Fiction ~ novel
Published (November?) 1898
(First read 07/11/2014)
I make no bones about it, gentle reader, The Money Market is pretty poor. It's not tearing-your-hair-out dreadful like Dodo, nor is it wanting-to-tear-their-eyes-out atrocious like Scarlet and Hyssop ~ it's just routine low-key poor. The good news is that it's virtually forgotten these days ... and deservedly so.
Our hero Percy Gerard has it all: he's 24; he's the acme of masculine beauty [yawn]; he's intelligent; he's a multi-millionaire¹; he's beloved by society and everyone-else-who-knows-him; and he's engaged to the loveliest young gel who ever graced late Victorian London [yawn].
The only snag is that said gel, Sybil Otterbourne, is a soulless husk of a thing, only interested in money, who thinks less of him than she does her lady's-maid². Even as early as 1898, this was well-trodden material for Fred Benson ~ see below for his own opinion of the book.
On his 25th birthday, for reasons EFB can't be bothered to explain, Percy is given a letter from his long-dead grandfather (his own father being also deceased) in which the said gent explains what this colossal fortune is founded on. And lo! shocker of the century, it turns out that Gerard grand-père was a moneylender, and the business of the firm ~ which Percy himself never even bothered to enquire about for 25 years ~ is still moneylending. Preposterous plot, moi? Well, anyway, Perce does the noble Bensonian thing and disposes of his moneylending businesses and the bulk of his fortune ... leaving him with a mere £70,000³ to shift on. That's not enough for Sybil, so she dumps him and marries an American millionaire named Carnegie⁴ instead. And after a brief bout of depression, from which he's rescued by Art, Percy marries his childhood pal who's been waiting in the wings all this time.
To describe the plot as cretinous would be an insult to cretinism. The whole sorry mess is available online here. I wouldn't bother, though.
¹ In today's money he can't be far off the billionaire bracket.
² At least her lady's-maid does her hair for her.
³ I forget the exact figure but it's something like this. It was enough to keep about 2,500 proles in food and lodgings for several decades, anyway.
⁴ I can't begin to imagine where EFB got the inspiration for this name.
Fiction ~ short story
Published in the Windsor Magazine, December 1926
Collected in More Spook Stories (1934)
5,505 words
(First read 04/11/2012)
The Step is unusual for being set in Egypt (Alexandria), and for leaving the reader on the edge of his seat, literally staring into the face of an unspeakable and inexplicable horror. It also contains a very large well-baked red herring, not something EFB generally went in for much. These make it, in my opinion, a decidedly superior spook offering¹.
The moment we learn that the protagonist John Cresswell is 'a big plethoric man' we suspect things won't end well for him; when Benson goes on to tell us he practises that absolute-bottom-rung-of-the-ladder profession of money-lending², we know he's doomed. Anyway, the plot: After a particularly profitable bit of usury, the result of which is his being cursed by the victim's crone of a mother, our 'hero' Cresswell finds himself being followed through the dark streets of the city. Given that the story has a genuinely surprise twist (for once), I'll say no more about it.
It's available online here.
¹ Mind you, that's not to say it doesn't suffer from the usual defects: it's overlong, the pace is too leisurely, and it's a tad repetitive.
² See also The Money Market (1898).
