THE HORRIBLE DUMMY AND OTHER STORIES – By Gerald Kersh — 1st Edition / 1st Printing, 1944 HC/DJ — HORROR and SUPERNATURAL Fiction Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd., London (1944)
In well preserved condition. The boards and binding are solid and tight, with minimal shelfwear. The pages are crisp and clean save for previous owner's name and date on the first blank page. The dust jacket is in good condition save for small tear near the top spine end and a small chip on the lower spine end. It remains uncut, with the British pricing still apparent. "It is a quality of flamboyant vigour in Mr Kersh that wins attention first of all for his fiction, and more especially, perhaps, for his occasional short story. When his flamboyant energy of sentiment and language comes off he achieves an effect of genuine distinction; at his surest, that is, he is a short story writer of a strongly individual and rewarding kind... the best and cleverest [of the 23 stories in this volume] tells with excellent economy of a ventriloquist's dummy which was inhabited, or so it seemed, by the spirit of the ventriloquist's murdered father... 'The Drunk And The Blind', the sketch of an old, battered and mentally ruined boxer, is done with a telling and slightly brutal power. 'The Devil That Troubled The Chess-Board'... is another sound thing in a vein of the slightly macabre." Times Literary Supplement, 1944. Please see below for more information on the author, Gerald Kersh.
Biography
Born in 1911,
Kersh began to write at the age of eight. After leaving school, he worked as,
amongst other things, a cinema manager, bodyguard, debt collector, fish and
chip cook, travelling salesman, French teacher and all-in wrestler whilst
attempting to succeed as a writer.
Kersh's first
novel, Jews Without Jehovah, an autobiographical tale of growing up poor and
Jewish, was published in 1934. Kersh, however, had not sufficiently concealed
the identities of some of the characters, and a member of his family sued for
libel; as a result, the book was quickly withdrawn. Night and the City (1938), was more successful
and has been filmed twice, with Richard Widmark in 1950 and then in 1992 with
Robert De Niro in the lead role (this version transposed the setting from
London to New York).
Kersh was
drafted into the army during the Second World War, served in the Coldstream
Guards and ended up writing for the Army Film Unit. Despite apparently
deserting, Kersh ended up in France during the liberation, where he discovered
that many of his French relatives had ended up in Hitler's extermination camps.
After the war, Kersh continued to enjoy commercial success, mainly because of
his short stories, in genres such as horror, science fiction, fantasy and the
detective story. From about the mid-1950s onwards, he started to suffer from
poor health and financial hardship (specifically relating to his failure to pay
income tax). However, Kersh continued to publish novels and stories, some of
which were commercially and critically successful. In 1958, his short story
"The Secret of the Bottle", originally published in The Saturday
Evening Post, received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The
following year he became a U.S citizen.
