The Scarlet Boy: Don’t spare me the details!

The Scarlet Boy by Arthur Calder-Marshall

In the mood for an offbeat haunted-house novel to keep you company during this fall season … or during any season; a beautifully written tale of supernatural horror that you have most likely never heard of before? Well, then, I have a doozy of a suggestion for you … namely The Scarlet Boy, by the British author Arthur Calder-Marshall! The book has been unfortunately neglected for over six decades now, and a quick look at its sporadic publishing history will help explain why it might be an unknown quantity for you and the general reading public today, despite its many fine qualities.

The Scarlet Boy was originally released as a hardcover volume by the British publisher Rupert Hart-Davis in 1961, sporting some unimpressive cover art by one Blair Hughes-Stanton. The following year, the book was reissued as a paperback edition by the English publisher Corgi, and with another piece of uninspired cover art by Josh Kirby. Also in 1962, the novel was released in the U.S. as a Harper & Row hardback, its cover (artist unknown), for some strange reason, featuring a drawing of what appears to be an … owl? And after this, and perhaps the book’s primary reason for being so little known today, the novel would go OOPs (out of prints) for over 60 years, till the fine folks at Valancourt Books opted to resurrect it in 2023, with still another meaningless piece of cover art by an unknown artist. (No illustrator, it seems, has so far managed to capture the essence of this novel graphically.) As it turns out, this was another inspired choice by the Valancourt group to showcase; “a disturbing, adult novel of an innocent’s encounter with unearthly evil,” as the Corgi volume had rightfully proclaimed!

Now, before sharing some thoughts on this very fine work, a quick word on the author himself. Arthur Calder-Marshall was born in Surrey in 1908 and went on to write nine novels for adults, three collections of short stories, two novels for children, five film novelizations, plus over a dozen works of nonfiction. The author passed away in 1992 at the age of 83. The Scarlet Boy, incidentally, was the last of those nine original novels.

George Grantley is our narrator for this excursion into the supernatural; a middle-aged, balding bachelor, on the wrong side of 50, who lives in the (fictitious) town of Wilchester and earns a living by writing scholarly biographies of obscure historical figures. Grantley’s serene existence is given a jolt when his old school friend, Christopher “Kit” Everness, a globe-trotting lawyer, asks for his help in locating a home that he and his family can move into. And George, right away, thinks of a pip: Anglesey House, built in 1603 and deserted for the past decade. It was in this house that George, apparently, spent so much of his youth, playing with his friend Charles Scarlet. And even after Charles’ accident in the summer of 1916, when he’d been killed after falling from his treehouse, George had been a regular visitor to Anglesey House, and Charles’ mother, Helen Scarlet, had become like a second mother to him. Now, the house lies derelict in its Wilchester plot; rat infested, overgrown with weeds, crumbling and worm-eaten; a real fixer-upper! But despite all this, Kit views the place as a challenge for his wife Nieves, a Spanish painter, to renovate, and so, after some finagling with hardware store proprietor John Scarlet, the pile’s current owner, he ultimately does take possession. In very short order, Kit and Nieves, their 11-year-old social misfit daughter Rosa, and their Hungarian cook Magda move in, despite some misgivings voiced by our narrator. George, it seems, had just learned from his own housekeeper, Mrs. Ambrose, that Anglesey House is popularly deemed by the locals to be haunted. And after doing some research in the town’s records, George unearths a truth that had been kept from him when he was 12: His old friend Charles hadn’t been killed in a tulip-tree accident after all, but had rather hung himself in his bedroom … a suicide, for no apparent reason!

As the days go on, George and Magda enter into a romantic liaison with one another. But on a more sinister note, the house’s contractor now reports that nothing can be done to eliminate the aura of chill emanating from what used to be Charles’ old room. When some artifacts – a stirrup, a piece of harness leather – are found in Charles’ cupboard and sent to a psychometrist for analysis, it is revealed that still another boy, Peter Ingleside, had committed suicide in that room, on the same date in 1709 … 200+ years earlier, when he was 11. And when Rosa begins painting pictures of the young Charles in his treehouse and of George’s ghostly mother in the garden, and evincing signs of being drawn to that same tree in which Charles and George had played 45 years before, the truth begins to manifest: Rosa herself is psychically gifted, and is being lured to her own suicide by the two young boys from the other side. Thus, what else can George suggest than to bring in the local rector, Martin Turner, to attempt an exorcism on Anglesey House itself…

The Scarlet Boy, it strikes me, really is perfect fare for all fans of the meticulously written ghost story, especially those that involve children in peril, a subgenre perhaps best exemplified by Henry James’ 1898 novella “The Turn of the Screw.” Calder-Marshall here presents us with a novel type of ghost as well … not merely ghostly children, but ghostly children who themselves might be under the control of still another and more sinister being! Potential readers should be forewarned that the book takes its sweet time getting to where it’s going, and indeed, it is not until page 134 (of this 210-page Valancourt edition) that there is any hint of spectral trouble within the Evernesses’ new home! Up till that point, the author overwhelms us with a mass of detail concerning the house’s history, its former occupants, the citizens of Wilchester (yes, this novel might well be considered the “Our Town” of haunted-house stories), the actual purchase of the abode, George & Magda’s budding romance, and an extended visit from George’s cousin Harry. In that cousin Harry section, we learn all about this failed businessman’s world travels, his favorite pipes, his favorite matches, his schemes, and his complex system for keeping in touch with contacts. The reader can only wonder why we are being given this mountain of background data, much of it extraneous to the central story. Ultimately, one realizes that the purpose here is to engender a patina of realism and authenticity, and of course flesh out the players and heighten characterization, so that when the trouble begins, we are fully invested with the cast. Your patience will be required, but trust me, it will be rewarded when the book builds to its nerve-racking conclusion. Grantley, a professional biographer, is the perfect person to act as our narrator, although he is compelled to admit at one point that even a trained biographer such as himself can fail to discern the true stories of those closest to him; ironically, he was completely in the dark as regards both Charles and Helen. The romantic subplot that he gives us is a touching one, too, detailing how a lonely bachelor who’d given up all hope of marriage, and a woman who had lost both her husband and son in the War and is now just waiting for death, find one another and their mutual happiness. Balding bachelors and tragic widows of the world, take heart!

Calder-Marshall presents his readers, after that lengthy setup, with at least five chilling sequences: the discovery of the cold zone in Charles Scarlet’s old bedroom; Percy, the bricklayer/psychometrist, sensing evil in the objects discovered in Charles’ cupboard; the rescue of an “overshadowed” (read: possessed) Rosa from the heights of that tulip tree; a rat attack that overwhelms the house’s backyard and kills George’s puppy; and that final exorcism. And there are several other wonderfully well-done sequences, as well. Thus, we get to read the love letters that Helen and her future husband had written to one another in the early 1900s … very revealing love letters, indeed; witness the first dates that George & Magda go on; and learn all about the history of the Anglesey and Scarlet families.

As for the rest of it, the book is almost intimidatingly and densely well written, with any number of apt descriptions. Thus, in John Scarlet’s darkened hardware store, George “detected a customer, like the solitary denizen of a pond which was being drained for brackishness.” We are told that when Helen’s husband “came into a room, you could no more ignore him than you could ignore a conger eel just landed in the bottom of a boat.” The book, need I even mention, is a very British affair, and you might have to do a little digging to find out the significance of Osbert Lancaster, Pears’ soap, Sandown Park, a Godfrey Davis car, and Harry Price. I’m not sure what the author’s religious beliefs were, but his book operates as a very strong argument for the power of Christianity. Both our narrator and Magda are devout Catholics (indeed, their shared religious beliefs are responsible for their first date together), and, as in another book that I recently experienced, H. B. Gregory’s Dark Sanctuary (1940), here, the power of prayer is revealed to be most efficacious, a belief in God is shown to result in salvation, and the mere entry into a church during Mass is enough to bring two apostates back into the fold. At bottom, this is a very Christian book, like Gregory’s.

I have only a few complaints to levy against Calder-Marshall’s very fine work here, but one of those few occurs in the book’s very first sentence. “The story undoubtedly began, as far as I was concerned, on Monday, April 3, 1959,” our narrator tells us. The only problem here is, April 3, 1959 was actually a Friday! I will never understand why authors don’t spend just a little extra time in getting all their details right, to satisfy us nitpickers out here! There are any number of cultural, religious, historical, biblical and literary references to look up, for those readers who insist on fully appreciating every little bit thrown at them (yeah, that’s me). And, as I mentioned, the novel may try the patience of some, as we wait for the “good stuff” to get going. Still, the book is so well written, and so unfailingly interesting, that I didn’t mind any of this overly much. I now find myself wishing that the author had applied himself to the production of more supernatural fare, a genre for which he clearly had a knack. Unfortunately, I don’t believe he ever did, and indeed, Calder-Marshall was famously quoted as saying “I have never written two books on the same subject or with the same object.” And so, we are left with The Scarlet Boy, but fortunately, it is a very effective chiller, indeed!