M arsh, R ichard

Abstract

Richard Marsh (1857–1915) was the pseudonym under which Richard Bernard Heldmann published most of his work. While he is best known for his supernatural thriller of 1897, The Beetle , he was a prolific author of fiction in various popular modes, including school stories and novels of mystery and crime. Heldmann's own life story is not without its own enigmas and plot‐twists. It was not until Robert Aickman, his grandson, published his autobiography in 1966 that it became widely known that Heldmann and Marsh were the same man. (Aickman himself also wrote supernatural fiction, and was the editor of the several editions of the Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories ). It is only in the last few years with the availability of state records and other resources online that it has emerged that the most likely reason for Heldmann's adoption of a pseudonym in 1892 was that he had been convicted of obtaining goods and money by false pretences at the Quarter Sessions at Maidstone, Kent on April 9, 1884, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison (Capture of a Forger at Tenby, 1884). (As late as 2004, when the Broadview edition of The Beetle appeared, the motivation for his second career under the name Marsh was obscure.) Heldmann was imprisoned for a minor crime spree that saw him use assumed names to live lavishly in various parts of the country. From 1880–3 he had also been writing school stories and novels, and his shorter works appeared in the boys' magazine, Union Jack , where he was also associate editor (with G. A Henty) from 1882. Upon his release he resumed his writing career, but did not publish his first novel under his new name, The Devil's Diamond , until 1893. From this period he began to churn out short and longer fiction at an impressive rate, sometimes publishing several novels a year: for example, in the same year that The Beetle appeared (1897) he also published three other novels. His short novels were well‐suited to the changing publishing market, in which people were buying single‐volume novels rather than renting three‐deckers. Published in colorful pictorial boards by such firms as Ward Lock, his “shilling shockers” were calculated to appeal to the browsing eye. Like other Victorian authors, Marsh made his work pay by serializing the novels before volume publication; Tom Ossington's Ghost (1898), for example, was serialized earlier that year in the Ipswich Journal as the Ossington Mystery . His shorter fiction was tailored to the proliferating light‐reading magazines of the period, such as the Strand , the Windsor , and the Idler , and he republished some of this work in such collections as Curios (1899) and Marvels and Mysteries (1900).