Victorian genre fiction before the turn of the century reflected a tension that the English felt towards the influx of foreigners into their country. (You build trains and ships and roads and you shouldn’t be surprised a few foreigners are going to use them!) This feeling of unease was expressed in the form of the “weird outsider” sub-genre, straddling both Mystery and Horror. From Count Dracula to Svengali, these master villains operate in polite society as they weave insidious plans against good Britishers. Like faintly seen fifth columnists they hover just out of reach, openly breaking no laws but using their secret influence to do evil.
Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1854-1914) and Eustace Robert Barton (1868 -1943) (better known as “L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace”) were a writing duo who specialized in this peculiar sub-genre of the Mystery. Their first try was The Master of Mysteries (1898) which falls more into the occult investigator school, but their second was a masterpiece, The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1899) featuring Madame Koluchy. It is so good that it made the “Queen’s Quorum”, Ellery Queen’s hit list of important Mystery works. They followed this novel with “The Sorceress of the Strand”, a three parter from The Strand Magazine (Oct-Dec 1902). This series features Madame Sara. Meade usually wrote Victorian girls’ books and Eustace was a doctor. He also collaborated with Dorothy L. Sayers and Edgar Jepson. Meade liked to collaborate with medical men for her Mystery fiction. She also wrote the more typical “The Ponsonby Diamonds” (1894) with Clifford Halifax MD.)
Franz Mesmer developed his “Animal Magnetism” in the 1780s which James Braid developed into Hypnotism in 1842. Madame Helena Blavatsky created her Theosophical Society in 1875. Their ideas would be turned to fictional use by the mesmerist villains who could control people’s minds to steal, even kill. Of course the most famous character of this sort, but not the first, was Svengali from Trilby (1894) by George duMaurier. Svengali takes his mysterious airs from the real life Rasputin. The novel was filmed in 1931 with John Barrymore. (DuMaurier was the grandfather of Daphne DuMaurier who gave us another Gothic classic, Rebecca (1938).
Svengali bred many imitations other than Mistress Sara and Madame Koluchy. Arthur Conan Doyle used the same idea before DuMaurier in “John Barrington Coyles” (1886) and “The Parasite” (1894). Doyle had an inside track through his investigations into Spiritualism.
Meade-Eustace were influential on writers like Sax Rohmer, with their evil super-villanessess. Later writers preferred to make their villains less fantastic, except in the Pulps like Doc Savage where colorful and flamboyant baddies are generally the rule. These later still became the colorful super-villains of the comic books. Mistress Sara and Madame Koluchy are the ancestors of Poison Ivy and Mystique.
1917’s Tales of the Occult by Dan A. Stitzer offers another Swengali-type in the Professor:
The Professor was a tall, slim person, with black hair, searching eyes that seemed to look clear through you, dark complexion and clean cut features. No matter when you met him, he was habitually well dressed…Yet with all these gifts and perfection, he had that “Don’t tread on me; mind your own business” air about him that caused people to be more or less averse to him.
Using hypnosis, the Professor takes control of the narrator, making him run through the street like a madman, to terrorize a neighbor on a wet night. The pay-off for this psychic control, is that the man’s amputated hand begins to grow back. The hand itches and aches but the narrator endures it as long as he can. The hand grows back but it is misshapen and mostly useless. Neighbors stop in to see it, causing him for grief.
Murder seems the only solution. During a short period of mental freedom, the narrator goes to the man’s house with a gun. The maid tells him he can’t come in. The Professor is sick. He dies the next day, freeing his victim for ever. Shortly after, the hand begins to wither, and finally break during an accident with a dog. Only when the hand has been removed by a surgeon does the man feel whole again.
