Mark Shadow is the perfect name for an occult detective. You have probably never heard of him. He only appeared in four stories by a vastly under-rated writer, R. W. Sneddon. These four exciting excursions into the unknown did not appear in Weird Tales, alongside Jules de Grandin and John Thunstone. They appeared in WT’s competitor, Ghost Stories. Despite the name of the magazine, there were few encounters with ordinary ghosts.
Robert W. Sneddon
Robert William Sneddon (1880-1944) was a prolific writer who used many pseudonyms. He was a talented writer who could work in any kind of magazine, including horror. He was one of the first to write for The Thrill Book, along with Greye La Spina, Francis Stevens and Murray Leinster. He never wrote for Weird Tales (I suspect the low pay was the reason) so he never fell in with that crowd of writers. He has portraits done by John Sloan and John Butler Yeats, so he was hanging out in literary circles that the average WT writer was not.
All the covers and illustrations from Ghost Stories are by mostly unknown artists. The first two were published when the editors used staged photos for illustrations. These are intriguing in their own way.
In Terror of Laughing Clay
Mark Shadow narrates his adventures for us. He tells us he was visited by John Ralston, a rich man and a complete unbeliever. Ralston offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could convince him of the truth of supernatural spirits. Mark is asked to investigate some odd happenings in the house, which Ralston thinks are tricks by human agents. Shadow asks him why doesn’t he just hire a regular detective rather than a “ghost hunter”? Ralston knows Mark’s reputation as an exposer of fraudulent mediums (like the one in Vienna) makes him a straight shooter.
Mark comes to the house and quickly identifies the questionable item is a box kept in the kitchen. The box smells of earth and is filled with clay. The servants avoid the thing because they hear a cruel laugh from it. One quit when they saw a shapeless body coming out of the container. The clay shape eventually tries to kill Ralston.
Mark Shadow realizes the clay form is an elemental. The earth spirit is controlled by human agency. The one man who would wish Ralston ill is Processor Carver. He and Ralston race over to Carver’s farm and discover a strange room with an idol in it. The clay elemental attacks again but Mark destroys the idol by shooting it. Carver’s spirit inhabits the clay and is dissolved when the shrine is destroyed. Ralston gives Shadow the $10,000.
Appearing only a year after Jules Grandin’s debut in “The Horron on the Links”, “In Terror of Laughing Clay” (Ghost Stories, October 1926) introduced us to Mark Shadow. Unlike the idiosyncratic style that Seabury Quinn used, Sneddon’s tale runs cleanly, with little call for “Nom d’un petit porc!” or other attempts at eccentric detective affectations. Since Shadow is the narrator we learn very little about him since he is a modest man.
Elementals often show up in Pulp ghostbreaker tales. E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low may have been the first to encounter one in “The Tale of Baelbrow” but both Jules de Grandin and Dr. Muncing do too. But Sneddon does it before both of them.
The Vampire of Oakdale Ridge
“The Vampire of Oakdale Ridge” (Ghost Stories, December 1926) begins when Mark Shadow is called in for Jill Stern, wife of John Stern. Jill is slowly dying. The doctors have been useless, and the distraught husband turns to the ghost hunter. Shadow comes out to the house and begins to learn about the couple. John was previously married to a Hungarian woman named Lilli. She died and was buried in the family graveyard near the house.
Mark collects evidence, like bite marks on the neck, dreams of terrible visitations and such. He places garlic around Jill’s window and she improves. Later (and stupidly) the garlic is removed when the room is painted. Mark is forced to take John to the crypt and open Lilli’s grave. He does not stake the beautiful woman inside, who looks quite alive but sleeping. Instead, he has her coffin sealed and the thing cremated. The man from the crematorium tells Mark later he thought he heard screaming. Mark tells him it is just gasses escaping from the body.
The plot of this story is very familiar to anyone who has read Dracula, or several other tales that imitated it like “The Tomb of Sarah” by F. G. Loring or “Four Wooden Stakes” by Victor Roman. Where Sneddon adds something to the usual tale is the last detail of Lilli Stern screaming as she is cremated in her coffin. This last nasty bit makes the well-traveled road just a little bit better.
Painted Upside Down
“Painted Upside Down” (Ghost Stories, September 1928) finally gives us traditional ghosts. We also are introduced to Mark’s Friday, the Frenchman, Maurice. Like Passporteau from Jules Verne’s Around the World In Eighty Days, Maurice is “the perfection of servants, a Frenchman who has become an admirable citizen without losing his distinctive birth marks.”
Shadow and Maurice go to the home of artist, Margaret Hawthorn, a vast estate on the coast. Margaret’s best friend, Janet Dunlop, is also invited. Once in the house, everybody hears low whispering that can not be identified or understood. Miss Hawthorne shows Mark a painting she is working on. She found some strange agency affecting her brushstrokes while she worked. When Shadow flips the canvas, a new image emerges, a vague figure and an idol.
Janet sees a matronly woman, who turns out to be a ghost. This leads Mark into the history of the place, constructed by her great-grand-father, Amos. The family fortune was built on trading, including in the slave trade. Amos died by hanging himself from a hook in the garret. When Mark goes up to the top of the house he feels a skeletal hand on his leg.
Both Janet and Maurice are frightened by the presence of ghosts but stay the course. Everything comes to a head when Margaret falls under ghostly influence and goes sleepwalking. She heads for the garret with a belt for a noose. Shadow intervenes but it attacked by strong, ghostly hands. Margaret wakes in time to stop. Later they explore the basement and find a hidden idol carved into the beams of the house. This belonged to a slave, Hannibal, who killed Amos. The matronly woman was Elizabeth, Amos’s wife, who had been man-handled by her husband, being choked so hard she could only speak in a raspy whisper. It was her voice they had been hearing all along.
Sneddon’s choice of Hawthorne for the family name is a fairly obvious nod to Nathainel Hawthorne and his The House of Seven Gables.
The Thing in the Theater
“The Thing in the Theater” (Ghost Stories, January 1929) has Mark called in when real ghosts start showing up during the horror play Horror House. The actors and stagehands are ready to quit if Mark doesn’t lay the ghost. Some of the incidents include the star of the show Carver Jones tripping over a stool, and later being struck in the dark. One of the actresses, Miss Walters, sees a sheet floating about. During a performance, Jones opens a fake coffin and stands back as if he has seen something terrible inside (not acting).
Shadow and his faithful Maurice stay the night in the theater. There is no electricity so they have to use flashlights. After one, they are witness to a shadow-play on the wall. Two men dressed in Elizabethan clothing have a sword duel. One of the shadows is Carver Jones. Jones kills the other man. This telling re-enactment ends at three with a great shadow claiming Jones. The men manage to go to sleep.
The next morning, after breakfast delivered by the manager, Barnaby, they learn that Carver Jones died that night. He was struck by a taxi cab. Mark says, “At three.” Barnaby is surprised Mark knows this. Barnaby explains that Mrs. Carver, was once Mrs. Ellis. Arthur Ellis, her husband, had been killed by Carver Jones while practicing their dueling. The incident was declared an accident. Shadow has a closet torn open that was nailed shut. Inside they find a stool, a costume wrapped in a sheet, and the missing point of a dueling blade. There are marks that show it has been filed so that it would break. Carver Jones had murdered Arthur Ellis for his wife. All agree that Mrs. Carver should learn nothing of this but Shadow is sure the only ghosts in the theater are now the stage prop kind.
Conclusion
Mark Shadow’s adventures come no where close to challenging Jules de Grandin’s ninety-three outings in Weird Tales. R. W. Sneddon wrote the first two, went on to other things but came back for a second batch. The first two, which don’t include actual ghosts, seem more fun than the last two which are more what you would expect from a magazine called Ghost Stories. (I wonder if the editors asked for ghosts, or if this was Sneddon’s choice.)
Sneddon does an admirable job of making the Mark Shadow stories fun to read, but he would certainly have had to move onto other spirits besides traditional spectres to keep the franchise going. (He did write three non-Shadow stories for GS in 1927 and 1930, so in between and after. He also wrote a non-fiction piece called “The Mystery of the Dancing Coffins”.) He chose to move on other projects like the Mystery novel, Monsieur X (1928).
