tale-title so far, being ‘The Curious Case of the Dog in the Nightdress,’ which describes his first meeting with Philomena Bucket. No one on the island knows anything of Drury’s origins, but I did attempt to suggest how things might have been in the tale ‘A Dog’s Life,’ which, I confess, reduced me to tears in the writing.

 So, I am writing this on the fourteenth of April 2024, exactly seven years after being first approached to contribute ‘a little something’ to The Vendetta. There have been a couple of short breaks during that period, but I reckon there must be about three hundred tales told in the series, so far. Occasionally, in the vague hope of continuity, I dig an early one out and have no recollection whatsoever of having written it. For all I know it could be a true account of events that have occurred, or may yet occur. As a believer in the possibility of a multiverse, therefore, I like to think that somewhere out there Durosimi, Doc Willoughby, Philomena , Reggie and all the rest – especially Drury – are wandering about in the fog, just an arm’s reach away on the island of Hopeless Maine.