David Forrest – The Undertaker’s Dozen

David Forrest – The Undertaker’s Dozen (Tandem, 1974)

Terror can have such simple beginnings—a child’s letter to Father Christmas…a lovely girl glimpsed in a London street…a spin down the Brighton Road…a night spent in an empty mansion for a bet.

And the consequences can be so fearsome, as the unsleeping dead walk again, as strange emotions stir inanimate things to murderous life, as horrors beyond our imagining cross the threshold into everyday life; can anyone be sure that all is as it seems?

After you have read this book, can you?

The Cynic
The Ghostwriter
Shingle
Whoever You May Be …
Boys Will Be ….
The Pilgrimage
The Wrong Christmas Spirit
The Voyager
The Finger Man
Pillion Rider
The Blackamoor
The Undertaker’s Dozen
Spare Parts Inc.

Thanks to Mark Samuels for providing the blurb, cover scan and contents of this one. You can Mark’s plot-outlines on Vault’s Undertaker’s Dozen thread here.

Find missing covers here

Curt Purcell’s Groovy Age Of Horror has Ralph Comer novel The Mirror Of Dionysos (1969) – “The elemental powers of white magic contend with a more terrifying form of evil” – and Arkon Daraul’s Witches And Sorcerers (1969).

Sexy Witch has Witches And Sorcerers (1965 and 1969 editions), Ronald Seth’s  Witches and their Craft (1970), Jules Michelet’s  Satanism and Witchcraft (1970) and Louise Huebner’s Witchcraft for All (1971).

Alwyn Turner’s Trash Fiction has the 1965 and 1969 editions of Daraul’s Secret Societies and examples of Tandem’s non-horror output.

Tandem-specific links

There don’t seem to be many of these. Chetwynd-Hayes’ Tandem  paperbacks are discussed at Loughville and there’s a useful illustrated article on some of the Witchcraft titles at the entertaining  sexywitch blogspot

Ronald Holmes – Witchcraft In British History

Ronald B. Holmes – Witchcraft In British History: The Manipulation Of Mankind’s Primitive Terrors And Superstitions (Tandem, 1976: Muller 1974)

Jessie Douglas Kerruish – The Undying Monster

Jessie Douglas Kerruish – The Undying Monster (Tandem, 1975)

“Devil or ghoul, the bane of Hammand would have it’s victim”

Isn’t that the most spine-chilling cover you’ve ever seen?

Dannow on the Suffolk Downs: For generations the Hammand family have laboured under a curse, apparently due to an evil ancestor who sold his soul to Satan. To make matters worse, they’re plagued by a werewolf who does for most of them, either rending their bodies or driving them to suicide. Now London-based Miss Luna Bartendale, a psychic detective, is called in by the present owners to see if she can prevent their doom at the fangs and claws of the monster.

First published by Heath & Cranton in 1922 and successfully filmed by 20th Century Fox two decades later, Tandem released this paperback version for no apparent reason I can fathom in 1975.

Richard Davis – Tandem Horror 2

Richard Davis (ed) – Tandem Horror 2 (Tandem, 1968)

 

Angus James – Working for Miss Arethusa
Robin Smyth – The Dooley Street Centre Forward
J. Ramsey Campbell – Reply Guaranteed
Rosemary Timperley – Ice in Their Laughter
Julia Birley – Dead on His Feet
Walter Harris – The Forgiver
Simon Pilkington – The Inheritance
Elizabeth Fancett – I’m Not Mad Yet
D. E. Piper – From Our Special Correspondent
J. Ramsey Campbell – The Stocking
Richard Davis – The Lady by the Stream
Rosemary Timperley – Voices in the Night
Michel Parry – The Last Bus

Thanks to Steve and Charles Black for providing the cover scan and details for this one.

And thanks to D. F. Lewis for giving me his copy!

Richard Davis – Tandem Horror 3

Richard Davis (ed) – Tandem Horror 3: Haunting Tales Of Unseen Terrors (Tandem, 1969)

 

The raw material of horror is everyday life. Who would admit to being frightened by the age-old clanking of the fettered ghost — but what made the window curtains shiver on a windless night?
And the face in the mirror; you see it several times a day, and it smiles when you smile, and frowns when you frown — but if one day it remained expressionless, whose reflection would it be?
Here is a collection of spine-creeping tales to make you look warily over your shoulder.

Introduction – Richard Davis
Dennis Piper – The Snowman
John Burke – The Tourists
Rosemary Timperley – What Happened To Sally?
Richard Davis – The Sick Room
Ramsey Campbell – Cyril
Julia Birley – Sawdust Caeser
David Campton – Alderman Stratton’s Fancy
Audrey Johnson – Takeover Bid
Elizabeth M. Fancett – Museum Piece

Ornella Volta – The Vampire

Ornella Volta – The Vampire (Tandem, 1965)

Do Vampires exist?

The interest in these macabre and horrific creatures of legend has increased in recent years and numerous books have been written and films made about them.

Ornella Volta’s book, which won this year’s Dracula prize, awarded in Paris, is without question the most brilliant and penetrating of all these books concerned with death, eroticism and blood of which vampirism is the symbol.

She traces their origins from detailed accounts found in Central and Eastern Europe, and particularly the basic source discovered in the forbidding Tarla mountains, and provides some terrifying facts which have furthered recent developments in the field of sexology and psycho-pathology.

This subject has fascinated people for centuries and one is left with. the disturbing question:

Is the Vampire myth or reality?

August Derleth – When Graveyards Yawn

August Derleth – When Graveyards Yawn (Tandem, 1965)

 

Introduction

Mr. George
Parrington’s Pool
A Gentleman From Prague
The Man On B-17
Blessed Are The Meek
Mara
The Blue Spectacles Alannah
Dead Man’s Shoes
The Tsanta In The Parlour
Balu
The Extra Passenger
The Wind In The Lilacs
Miss Esperson
The Night Train To Lost Valley
Bishop’s Gambit
Mrs. Manifold

Have you ever

Felt an unseen presence?
Lived through the same moment before?
Felt a sudden chill when there was no draught?
Heard your name called when there was no-one near?
Known something would happen before it does?
The superb stories in this collection by August Derleth will confirm your worst fears.

He says in the introduction that they are among the best macabre tales he has written.

Charles Birkin – Where Terror Stalked

Charles Birkin – Where Terror Stalked (Tandem, 1966)

 

Where Terror Stalked, New Faces, Obsession, Shelter, The Orphanage, Paris Pilgrimage, The Belt, Softly … Softly, Old Mrs. Strathers, The Harlem Horror, Gran, Bring Back My Bonny, No More For Mary.

To Ralph Stokes for no good reason

Just a quick note for the time being: The Harlem Horror, Shelter, Obsession and Old Mrs. Strathers are all from the Creeps series although they’ve reputedly been slightly amended/ updated. I’m sure that The Belt is also a reworking of Henri Larne.

Old Mrs. Strathers: Paralysed by a stroke, old Mrs. Strathers is powerless to intervene on her doting son’s behalf when his faithless wife, Molly, sets about poisoning him. As Ronnie lies dying, with a supreme effort she raises herself from her chair, and … pitches headfirst into the fireplace ….

Paris Pilgrimage: A revamped, extended version of The Cockroach from ‘Monsters.’ Thirty years on from the awful events, we catch up with Jane on her return to the scene of the crime.

New Faces: “You mean it’s the bloke what was in the news tonight … the fellah what could ‘elp the police in connection with doin’ in all those perverts?”. Thomas Brown’s murder spree has accounted for the death of eight homosexuals, but the net is closing in and he’s aware of being watched wherever he goes. To get away from one plain-clothes policeman, he slips into the waxworks and hides himself away in the Chamber of Horrors for the night.

The Harlem Horror: The Harwoods, Michael, Mary and little Clare, move from London to New York. There have been a spate of child disappearances in the Big Apple, and one day Clare goes missing. Some months later, the grieving, broken parents attend a funfair on Coney Island. During a sudden downpour they take shelter in a tent which turns out to be the entrance to a freak show. The star exhibit is the ‘What-is-it?’, a one-eyed, hideously deformed creature which the barker assures is female and aged no more than ten. On the boat home to England, Michael buys a newspaper. The lead story tells of a police raid on a laboratory in Harlem where the brilliant – albeit criminally insane – plastic surgeon, Sir John Trowbridge, has been performing abominable vivisections on children and animals which he then sells on to the freak shows …

Obsession: Hartledean. Doris Carson and Henry Russell are to wed. Joe, the village idiot, has a massive crush on Doris as she’s the only person who has ever been kind to him. After she gently declines his offer of marriage, Joe takes to stalking both she and her burly fiance. Henry beats him up.
Events reach their grim conclusion at the old quarry when, with a superhuman effort, Joe dislodges a huge boulder, intending for it to crush the life out of his rival. It takes a nasty deflection on the way down ..

Shelter: Brazil. Paul Christie spends the night at the home of Lopez, his wife and their daughter when they kindly give him refuge from a terrible storm. In the dark, he is visited in his room by one of the ladies of the house who shares his best. As he rides away next morning, he learns of the existence of a second daughter. He was lucky to catch her, actually, as she’s being consigned to a leper coloney later on today.

No More For Mary: One of Birkin’s rare and increasingly bizarre excursions into SF. Author Toby Lewis, holidaying in San Bernando, discovers a beautiful jewelled insect and decides it will do nicely for sister Mary who’s something big in Lepidoptera at Oxford. The “bug” is actually Zeon, a visitor from a far more developed and benevolent society than our own who are intent on colonising Earth by peaceful means and saving us from ourselves. After the hapless Toby has left him exposed near an ants nest, Zeon suffers a cruel and agonising death while trying to free himself of his spacesuit.
In his introduction to Tales Of Terror From Outer Space (Fontana, 1975), R. Chetwynd-Hayes writes;  “Charles Birkin has given us a new kind of invader from outer space in No More For Mary. I can only suggest you be very careful with the insecticide spray from now onwards. That over-sized bug crawling up the table leg might well have the kindest intentions.”