High Spirits In Writing

NZ Truth, Issue 943, 22 December 1923, Page 6

High Spirits In Writing

SEASONABLE SPOOKY SUGGES-

TIONS.

Do the Departed come back and help the ambitious m the exercise of the art of story-telling? Was Homer the embodiment of a dozen • disembodied? , Was Shakespeare tho amalgam of a hundred near-geniuses of the past?

It would seem as if there is to-day but the beginning of an understanding of the possibilities from the Borderland, as there is of radio-activity. A book, - "Blackerchlef Dick," has just ""been published m Hodder and Stoughton's Colonial Libray which will interest the average novel reader as. a red-blooded tale of smugglers away back m the days of the Restoration m Merry Old England:'

But the inquiring mind and the psycho-analyst will delve deeper into the novel. Because, m a most interesting Preface, William McFee, a London novelist and journalist, tells' the world that the tale of Dick, the sanguinary smuggler, was written by a ,girl of 17, Margery Allingham, daughter of parents both of whom are writers.

•Margery does not claim to be a prodigy, although McFee's story ot her childhood proves that she is. But the girl avows that "Blackerchlef Dick" is really the- result of automatic writing — that some genius m Spiritland gave her the tale, by the way, which is as full of quaint characters as one of Jeffrey Farnol's novels. And there never was a book outside of a wine seller's aatalogue that contained so much drink and drinking as this story by the seventeen-year-old girl.

But can it be done by the spirits, for all that?

It is said that m Wellington there Is a man to-day hard at work putting the finishing touches to a book that is going Home to set the Thames on fire, It is a description of what is going on m Borderland, and it has all been the result of automatic writing and under the control of a master spirit, who has practically dictated or inspired the book. Sir Conan Doyle is to father the publishing of the book, which he has been kept m touch with since he toured New Zealand, and is greatly interested m the spooky authorship — as well he might be.