Read My Lips

Abstract

Richard Marsh (1857–1915) appears to have relished inventing gruesome ways to torture and murder his characters. A popular crime writer who also found himself on the wrong side of the law, Marsh is today largely known for his bestselling detective horror novel, The Beetle: A Mystery (1897), published in the same year as Dracula. The Beetle is Marsh’s most famous novel. It was an instant hit. By way of example, the Academy said: ‘Dracula, by Bram Stoker, was creepy, but Mr Marsh goes one, oh! Many more than one better.’ The Glasgow Herald agreed: ‘Mr Marsh has, so to speak, out-Heroded Herod.’¹ Bram Stoker’s blood-sucking count has, of course, endured in the popular imagination, although at that time it was the monstrous and sadistic serial killer in The Beetle who mesmerized readers into buying the novel, securing more sales for Marsh than for Stoker until the 1920s. According to Hugh Greene, the brother of the novelist, Graham Greene, Marsh was ‘a man haunted by demons’.² Marsh’s novels are certainly a disorientating world where palmists are not to be trusted, where cigars are accompanied by evil forces and where it is highly inadvisable to accept sweets from strangers.

‘I all at once became conscious, as I struggled to ask help of God, that I was wrestling with something evil.’ Marjorie Lindon’s narration, The Beetle,

by Richard Marsh