- Richard Marsh (author)
Richard Marsh (1857-1915) was the
pseudonym of the British author born Richard Bernard Heldmann. He is best known for his supernatural thriller "The Beetle: A Mystery", published in the same year asBram Stoker 'sDracula and initially even more popular. "The Beetle" remained in print until 1960, and was subsequently resurrected in 2004 and 2007. Heldman was educated at Eton andOxford University . He began to publish short stories, mostly adventure tales, as "Bernard Heldmann," before adopting the name "Richard Marsh" in 1893. Several of the prolific Marsh's novels were published posthumously.The Beetle
Heldmann's greatest commercial success came with one of his earliest novels, "The Beetle" (1897). A story about a mysterious
oriental figure who pursues a British politician toLondon , where he wreaks havoc with his powers ofhypnosis andshape-shifting , Heldmann/Marsh's novel is of a piece with other sensationalturn-of-the-century fictions such as Stoker'sDracula ,George du Maurier 'sTrilby , andSax Rohmer 'sFu Manchu novels. LikeDracula and many of thesensation novel s pioneered byWilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, "The Beetle" is narrated from the perspectives of multiple characters, a technique used in many late nineteenth-century novels (those ofWilkie Collins and Stoker, for example) to create suspense.Works
* "The Mahatma's Pupil" (1893)
* "The Devil's Diamond" (1893)
* "Mrs Musgrave and Her Husband" (1895)
* "The Beetle" (1897)
* "Crime and the Criminal" (1897)
* "The Duke and the Damsel" (1897)
* "Philip Bennion's Death" (1897)
* "The House of Mystery" (1898)
* "Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors" (1898)
* "The Goddess: A Demon" (1900)
* "The Seen and the Unseen" (1900)
* "Marvels and Mysteries" (1900)
* "The Joss: A Reversion" (1901)
* "The Magnetic Girl" (1903)
* "The Confessions of a Young Lady: Her Doings and Misdoings" (1905)
* "The Coward Behind the Curtain" (1908)
* "The Deacon's Daughter" (1917)
* "On the Jury" (1918)Further reading
*Vuohelainen, Minna. "Distorting the Genre, Defining the Audience, Detecting the Author: Richard Marsh's 'For Debt' (1902)." "CLUES: A Journal of Detection" 25.4 (Summer 2007): 17-26.
External links
*
* [http://www.valancourtbooks.com/thejoss.html Book summary for "The Joss: A Reversion" (1901) at Valancourt Books]
* [http://www.valancourtbooks.com/curios.html Book summary for "Curios" (1898) at Valancourt Books]
* [http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Richard%20Marsh Richard Marsh Bibliography at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB)]
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