“The Hoard of the Gibbelins” (1911)

Here’s another good one from Lord Dunsany, also very short. Most of his stories are short, though he also wrote novels. It is typically biting in its mordant humor, opening with, “The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.” Their hoard consists of jewels and gold in vast amounts, a great temptation to humans living nearby. People are forever trying to rob them and forever failing. I’m giving nothing away when I say this is the story of another failure. But the knight making this attempt, Alderic, certainly gets the A for effort, among other things enlisting a dragon and getting himself past the Unpassable Forest. Something about the “Lord” in Dunsany’s name—he was authentically heir to an ancient Irish peerage—chips in to the work for me: he’s cynical and sophisticated in ways recognizably of the rich. Perhaps the title evokes some reflexive class deference. His stories are silly yet fun to read. Dunsany is better than the more uneven Saki, for example, because his stories are so well done, a light touch with the humor and always a straight face. “Cheeky” might be the operative term, but the violence can be abrupt and bracing. In my internet travels on Dunsany and his work I found an interesting forum called The Weird Tradition, with a weekly reading and discussion group called The Deep Ones. They chew over stories at about the rate of one per week. Dunsany is a regular focus of attention and I’ve learned some interesting things about him. He worked on his books and stories with illustrators, notably Sidney Sime, who created the image above and seemed to function as a sort of Jack Kirby to Dunsany’s Stan Lee. That is, many specific stories proceeded from Sime’s illustrations, which came first. The Deep Ones is very good about including these illustrations in their discussions. They illuminate the stories in interesting ways. The stories on their own, as I’ve seen with kindle products, lose a little something without the pictures. At the same time, Lord Dunsany is one of those writers who get better with more reading—you have to kind of tune into his world with a little practice. Thus, in this case, we can be pretty sure Alderic never has a chance. But he has an elaborate plan, and it’s working, and then: “... there were the Gibbelins waist-deep in the water, with torches in their hands! And, without saying a word, or even smiling, they neatly hanged him on the outer wall—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.” THE END. Beautiful.

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“Two Bottles of Relish” (1932)

I know this Lord Dunsany story is a murder mystery because it was another I found in the 65 Great Murder Mysteries anthology edited by Mary Danby, which is chock-full of murder mysteries however offbeat. In 1932 Lord Dunsany was reportedly trying to break into the murder mystery story market, but I prefer to think of “Two Bottles of Relish” as a parody of Sherlock Holmes, tacking on a gruesome and somewhat obvious twist. Dunsany is otherwise doing his basic witty, whimsical, droll, fantastic, weird thing. The story is told by Smithers (or Smethers), a traveling salesman who “pushes” Num-numo, “a relish for meats and savouries.” He needs to get his sales numbers up. Dunsany always did like a traveling salesman. (Later Smithers will mention he has no idea what savouries are.) “Two Bottles of Relish” is not exactly a locked-room situation but something like it, with the disappearance of a young woman that is probably a murder. But there is no corpse and so no evidence. Smithers tells it with a lot of digressions, with the prolix bonhomie of the salesman at his ease over cigars and brandy. There’s a long preamble about renting an apartment with the Sherlock Holmes character, an Oxford scholar. Smethers is apparently the Dr. Watson around here. The suspect, Steeger, was living with the woman at the time she disappeared along with all her money. Around that time Steeger came into an unusually large amount of money. Other seemingly random clues include that Steeger was a vegetarian—extremely suspicious in this story—and also that he chopped down all the trees on the property apparently for firewood. That seemed to me to be more suspicious than being a vegetarian but what do I know. Smethers does the investigatory footwork for his genius roommate and sleuths out this information, including that Steeger bought an unusually large supply of Num-numo relish shortly before the woman’s disappearance. The twist—I’m going to give it away now!—is that he disposed of the body by eating it. He used the trees as an excuse for purchasing an ax. He only bought vegetables from the grocer because he had a supply of meat at home, which is why he needed the extra relish. I mean, this is all patently absurd as murder mysteries go, hardly the stuff of some ultrarational detective using scientific deduction methods. But it’s a pretty good Lord Dunsany story.

65 Great Murder Mysteries, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
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“The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles” (1951)

Margaret St. Clair’s very short story should be a reminder to all of us to read more Lord Dunsany. It rivals Dunsany’s original gnoles story from 1912 (“How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles”)—both are in the Weird anthology. Gnoles are jewel-eyed creatures who live in the woods and have no use and little regard for humans. This story features a Rotary Club style of midcentury salesman, Mortensen, who studies Dale Carnegie and other sales literature. Mortensen has decided on setting up trade with gnoles in order to service their “cordage requirements.” The situation is absurd. Very little is known about gnoles other than a general sense they are quite dangerous. But our go-getter is determined to give it a try—he needs to get his sales numbers up. The story is short enough to verge on short-short but there’s no real hard twist to it. We come to it with a good idea of what’s going to happen. “The gnoles had a bad reputation,” it starts. But Mortensen “reasoned, correctly enough, that cordage must be something for which the gnoles had a long unsatisfied want.” Indeed, that’s exactly what proves out. They are happy to purchase rope and pay him with a fabulous emerald the size of a personal watermelon. Mortensen should have quit while he was ahead but thinks it would be taking advantage of them to accept such an enormous gem. For one thing, he thinks he couldn’t possibly make the change for it. Instead, he asks for something he thinks is less valuable. But that item turns out to actually be infinitely precious to the gnoles. Even asking for it so offends them that they promptly issue their lethal response. “Though they fattened Mortensen sedulously, and, later, roasted and sauced him and ate him with real appetite, the gnoles slaughtered him in quite a humane fashion and never once thought of torturing him. That is unusual, for gnoles.” It’s all quite enjoyably ridiculous, much like the original Lord Dunsany. St. Clair has her slightly savage fun with it and she has an admirable facility for moving in and out of grotesque scenes with a deceptively light hand (much like Lord Dunsany). St. Clair was an occultist, a Quaker, a nudist, and a long-time correspondent of Clark Ashton Smith. She published under various names (“Rope” as by “Idris Seabright”) and was known mostly for science fiction. Her voice could be so tart and acerbic that she had problems with readers who thought she was making fun of them—she might have been. Though gnoles only appeared in these two stories, as far as I can tell, they live on now as “gnolls” in the Dungeons & Dragons universe.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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“How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles” (1912)

One of Lord Dunsany’s most famous stories is typically very short, suggestive and allusive. No time to learn much directly about gnoles or about Nuth either, except the first are very dangerous, the latter is very skilled. The gnoles live in a picturesque section of the deep forest. Nuth is something of a trickster. He enlists a young man, Tommy Tonker, as an apprentice burglar. Burgling is one of the things Nuth does. His real intention here is to rob gnoles, who by rumor (or perhaps certain knowledge) are in possession of extremely large emeralds. Nuth thinks they can handle two of these gems between them but cautions Tommy they may have to abandon one if things get hot. That’s how big the emeralds are—or how small this cast of characters. For his part, Tommy would prefer to be excused from this exercise, fearful of the reputation of gnoles. By the way, so-called “gnolls” were among the first creatures in the original Dungeons & Dragons game. The spelling was off, but the description read, “A cross between gnomes and trolls (... perhaps, Lord Dunsany did not really make it all that clear).” Tommy, being an obedient pupil, does as he is told and it does not go well for him. In the end it looks more like a kind of reconnoitering mission for Nuth, who learns a few new things about gnoles, such as that they bore holes in the trees, from the insides of which they watch for intruders. I like the tone of the story—cheery and upbeat, like a little fairy tale, streaked with sinister cynicism. This is how Tommy Tonker’s end is described, for example: “And where [the gnoles] took him it is not good to ask, and what they did with him I shall not say.” It’s curious that such an arguably slight story had such an impact—besides shaping D&D, it inspired the science fiction writer Margaret St. Clair to take up the scenarios in 1951 with a story called “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles.” But there doesn’t appear to be much more mention of Nuth elsewhere. He is mysterious and unsettling, sharing a dry wit with Lord Dunsany. The best part of this story is the description of the woods where the gnoles live—dark and frightening they are. It’s a weird fairy tale with sharp edges.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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"Thirteen at Table" (1916)

Here is Lord Dunsany doing a ghost story—a pretty good one, typically very short and things out of whack. The usual absurd cruelties work to turn this one into a kind of situation comedy. Never mind about the frame story. On the last day of hunting season the last fox leads the last hunter (and the narrator of this story) on a merry chase all day long and into the gloaming, literally over hill and dale. He never gets it either. Now it's so late he's not going to make it home before dark. He and his assistant and horses must find shelter for the night. Fortunately, their last glimpse of the fox leads them to a strange mansion: "no avenue led up to it or even a path nor were there signs of wheel-marks anywhere." But there's a light in the window so the hunter approaches and knocks. A shabby butler announces him to Sir Richard Arlen, who declines to put him up. The hunter blusters and demands accommodation. Sir Richard politely changes his mind and announces dinner is served at 7:30, in 30 minutes. It's a gloomy scene at the dinner table, "quite in keeping with Sir Richard's first remark to me after he entered the room: 'I must tell you, sir, that I have led a wicked life. O, a very wicked life.'" The dining room is drafty but that's actually ghosts arriving, each one greeted by name by Sir Richard. The hunter decides he must be insane. As dinner is served, it's thus the hunter, Sir Richard, and the ghosts of a group of apparently quarrelsome women seated at table. After the second glass of champagne the hunter decides to humor Sir Richard and pretends to have conversations with the ghosts, who appear to him at best only as shadowy patches of smoky darkness. Eventually he's drunk and raving about the fox he hunted that day. "I was pleased to be able to make the party go off well by means of my conversation, and besides that the lady to whom I was speaking was extremely pretty: I do not mean in a flesh and blood kind of way but there were little shadowy lines about the chair beside me that hinted at an unusually graceful figure when Miss Rosalind Smith was alive." This mostly goes toward convincing us he is drunk, as well as placating his host, but we also know it's a horror story, or at least a ghost story, so these things could be real. Eventually the hunter feels comfortable enough to joke with them, and eventually he somehow insults them all, and they leave the table in a huff. The result is that Sir Richard is freed from his curse and very grateful. The story is neatly done all the way up to and including the Last Supper connotations.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos

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"The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men" (1911)

Here we find Lord Dunsany in more typical form: a long ambiguous title, a very short story, and lots of made-up words and proper nouns: the Dubious Land (a dark forest), a creature called a mipt, an evidently dangerous geographic feature referred to as "the crack in the World," and high levels of unexpected danger everywhere. It's whimsical like Tolkien and lots of fantasy, but not Polyannaish but rather bitingly sardonic. The three literary men—Slith, the only thief with experience, with Sippy and Slorg—are intent on stealing a golden box from a powerful being in a faraway land because they believe it is filled with poetry (obviously my favorite point in this story). The writer notes that "it is lonely to sit around the camp-fire by night with no new songs." The "probable" is in the title because the adventurers never returned, having presumably failed, probably the way the story tells it. The story is from Lord Dunsany's collection The Book of Wonder, which features illustrations by his usual collaborator, Sidney Sime. In the case of this collection, however, they switched things up. Sime prepared illustrations first and then the Irish nobleman dreamed up explanations for them. The result was some of Lord Dunsany's best stories. The image above is the one Sime created for this story. Knowing the process, it's apparent the writer often labors to make things fit. You can almost feel the surge when he lands on something he thinks is working. That's most obvious in the prize, won at last (though not really), which is absurdly detailed (because, as always, everything here is merely probable):

What was their joy, even at that perilous moment, as they lurked between the guardian and the abyss, to find that the box contained fifteen peerless odes in the alcaic form, five sonnets that were by far the most beautiful in the world, nine ballads in the manner of Provence that had no equal in the treasuries of man, a poem addressed to a moth in twenty-eight perfect stanzas, a piece of blank verse of over a hundred lines on a level not yet known to have been attained by man, as well as fifteen lyrics on which no merchant would dare to set a price.

Really. You have to ask yourself.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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"The Three Infernal Jokes" (1915)

Then there is Lord Dunsany, Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany, who specialized in a kind of fantasy all his own. Where others waxed on at length the Irish nobleman tended to keep it short. I might prefer Saki, roughly his Scottish contemporary, but both were quite good working in tight spaces, lathering up with absurdity and the snap of the cruel. Lord Dunsany errs more often toward the plain fantastic—many of his stories are strewn with words and proper nouns he made up. This story is almost conventional for Lord Dunsany, a surprising and weird variation on the crossroads encounter with Old Scratch. At a bar they all frequent, a man declares to a group of fellow salesmen that one woman to him is as ugly as another. This is in the context of the salesmen boasting of their virtues. That is his. Later, another man—a supernatural being of some kind who places phone calls to Hell—expresses his admiration for the virtue and his desire to purchase it. His offer is three jokes that will make all who hear the first man tell them die of laughter. The jokes aren't actually very funny, as the first man notices, but the other says that's no matter. It's the spells they carry that count. Some time later, as a matter of conducting his own line of work as an encyclopedia salesman, the first man is giving a dinner for 20 at his club and decides to try one of his jokes there to see what happens. Suddenly the story plunges crosswise at once of urbane James Thurber and ingrown Franz Kafka, much of the mood perhaps due to the strange spell of infectious laughter, with a splash of unhinged suspense:

They laughed. One man accidentally inhaled his cigar smoke and spluttered, the two waiters overheard and tittered behind their hands, one man, a bit of a raconteur himself, quite clearly wished not to laugh, but his veins swelled dangerously in trying to keep it back, and in the end he laughed too. The joke had succeeded; my friend smiled at the thought; he wished to say little deprecating things to the man on his right; but the laughter did not stop and the waiters would not be silent. He waited, and waited wondering; the laughter went roaring on, distinctly louder now, and the waiters as loud as any. It had gone on for three or four minutes when the frightful thought leaped up all at once in his mind: it was forced laughter! However could anything have induced him to tell so foolish a joke? He saw its absurdity in revulsion; and the more he thought of it as these people laughed at him, even the waiters too, the more he felt that he could never lift up his head with his brother touts again. And still the laughter went roaring and choking on. He was very angry. There was not much use in having a friend, he thought, if one silly joke could not be overlooked; he had fed them too. And then he felt that he had no friends at all, and his anger faded away, and a great unhappiness came down on him, and he got quietly up and slunk from the room and slipped away from the club. Poor man, he scarcely had the heart next morning even to glance at the papers, but you did not need to glance at them, big type was bandied about that day as though it were common type, the words of the headlines stared at you; and the headlines said: – Twenty-Two Dead Men at a Club.

It's sublime in its way, and the story is not finished yet. It goes on from there as he is arrested and charged with mass slaying. And he still has a third joke to tell.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
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