used by people in the PR business.
Rhine cards. Devised by Dr. Karl Zener and J. B. Rhine at Duke University in the
1920s, used to test telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition. Each pack has twenty five cards; each card shows one of five symbols (square, circle, wavy lines, star, cross).
Ribena. A diluted fruit drink.
right cow, a. Not a very nice woman.
Ring-a-ring-a-rosy. A rhyme and a game, inspired by the Black Death.
Robot Archie. A comic strip character.
Ronnie Scott’s. Jazz club in Soho.
Round the Home. BBC radio comedy programme, hosted by Kenneth Home. The
performers Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick played recurring characters, Julian and Sandy, who popularised camp patois (polari) at a time when male homosexuality was technically a criminal offence. “How bona to vada your eek” means “How nice to see your face.”
Royal Film Performance.An annual showbiz institution whereby the Royal Family
are shown a film specially selected as inoffensive.
Royal Wedding in St. Petersburg in 1972.See “Abdication Street” in Back in the
USSA (with Eugene Byrne).
rozzer. Police.
rugby try, a.Equivalent to a touchdown in American football. “Converting” is the
rough equivalent to the American “try.”
Ruling Cabal, the. The governing committee of the Diogenes Club.
Rupert scarf.Distinctive yellow check scarf, as worn by the comic strip character
Rupert the Bear.
s.b.g. Stunningly beautiful girl.
Sabrina. A UK pinup and television personality of the 1950s,
sarnie. Sandwich.
SAS. Special Air Service. UK equivalent of Navy SEALs or Special Forces.
Schleswig-Holstein Question, the.Bane of any schoolboy studying O-level
European history in 1975. It’s a key plot point in George Macdonald Fraser’s novelRoyal Flash.
Screen International. UK film trade paper, along the lines of Variety.
Sergeant Arthur Grimshaw.See “Teddy Bears Picnic” in Back in the USSA (with
Eugene Byrne) or Unforgivable Stories. See also Carry On Sergeant, with William Hartnell.
“The Seven Stars.”See: “Seven Stars” in Seven Stars, Dark Detectives.
Shane jacket.Hideously out of fashion after Jon Voigt threw his away at the end of
Midnight Cowboy.
Shirley Anne Field. Star of Beat Girl, The Damned and other British cult films, busy
as late as My Beautiful Laundrette.
short back and sides.A severe haircut.
Shove ha’penny. A pub game, which involves competitively shoving small coins
across a board.
Shrewsbury. A women’s college at Oxford University. Among Lady Damaris’
contemporaries was the crime writer Harriet Vane.
sides. Theatrical term for an actor’s lines.
sign the Official Secrets Act.A formality for civil servants dealing with secret
information, who give a written pledge not to reveal same to outside parties. Actually, passing on secret information one happens to come across is illegal whether or not you’ve signed the act.
Simon Dee. Radio disc jockey, then TV chat show host (Dee Time). Fell from favour
overnight in the early 1970s.
since the Year Dot.Since time immemorial.
six of the best. Six strokes of the cane on the buttocks—traditionally, a significant
corporal punishment.
skiffle. Form of music popular (briefly) in the late 1950s, typified by the use of a
washboard base and the mangling of nineteenth-century folk songs. Stuart Sutcliffe once demeaningly referred to the Beatles as “John Lennon’s skiffle group.”
skins, skinhead.
slam-door diesel. Type of train in use in the 1980s,
slap. Slang—makeup.
Smarties. Chocolate discs inside shells of various colours, available from Rowntree
& Company in cardboard tubes. Still a staple sweet (ie: candy) in the UK; similar to M&Ms.
Smithfield’s. London’s premier meat market.
snoek. Whale meat, a staple food during wartime shortages.
Special Patrol Group, the.More familiarly the SPG, controversial police unit of the
1970s—often accused of racism, excessive force and the like.
Spirit of Ecstasy. The Rolls Royce hood ornament.
Spotlight. The UK directory of actors.
squaddies. Slang—soldiers, especially privates.
St. Trinian’s. Girls’ school in cartoons by Ronald Searle, made famous by a run of
British film comedies starring Alistair Sim.
Sta-presses. Smart jeans.
Steenbeck. A flatbed editing machine.
stone tape, the.Expression coined by Nigel Kneale for the TV play The Stone Tape,
describing the theory that ghosts are recordings that play back under certain circumstances.
striding to the crease.Going in to bat at cricket.
structuralists. Followers of a critical school, ascendant in academe in the 1970s.
Sunday supplements. A UK publishing phenomenon of the 1960s, magazines
included with Sunday newspapers. The pioneering rivals were The Sunday Times andThe Observer.
susses. Suspects. Verb—to suss, to suspect or find out.
Swan Vestas. A brand of matches,
sweetshop. Candy store,
take a spin. Go for a drive.
tannoy. Though a registered trademark of a specific brand, this is a UK
colloquialism for any public-address system.
tart. Girl of easy virtue, prostitute.
“Tears for Souvenirs.”Truly horrible hit record. Don’t let anyone tell you the
charts in the 1960s were exclusively full of great music—Ken Dodd, perhaps most familiar to non-UK viewers as Yorick in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, was more successful in record sales in Britain than Jimi Hendrix.
teddy boy. A late 1950s youth phenomenon—roughs and layabouts who liked
rock-’n’- roll music but dressed in modified Edwardian gear—frock coats, tight trousers, greasy quiffs.
Television Monograph. Published by the British Film Institute.
teterodotoxin. Drug used to simulate death, essential in the recipe for enslaving
folks as zombies.
that documentary about the Queen eating cornflakes. The Royal Family,
telecast on BBC1 on June 21, 1969. Sixty-eight percent of the British population watched the (excruciatingly dull) two-hour programme. There was much comment about the hitherto-unrevealed details of the Windsors dietary habits.
three-piece suite. A sofa and two armchairs, inevitable in the parlours of lower
middle-class or upper working class families with aspirations to gentility.
Thunderbirds puppet. Gerry Anderson-produced children’s TV show (1965-66);
one of his run of puppet-populated science fiction adventures, enormously popular among successive generations of British children. Avoid the live-action movie directed by an American.
time-and-motion study. An efficiency survey.
Tit-Bits. A bland gossip magazine.
titfer. Hat. Rhyming slang, tit fer tat = hat.
toerag. Person of inferior morals and status.
torn. Prostitute.
Tommies. British soldiers. The expression comes from Thomas Atkins, the name
used in World War One in a notice that showed how a form mandatory for all those entering military service should be filled in.
Tomorrow Town Alphabet, the. “Q” and “X” are replaced by “KW” and “KS”; the
vestigial “C” exists only in “CH” and is otherwise replaced by “K” or “S.” E.g., “The kwik brown foks jumped over the layzee dog.”
toodle-oo. Good-bye.
Top of the Pops. BBC-
TV’s weekly pop music program from 1964 onwards.
topping. Excellent,
trimmer. Lazy, morally lax type.
Triumph TR-7. Not the best car ever made in Great Britain,
tube. London Underground Railway, i.e., subway or metro
tuck shop. In-school sweet (candy) shop.
TV Times. ITV’s TV listings magazine,
two pound. Expensive now, exorbitant then.
Ty-Phoo. A brand of tea.
upped stumps. Died. The expression refers to the aftermath of a cricket match,
when stumps are pulled up from the wicket.
Valerie Singleton. Presenter of the BBC-TV children’s magazine programme Blue
Peter. Well-spoken and auntielike, she famously showed kids how to make things out of household oddments without ever mentioning a brand name (a cohost who once said “Biro” instead of “ballpoint pen” was nearly fired).
Variety Club of Great Britain.Showbusiness charity organisation that raises funds
for underprivileged and handicapped children.
Varno Zhoule. British SF author, most prolific in the 1950s, when he published
almost exclusively in American magazines. His only novel, The Stars in Their Traces, is a fix-up of stories first seen in Astounding. His “Court Martian” was dramatised on the UK TV series Out of the Unknown in 1963.
Vera Lynn. Popular British singer of World War Two. That’s her singing “We’ll Meet
Again,” her signature hit, over the explosions at the end of Dr. Strangelove.
vest. Undershirt, not a waistcoat.
War on Want. A charity campaign,
warrant card. British police ID.
Wellies. Wellington boots.
Wembley. The English national football stadium, also used for other sports and
large concerts.
“We’re on a sticky wicket,” “up against the ropes,” “down to the last man,”
and “facing a penalty in injury time.”Bad situations in cricket, boxing, cricket and soccer.
when chocolate was rationed.From 1940 to 1954.
Whistler forced George du Maurier to rewrite Trilby to take out some digs at
him. The artist Joseph Whistler objected to a caricature of him as Joe Sibley in the serial version of du Maurier’s novel—which he rewrote for book publication to omit the offending material. The original version has been restored in modern editions.
“White Horses.” A UK chart hit, it was the theme tune for a children’s television
program.
Whitehall. General term for the British Civil Service, whose offices are in Whitehall,
London.
Wilson Government, the. Harold Wilson was Labour Prime Minister of Great
Britain from 1964 to 1970 and again from 1974 to 1976. A Maigret-like pipe-smoking, raincoated figure, he famously boasted of the white heat of technology when summing up British contributions to futuristic projects like the Concorde. At the time of this story, he had been succeeded by the Tory Edward Heath, a laughing yachtsman.
Windmill Girl. One of the nude tableau performers at London’s Windmill Theatre.
with-it. Stylish, up to the minute, in the know.
worst bits of James Herbert.Usually castration anxiety fantasties with extra
adjectives (c.f., The Rats, The Fog). The word “nasty,” as applied to video nasties in the 1980s, was devised to describe the brand of moist paperback horror of which Herbert was the preeminent ‘70s practitioner, followed by the even more prolific Guy N. Smith (Night of the Crabs, The Sucking Pit).
ylang-ylang. Perfume derived from the flower of the cananga (or custard-apple)
tree.
Zebedee. A puppet character from the children’s television programme The Magic
Roundabout, originally a French show calledLe Manege Enchante, it became a cult in the UK partially thanks to wry narration by Eric Thompson (Emma’s Dad). There was a film spinoff, Dougal and the Blue Cat (1972), and a needless CGI update in 2005.
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* * * *
AFTERWORD
Here’s how these stories happened.
In the 1990s, Stephen Jones edited an anthology called Dark Detectives: Adventures of the Supernatural Sleuths, dedicated to the subcategory of weird tale in which detectives, in the traditions of Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe, tackle cases that involve the supernatural or the strange. The book represented William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, Manly Wade Wellman’s John Thunstone, Clive Barker’s Harry D’Amour and Jay Russell’s Marty Burns. Also in the “magnifying glass and wooden stake” business are Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, Anthony Boucher’s Fergus O’Breen, Bram Stoker’s (and Chris Roberson’s—but not Stephen Sommers’) Van Helsing, The X-Files’ Mulder and Scully, Jeff Rice’s (and Dan Curtis’, Richard Matheson’s, Darren McGavin’s and David Case’s) Carl Kolchak and a run of comic book or strip characters famous (Dr. Strange, Batman in a certain mood), middling cult (the Phantom Stranger, Zatanna) or obscure (Cursitor Doom, anyone? Dr. Thirteen?).
Steve asked me to contribute to the book. I’ll let him describe what happened next. “After I had explained to Kim that the book would be themed along a loosely assembled chronology, we came up with the concept (probably over glasses of wine and beer) that it would be fun to have one serial-like case that would be investigated across the centuries by many of the characters he had created in his earlier novels and stories. These episodes would then be interspersed amongst the contributions from other writers to the book.” Since part of the point of doing sleuth stories is that you can do a whole series—unless, like E. C. Bentley, you kick off with a book called Trent’s Last Case—my plan was to have the serial that wound up being called “Seven Stars” feature detectives I’d written about in earlier stories or novels. The Victorian section (“The Mummy’s Heart”) revisits adventurer Charles Beauregard and journalist Kate Reed, who were inAnno Dracula; a WWII-set Los Angeles interlude (“The Trouble with Barrymore”) uses the anonymous narrator (plainly, a version of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe) who’d been in a Lovecraft-Chandler pastiche called “The Big Fish”; the “contemporary” 1990s section (“Mimsy”) is a semisequel to my novel The Quorum, featuring London private eye/single mum Sally Rhodes, etc.
“The only problem,” Steve says, “was that Kim did not have a psychic investigator for the period covering the 1970s. Of course that was no problem for Kim, who simply went back to his very first efforts at fiction while still a schoolboy and revived the character of ostentatious amnesiac Richard Jeperson, along with his striking associate Vanessa and ex-police constable Fred Regent. Inspired by such TV characters as Jason King, The Avengers, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who and the novels of Peter Saxon and Frank Lauria, Jeperson made his official debut with the novella ‘The End of the Pier Show’ in my 1997 anthology Dark of the Night: New Tales of Horror and the Supernatural.” Since then, Jeperson has made further appearances in the stories collected here. Thanks and credit are due to Steve and other editors who have commissioned, edited and published (and republished) them. “You Don’t Have to Be Mad ...” first appeared in Steve’s White of the Moon: New Tales of Madness and Dread; “Tomorrow Town,” “Soho Golem” and “The Serial Murders” were posted on the much-missed SciFi.com site, edited by Ellen Datlow; “Egyptian Avenue” was in William Schafer and Bill Sheehan’s Embrace the Mutation, inspired by the illustrations of J. K. Potter; and “Swellhead” was in Night Visions 11, edited by Bill Sheehan. “The Man Who Got off the Ghost Train” is original to this collection.
The Man from the Diogenes Club isn’t quite the complete Richard Jeperson. I’ve reluctantly omitted “The Biafran Bank Manager,” the episode of “Seven Stars” he was revived for in the first place: it features significant moments in the history of the Diogenes Club (the death of Richard’s mentor, Edwin Winthrop), but is too tied in with the overall story to work as a stand-alone. Dark Detectives is still out there, and you can
also find the whole serial, plus other related stories (only two overlapping with this book) in the UK paperback Seven Stars. Furthermore, continuing my habit of presenting alternate versions of my characters (blame Michael Moorcock for this, or else those DC Comics “Imaginary Stories”), Richard and the Diogenes Club feature in alternate timelines in “The Man on the Clapham Omnibus” inThe Second Time Out Book of London Short Stories, edited by Nicholas Royle, and “Who Dares Wins: Anno Dracula 1980,” a chunk of my long-in-progressJohnny Alucard, on the Dr. Shade’s Laboratory website (johnnyalucard.com), hosted by the lovely Maura McHugh.
To backtrack, where did Richard Jeperson come from?
As Steve said, from my very first efforts at fiction. In the 1970s, I was growing up—which is probably obvious from this book. As a schoolboy and later a university student, I wrote essays, plays, stories, attempted novels, pastiches, humour, sketches, long letters, scripts, comic strips, gossip, filmographies, book and film reviews, articles, fanzine filler, song lyrics, a pantomine, monologues, musicals, etc. Almost all this stuff was disposable, though I showed some of it to friends. By the early 1980s, I was getting plays performed and songs sung, even as I segued into more or less aboveground publication. None of this is unusual: you learn to write by writing, and you need to produce millions of words of rubbish before you get anywhere. I started early on my rubbish. You may not think much of me now, but—trust me—the juvenilia was much, much worse.
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