Doctors Wear Scarlet: Hated the movie, loved the book

Doctors Wear Scarlet by Simon Raven

The British film Bloodsuckers, from 1970, was easily one of the worst cinematic experiences I’ve sat through in recent memory; a confused and confusing mess of a movie, made even more disappointing for me by dint of the fact that the two lead actors whose participation induced me to watch the film in the first place – namely, Peter Cushing and Patrick Macnee – don’t even appear on screen together once! And yet, I thought, the central premise of the film, based on Simon Raven’s novel Doctors Wear Scarlet, had been a good one, if thoroughly botched, and I decided to check out that source material one day … perhaps. But that resolve was only strengthened when I learned that editor/horror maven Karl Edward Wagner had chosen that novel for inclusion in his celebrated list of The 13 Best Supernatural Horror Books! That particular KEW list is one that I hugely respect, having previously enjoyed some of its other recommendations, such as Walter S. Masterman’s The Yellow Mistletoe (1930), Abraham Merritt’s Burn Witch Burn (1932), J. U. Nicolson’s Fingers of Fear (1937), R. R. Ryan’s Echo of a Curse (1939), H. B. Gregory’s Dark Sanctuary (1940), and William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel (1978). And, I am happy to report, this KEW list has not let me down once again!

Doctors Wear Scarlet was originally released in 1960 as a hardcover volume by the UK publisher Anthony Blond. (Mr. Blond himself, it seems, aware of Simon Raven’s dissolute ways and heavy debts, offered to put the author on an annual salary if Raven would move away from London and its temptations … an arrangement that lasted for over three decades!) The following year, Doctors Wear Scarlet – the author’s third novel, following The Feathers of Death (1959), which centered on a trial for homosexuality in the British Army, and Brother Cain (also 1959), a spy story – would be published in the U.S. as a Simon & Schuster hardcover. Four more editions would crop up during the course of the 1960s, and then the book would go OOPs (out of prints) for 30+ years, till the House of Stratus revived it in 2001. For readers today, happily, there is a beautiful edition that Valancourt Books released in 2019; a very handsome volume, indeed, and featuring a fun introduction from horror authority Kim Newman, co-editor of two of my Bibles: Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books.

Before sharing some thoughts about this, Raven’s first horror novel, a quick word on the author himself. Simon Arthur Noel Raven was born in London in 1927 and went on to become a journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and the author of almost three dozen books. He is perhaps best known for his 10-novel ALMS FOR OBLIVION series, released from 1964 – ’76, and the seven-novel FIRST-BORN OF EGYPT series, released from 1984 – ’92. Something of a notorious reprobate, Raven passed away in 2001, at the age of 73.

His Doctors Wear Scarlet is divided into three quite discrete (emphasis on the “Crete”!) sections. In the first, which takes up almost half of the book, an inspector from Scotland Yard, John Tyrrel, arrives at the London home of our narrator, magazine editor Anthony Seymour, to ask some questions about one Richard Fountain, with whom Seymour had attended Cambridge’s (fictitious) Lancaster College. Fountain, it seems, who is three years younger than our narrator, had gone to Greece some eight months earlier, and is currently on the verge of being kicked out of that country for committing violent and unspeakable acts in the company of a young woman. In this section of Raven’s novel, we learn all about Fountain’s life; how he’d evinced a violent streak while at the same time maintaining good grades. When Seymour had first encountered him at Charterhouse boarding school (from which, incidentally, Raven was evicted at age 18 for “homosexual conduct”), the younger man had been aloof and fairly unpopular. Years later, at Cambridge, his lot in life had looked bright, after the manipulating head tutor, Walter Goodrich, had arranged both his future career and an engagement to his daughter Penelope. When Seymour later receives a desperate letter from Fountain in Greece begging for his help, matters suddenly appear in a new light. Thus, with Tyrrel’s approval, Seymour takes off for Crete (oddly enough, this was the second novel that I’ve read this year featuring that Grecian island, after Jack Williamson’s 1940 fantasy classic The Reign of Wizardry), accompanied by Fountain’s hard-drinking yet scholarly undergraduate friend Piers Clarence, as well as his old commanding officer in the Army, Major Roderick Longbow, to rescue him from whatever peril he might be in.

In the second section, the three adventurers travel from Crete to the myth-shrouded island of Hydra and back to Crete again, where they finally catch up with Fountain in an abandoned fortress in the White Mountains. The man is a weakened wreck when they find him, and it soon becomes obvious why, when they discover his female companion, Chriseis, with her teeth in his neck, sucking out his lifeblood while Seymour and Clarence stand by in hypnotized paralysis! But Richard is indeed safely brought back to England, setting up the scene for the novel’s third section. Here, Seymour and Tyrrel consult Dr. Erik Holmstrom, a man of arcane learning in the British Museum, and hear all about the lore of the vampire. They also discover that although Richard seems well recovered from his ordeals in Greece, he is hardly “out of the woods” yet. While the museum professor feels that vampirism is a psychological condition rather than a supernatural one, he yet maintains that Richard might still be a danger to others. And on the night of the big Michaelmas feast at Lancaster College, at which Richard is due to be feted as the guest of honor and act as the headline speaker, we do indeed learn whether or not Holmstrom is correct in his surmise…

Released a full decade after its source novel, Bloodsuckers (which also ran under such titles as Incense for the Damned, Freedom Seeker and, yes, Doctors Wear Scarlet) was very much a product of the hippie era, and thus saw fit to add scenes of drug usage, orgies, and psychedelic whatnot. Several characters in the Raven book were dropped, new ones were added, the fates of many of the main players were significantly altered, and the primary setting, for some inexplicable reason, was changed to Oxford, instead of Cambridge. And most egregiously, due to the film’s problematic production history, the editing of the picture was a total farrago, resulting in an incomprehensible hash. Not so Raven’s book, which sports a wonderfully lucid and literate style of writing that renders everything completely clear for the reader. But is it a supernatural horror novel, as Karl Edward Wagner insists? Well, if Dr. Holmstrom is to be believed, the answer is no. Still, few readers will doubt that Chriseis is the genuine article after seeing how easily she’s able to paralyze others with a glance. And the book’s final scenes, and especially closing sentence, leave little doubt that Wagner was justified in putting the novel into the supernatural category. What is undoubtedly supernatural, I might add, are the uncommon lengths to which Richard’s three friends are willing to go to rescue their old comrade. We should all be so fortunate as to have friends such as these!

Raven’s book, besides being lucidly written, is also an elegantly written affair, and a delight to read. The author has a seeming knack for choosing an apt turn of phrase, such as when he describes Marc Honeydew, a Cambridge math tutor, as “a tall and angular man who was apparently sitting with some difficulty on the fence which divides youth from middle age.” All of the book’s main characters are well drawn, with Honeydew perhaps being my favorite: a “waspish” lover of gossip who keeps our narrator apprised of the latest events, and who Raven undoubtedly wants us to believe is gay, as deftly suggested by his manner of speech. I kept picturing him as an Ernest Thesiger type, for some reason. As Newman informs us in his intro, Raven put a lot of his own personal history into the book’s lead characters, especially Richard Fountain. Thus, Raven also failed to get his fellowship at Cambridge, and also saw duty in Africa during his Army service (Kenya for the author, the Congo for Fountain). His novel takes its sweet time getting to where it’s going, adding reams in the way of character development, but is so well written that the reader never feels restless. Not for nothing was it once said of Raven that he had “the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel.”

Doctors Wear Scarlet, it must be admitted, features very little in the way of scares but any number of moments that shock. Among those shocking sequences: A peasant woman on Hydra presents her dead baby, presumably killed by the vampiress; Chriseis’ initial appearance, cloaked, and exerting her full hypnotic powers; the tragic death of one of our three brave rescuers; the story of how Richard, held helpless, was forced to watch Chriseis have her way with two peasant children; Richard’s stunning speech at that Michaelmas feast; and the book’s doubly tragic, downbeat denouement. And there are many other wonderfully handled scenes, as well, such as the one in which the young Richard takes care of a bully at Charterhouse; the remarkable adventure that Richard and some of his men had while in the Congo; the chance encounter that our brave trio has with Arnold, an oddball historian, in a crumbling Cretan temple; and an interview with the monks on the island of Hydra. The novel becomes marvelously suspenseful towards its conclusion, as we wonder whether or not Richard will snap, and also gives us an excellent look at life in the world of Cambridge University, despite its use of a fictional college. In all, it is a remarkable tale, always unpredictable and unfailingly intelligent. “Your story is a little unusual, you know,” Tyrrel tells our narrator at one point, and for very good reason!

I have very few complaints to make regarding Raven’s very fine work here. Oh, he withholds the use of the “v word” (“vampire,” that is to say) a little too coyly, all the way till page 175 of this Valancourt edition, and the character of Chriseis is unfortunately seen in only two sequences. Also (and this is something that would probably only bother a genuine nitpicker such as myself), it is implied that the Michaelmas feast is held on a weekend, whereas in actuality the date of that event, October 31, 1957, was a Thursday. And while I’m picking nits, why would a Michaelmas celebration, which is traditionally held on September 29^th, be held at Cambridge on … Halloween? But these are very minor matters, and in no wise detract from the manifold fine qualities of Raven’s work. I would now love to read the three other horror/Gothic books that the author wrote later in his career, namely the novels The Roses of Picardie (1980) and September Castle (1984), as well as the collection Remember Your Grammar and Other Haunted Stories (1997). Hopefully, the folks at Valancourt will one day see fit to release those titles, as well…