Richard Marsh (author)

This article is about the author. For the politician, see Richard Marsh, Baron Marsh. For the racing driver, see Richard Marsh (racing driver).

Richard Marsh (12 October 1857 – 9 August 1915) was the pseudonym of the British author born Richard Bernard Heldmann. He is best known for his supernatural thriller The Beetle: A Mystery, which was published in the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula and was initially even more popular. The Beetle remained in print until 1960, and was subsequently resurrected in 2004 and 2007. Heldman was educated at Eton and Oxford University. He began to publish short stories, mostly adventure tales, as "Bernard Heldmann," before adopting the name "Richard Marsh" in 1893. Several of the prolific Marsh's novels were published posthumously. Marsh's grandson Robert Aickman was a notable writer of short "strange stories".

The Beetle

Heldmann's greatest commercial success came with one of his earliest novels, The Beetle (1897). A story about a mysterious oriental figure who pursues a British politician to London, where he wreaks havoc with his powers of hypnosis and shape-shifting, Heldmann/Marsh's novel is of a piece with other sensational turn of the 19th to 20th century fictions such as Stoker's Dracula, George du Maurier's Trilby, and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels. Like Dracula and many of the sensation novels pioneered by Wilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, The Beetle is narrated from the perspectives of multiple characters, a technique used in many late 19th-century novels (those of Wilkie Collins and Stoker, for example) to create suspense and to confuse gender boundaries.

Works

• The Mahatma's Pupil (1893)
• The Devil's Diamond (1893)
• Mrs Musgrave and Her Husband (1895)
• The Beetle: A Mystery (1897)
• Crime and the Criminal (1897)
• The Duke and the Damsel (1897)
• Philip Bennion's Death (1897)
• The House of Mystery (1898)
• Curios: Some Strange Adventures of Two Bachelors (1898)
• The Goddess: A Demon (1900)
• The Seen and the Unseen (1900)
• Marvels and Mysteries (1900)
• The Joss: A Reversion (1901)
• The Magnetic Girl (1903)
• The Confessions of a Young Lady: Her Doings and Misdoings (1905)
• A Spoiler of Men (1905)
• The Coward Behind the Curtain (1908)
• Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (1912)
• The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916)
• The Deacon's Daughter (1917)
• On the Jury (1918)

Further reading

• Pittard, Christopher. "'The Unknown—with a capital U!' Richard Marsh and Victorian Popular Fiction." Clues: A Journal of Detection 27.1 (Fall 2008): 99–103.
• Vuohelainen, Minna. "Distorting the Genre, Defining the Audience, Detecting the Author: Richard Marsh's 'For Debt' (1902)." Clues: A Journal of Detection 25.4 (Summer 2007): 17–26.

External links

• Works by Richard Marsh at Project Gutenberg
• Book summary for The Joss: A Reversion (1901) at Valancourt Books
• Book summary for Curios (1898) at Valancourt Books
• Book summary for The Complete Adventures of Judith Lee (1912-16) at Black Coat Press
• Richard Marsh at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Richard Marsh at the Internet Movie Database
• The Beetle by Richard Marsh free audiobook at Librivox.org