Description
Paul Newman
Abraxas Editions & DGR Books, United Kingdom, 2007. Paperback. 220 pages. Brand New/Fine.
THE TREGERTHEN HORROR: Aleister Crowley, D. H. Lawrence & Peter Warlock Involving murder, mayhem, espionage, sexual scandal and the Beast 666, this bizarre and tragic investigation into the death of Ka Cox at a lonely, haunted cottage in Zennor is one of the strangest stories to have ever come out of Cornwall and took many years of scrupulous research on the part of the author. Involving a large and larger-than-life cast of characters, including the ‘handsomest young man in England’, Rupert Brooke, the climber George Mallory, the mad, babbling psychotherapist, Meredith Starr, and the rip-roaring composer, Peter Warlock, the narrative unwinds a tangled tale that enlists the embattled remnants of the Bloomsbury Group, the decadent acolytes of Fitzrovia, a young woman’s involvement with a notorious magician, occult orgies in the grounds of a great house climaxing in a flourish of grand guignol when Bob Fabian, ace sleuth of Scotland Yard, joins the ensemble as he seeks to find the perpetrator of the horrific ‘witchcraft murder’ of Lower Quinton.
This book is really a piece of biographical detection based on mainly primary sources. It also could be called a Cornish mystery story, except that it is more fantastic than an ordinary mystery and far truer. It is a long, detailed investigation into a curious death that took place in Zennor before the Second World War. Startling rumours were erupting in the district that Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast or `Wickedest Man in the World’, was extending the tentacles of his influence, and that he had founded a mainly female cult in West Cornwall who danced naked around stone circles, took powerful narcotics and held orgies up on the moor. This was spread by word of mouth and by numerous ‘horror’ stories penned by writers like A.L. Rowse, Denys Val Baker, Mary Williams and Frank Baker. Some maintained this decadent coven was directly or indirectly responsible for the death of Katherine Arnold Forster, the former sweetheart of the poet, Rupert Brooke, who died in mysterious circumstances at a ‘haunted’ cottage near Zennor Carn in 1938.
Initially alerted by an anecdote (preserved in literature and living memory) of Crowley’s influence tragically affecting the lives of a young couple who were living at Zennor, I stared by asking sceptically, “Why has no biographer ever taken this seriously?” It was a strange, fascinating book to write because the name Aleister Crowley, and his association with black magic and sexual scandal, still causes people to shiver. So, when you have to contact people down here who were once marginally involved, you tend to stir a ripple of horror or hostility. Why dig up all this? Why not leave it dead and buried, they say. However, what I’ve actually written has never been brought to light before, and if I had not managed to glean the recollections of the few people alive who still remember the incident, nothing would have survived. But one thing did help, and that was when somehow high up smuggled out a document and allowed me access to it – that enabled me to name the members of the Cornish coven. As all of them are now dead, the information is far less sensitive than it might have been if released, say, thirty or forty years ago.”
Asked why he should choose such an eerie, disconcerting subject for investigation, Paul replied: “I really do not find it morbid or frightening. I prefer to call it an exercise in `dark nostalgia’. Compared with the terrible problems the world has to face today, global warming and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, an old fashioned scandal with a whiff of lechery and necromancy, plus a ghost or two, provides a pleasant respite for many readers, a bit like Foyle’s War or something equally diverting.”
“I wrote about Crowley firstly because of the rumours circulating down here and secondly because he had become part of my family folklore. My father had known him, not as a friend, but more as a notorious character he would encounter in pubs and cafes in Soho. Generally he kept a safe distance from him, although he did attend the famous `Laughing Torso’ trial when Crowley tried to sue the publishers, Constable and Co, for libelling him by bringing out a volume of memoirs by the artist, Nina Hamnett, called `Laughing Torso’. As he was already known as the Wickedest Man in the World, his reputation was already far too black for it to be smirched by the tiny crumbs of gossip in Nina’s book. The verdict went against him. If he had only been the Wickedest Man in Wigan or the Most Consummate Cad in Clovelly, he might have won the case.”
Paul Newman lives in Cornwall. Former editor of the literary magazine Abraxas, he has produced books and articles covering subjects as diverse as art, symbolism, topography and literature. Titles include a folklore study The Hill of the Dragon (1979); The Meads of Love (1994), a life of the
poet-miner, John Harris, popular illustrated books on Bath and Bristol as well as a Time Out guide to North Cornwall.
Together with the sculptor A.R. Lamb, he shared a poetry collection In Many Ways Frogs (1997), followed by Lost Gods of Albion (1998), a study of British hill-figures, recently updated and re-released. His cultural chiller A History of Terror: Fear and Dread Down the Ages (2000) has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. Among his `local’ titles are Haunted Cornwall (2005) and The Tregerthen Horror (2006), the first part of a popular series, and the second an essay in dark nostalgia, investigating the bizarre death of Rupert Brooke’s ex-sweetheart, Ka Cox, at a lonely cottage in Zennor in the year of the Munich crisis. His novel Galahad (2004) won the Peninsula Prize and he was among the international scholars invited to contribute to Scribner’s Dictionary of Ideas. His film script That Summer at Lamorna (2004) was commissioned by the Cornwall Film Fund and his latest book is The Man Who Unleashed the Birds: Frank Baker & His Circle (2011) tracing the extraordinary life of a forgotten figure whose terrifying novel ‘The Birds’ pre-figured the fantasias of Du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock. On the heels of this, just about to be released, is ‘Under the Shadow of Meon Hill’, dealing with the Lower Quinton murder investigation in the 1940s conducted by Britain’s foremost sleuth of the day, Fabian of the Yard.
