The Missing Miss Bartendale of the 1942 film version of The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension (1922) is typical of the changing attitude towards occult detectives in the 1940s. An instrumental character in the book, the female ghostbreaker is shown the door in a time that looked at the post WWI craze for mediums and seances as old fashioned. Even Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard’s success in The Ghostbreakers (1940), a horror comedy, offers no assistance.
The author of the book was Jessie Douglas Kerruish (1884-1949). A British author of Arabian fantasy novels, she published Miss Haroun al-Raschid (1917) and The Girl From Kurdistan (1918). Her other fantastic title is Babylonian Nights’ Entertainments: A Selection of Narratives from the Text of Certain Undiscovered Cuneiform Tablets (1934). Several of her short stories appeared in Christine Campbell Thomson’s Not at Night series.
Luna Bartendale, known as the White Witch, but prefers “The Super-sensitive”, is an English psychic who helps families in trouble with the supernatural. She is sought out by Swanhild Hammands and Goddard Covert when the familial monster returns to terrorize Thunderbarrow Shaw: ‘”‘Lady Grace Kynaston told me about her. There was something wrong in the family last year: Nobody knows just what it was, but they say the family vault at Stoke Kynaston Church had to be hermetically sealed. Miss Bartendale succeeded when the S. P. R. failed…” .
Miss Bartendale is hardly a hideous witch. In fact she states: “I am glad I don’t look my job”:
Her pretty hair was of that fine pale golden tint that so rarely survives childhood, and her features were so delicate only her eyebrows much darker than her hair and the pronounced cheekbones and high bridged nose saved the ensemble from dollishness. Her skin was creamy, touched with pink on either cheek and with a sharp-cut splash of red at the lips, her daintily rounded chin had a deep dimple in it, and she kept her lids habitually drooped so that her eyes flickered darkly behind a screen of golden lashes. She was slightly built, carried herself very upright, and was muffled in a voluminous coat of the heavy woolen stuff humane women wear in place of furs.
Hardly the physical bruiser that a John Thunstone would have been. Her doll-like size and cuteness disguises a powerful enemy to evil. Her journey through dimensions, her encounter with ancient magic, will cost her the gifts she possesses. By novel’s end, the Hammond Mystery will be solved but Luna Bartendale will be an ordinary woman, no longer a sensitive.
The film version of the book replaces Miss Bartendale with Scotland Yard detective, Robert Curtis (played by James Ellison) and his female sidekick, Christy (played by Heather Thatcher). People are attacked by the werewolf with only a hint that this has been a problem since the Crusades. There will be no traveling in time or dimension. The werewolf is killed and it proves to be Oliver Hammond, one of the good guys. Curtis is much less successful than Miss Bartendale, who rids Oliver of his curse so he can happily marry at the end of the book. In other words, the film version is only a mere shell of the original. One that feels only a man is able to investigate this strange mystery (with female sidekick in tow). Kerruish’s original is much more a feminist article. Really, just a film trying to capitalize on the success of Universal’s The Wolf Man (1941).
The novel was reprinted by Famous Fantastic Mysteries (June 1946), four years after the film adaptation. The cover and illustrations were done by “Lawrence” (1886-1960 in the Virgil Finlay style of the magazine. From the illustrations you wouldn’t even know it was a werewolf mystery. The object was probably to make everything look like it had been written by A. Merritt, the main draw at FFM. The cover shows the Hand of Glory from the story with some creepy eyeballs behind it.
A new version of The Undying Monster would be great, starring the missing Miss Bartendale, if it was approached as a fantastic journey into time and space by an enchanting woman psychic like Luna Bartendale. Preferably done in the 1920s, a period piece. Would such a film be made? With the TV success of Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, the classic monsters of Penny Dreadful, and even those old Poltergeist films, I would never say no.
