After my Christmas Day selection of contemporary reviews of Adrian Ross’s The Hole of the Pit, Douglas Anderson kindly sent me some I missed out on, so here’s a follow-up.

First, from The Observer, 16 Oct 1914, and like the London Evening Standard last time, one that gets the title wrong both in its heading (The Hole in the Pit) and the review:

Although the name of “Adrian Ross” is familiar as that of a writer of lyrics for the stage, this seems to be the first time that Mr Arthur Ropes has appeared as a novelist. He has many gifts for that part: a clear unhampered method of setting forth a story and nice invention. “The Hole in the Pit” is a tale of the English Civil War period, but the Civil War has very little to do with it, beyond sending Mr Hubert Leyton to his cousin’s castle to intercede with the Earl on behalf of terrorised villagers. The Earls of Deeping were a wild race and had upon them a curse of unusual potency. What the curse was shall not be told here, nor, indeed, could it be told in few and definite words. The book has an atmosphere of clinging terror which is most skilfully created and maintained. Period history and the like matter very little. Character and conversation hardly matter either, though Mr Hubert Leyton’s tone is very plausibly seventeenth century, and the Italian sorceress has an effectiveness. But for ghostliness and ghastliness the manifestations of the Deepings’ family curse are hard to equal, and it is the cleverly contrived air of the horrible in the scene and in the happenings that makes the book hard to put aside. It ought to be read in broad daylight, and in a robust mood.

Next, The Times Literary Supplement from 22 Oct 1914. This was published unsigned, but Doug tells me it’s by Harry Pirie-Gordon (who co-authored The Weird of the Wanderer with Baron Corvo, and perhaps knew M R James):

Mr Adrian Ross has dedicated The Hole of the Pit (Arnold, 6s.) to the Provost of King’s; and one may well imagine that the Curse which was loosed from the Hole was a sort of grey and amorphous elder brother of the engaging entity which haunted Canon Alberic’s scrap-book. As a rule those who write stories about the period of the Great Rebellion in England have enough to do to cope with the local and contemporary colour surrounding their plots. Mr Ross, however, makes his story centre on a horror which has nothing to do with history, and merely uses his period as a convenient store-house whence he may draw the picturesque persons of his drama. There is a pious preacher and a wicked Earl, a maiden in distress, a negro page, a murdered Countess, and a foreign witch; also many ruffians and a carnivorous Curse. The story threads amid scenes of bloodshed and outrage, and there are some horrible episodes nicely told and not over-described. The hero nearly falls a victim in rescuing the heroine from the clammy embrace of the Curse, which is too strong for the witch, who vainly calls up devils to fight against its powers—as she is menaced no less than the Earl, with whom she keeps company. From the moment when the Curse devours the captive cobbler to that when the Earl cheats it of its prey by drastic means the reader can watch the inexorable advance of the stinking doom.

Finally, the US edition of The Occult Review, from February 1915. It’s signed WHC, which Doug has identified as Wilfred Chesson:

Of an earl, figuring in rhymed prophecy, we are informed that, in a certain eventuality—

“What doth sit beneath the Hole
Shall come and take him body and soul.

The horrible “what” never loses it pronominal mystery in this seventeenth-century English romance of an aristocratic robber, a sorceress, a murdered wife, a charming innocent girl and one Hubert Leyton, who serves as chronicler. Mr Ropes skilfully blends the weird and repulsive in incident and local colour with the tender glow of first love, and the sublime heroism of a Cromwellian Puritan. His novel may be recommended as excellent mental fare for that time of the year when the body being fortified by unwonted rations, the imagination is inclined to feast itself on fictitious marvels and terrors.

Oddly, this review doesn’t seem to have appeared in the UK edition of The Occult Review, at least not in the scans available at The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals (though I did find another review by WHC among them, for William Hope Hodgson’s Men of the Deep Waters).

Finally this quote from The Yorkshire Post is part of an entry for The Hole of the Pit in a catalogue of Edward Arnold’s new books that Doug came across. I can’t find the full review, but the excerpt is worth quoting:

Seldom since the death of Edgar Allan Poe has there been published a book more uncanny, yet stamped with greater verisimilitude than “The Hole of the Pit.” Mr A R Ropes has conceived a weird yet enthralling plot.

And to finish off, I found another picture of Adrian Ross, this time a full-page photograph in The Tatler, 13 Jan 1904. (The full page can be found at the British Newspaper Archive.)

On the wall behind him is his own portrait:

Adrian Ross in 1904