Bizarrism Vol 2

“If you’re trying to stand out in your social circle, take some tips from the experts.” - Beat magazine

WITCHCRAFT,

CHAOS

THE STRANGE ODYSSEY OF WILLIAM SEABROOK.

KRISHNAS

VOODOO & ALCOHOL THE CASE OF THE

find that fish!

JLB Smith’s quest for the coelacanth.

AMONG THE

Eugenia falleni THE MAN-WOMAN MURDERER.

THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF LEONARD LAWSON. ALSO AVAILABLE

UK £13.99 US $19.95

WWW . WORLDHEADPRESS . COM

9781909394483-Perfect-218pp_UPDATE.indd 1

EDITION ED D N PA EX D N A ED IS EV The R ns by Glenn Smith

by Chris Mikul

Illustratio

Vol.

2

BY CHRIS MIKUL

COMIC BOOK KILLER

M S R I R Z A I B

The REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

Along the way, light is shone on various religious cults, mysterious deaths are pondered, conspiracy theories probed and the fate of Napoleon’s penis tracked. It’s a lively, meticulously researched collection of tales that will amuse, appall and intrigue, and leave you marvelling at the infinite strangeness of human beings.

BIZARRISM

Bizarrism II collects further tales of high strangeness around the world.

The cast includes an eccentric baroness, a murderous comic book artist, an obsessed ichthyologist, a celebrity stigmatic, a cannibalistic writer, a senile surgeon and a woman who tried to make atheism into a religion.

Vol. 2 HEADPRESS

18/07/2017 16:54:46

B I Z A RE RTWOI S M OLUM V

These are sample pages from a Headpress book copyright Š Headpress 2017

For more information or to buy a copy of the book visit www.worldheadpress.com

Also by Chris Mikul from Headpress The Eccentropedia Bizarrism Vol 1

CO N T E N T S Introduction................................................................................................ 5 The Case of the Garrotted Sherlockian................................................... 9 Queen Bee................................................................................................. 17 Eugenia Falleni — the Man-Woman Murderer ................................... 23 Of Aliens and Raelians............................................................................ 31 The Comic Book Killer............................................................................ 39 Who Killed the Baroness?....................................................................... 45 Death, Indeterminacy and Claudine Longet......................................... 56 Chaos Among the Krishnas.................................................................... 63 Witchcraft, Voodoo and Alcohol............................................................ 71 Members on the Move............................................................................. 91 The Case of the Senile Surgeon.............................................................. 95 The Man on the Beach ..........................................................................103 Padre Pio — Celebrity Stigmatic..........................................................112 Death of a Shakespeare Thief...............................................................122 Find that Fish!.........................................................................................127 Adam and Chopper................................................................................137 Turning Atheism into a Religion..........................................................143 The Colourful Tale of Roderick Mackenzie........................................157 The Messiah from Korea.......................................................................165 Strange News from the House of Dior................................................173 A Visit to the Tiger Balm Gardens.......................................................181 Of Moral Panics and the Morbid Fear of Clowns..............................189 Eternal Life — Guaranteed...................................................................195 The Fabulous Adventures of Denisa, Lady Newborough..................203 Notes and Sources..................................................................................211 About the author and artist...................................................................217 About this book......................................................................................218

N O I T C U D O R T IN s I ran off the pages of the first issue of Bizarrism on a tax office photocopier in 1986, I had no idea I would still be producing it three decades later. I also had no idea what I was actually doing.

The concept of a ‘zine’, as opposed to a ‘fanzine’, was unknown at the time, or at least unknown to me. I knew that fanzines, which were mostly produced by science fiction or horror film enthusiasts, had been around for years. I’d seen some devoted to Doctor Who, and more recently some of the fanzines that emerged from the punk scene like Sniffin’ Glue from the UK, a few copies of which made it out to Australia and inspired some local imitations. But I didn’t think of myself working in any sort of tradition with Bizarrism. All I knew was I had some really interesting stories to tell people and this seemed an easy way of doing it.

As it happened, this was around the time when fanzines broke away from their moorings as being purely a way for large groups of people to share their collective enthusiasms. A zine, by contrast, could be about something for which the zine-maker was the sole enthusiast; it could be could be about anything. The early ’90s saw an explosion in such publications, with the appearance of iconic American zines such as John Marr’s Murder Can Be Fun, Al

Hoff ’s Thrift Score (about shopping at thrift stores), and Paul Lukas’ Beer Frame (about odd products and packaging). Underground culture specialists RE/Search published two hefty volumes devoted to zines, and some zinemakers got book deals.

Just a few years later it all seemed to be over. The internet had well and truly arrived, and many zine-makers switched to websites and blogs. After all, why spend hours slaving with photocopiers and staplers to make a few hundred copies of your zine when the internet could give you access to thousands of readers?

I also wondered whether the internet threatened to make the whole idea of Bizarrism redundant. From the beginning, my intention was to tell stories which people were unlikely to know, and about which information was hard to come by. My research method consisted of slowly accumulating newspaper and magazine articles, and other bits of information about subjects as they came to hand, often over several years, until I had amassed enough to tell a story comprehensively. But surely the advent of search engines like Google meant that such information was now at everyone’s fingertips.

Well, yes and no. There’s no doubt that the internet is an extraordinary tool for research. And yet it will be a long time before everything in the world is digitised, if ever, and I’m often surprised about just how little there

5

O BIZARRISM – VOLUME TW

is online about certain subjects. And even when you uncover a mass of data, that might not be enough to understand the story.

That’s what keeps me doing Bizarrism — finding those stories. I’m constantly on the lookout for extraordinary stories along the lines of Donald Crowhurst’s ill-fated roundthe-world yacht race, the first piece I ever wrote for Bizarrism; stories that have largerthan-life characters, and mind-boggling plot twists, and read like the most daring fiction.

Once I get wind of one, I’m like a dog with a bone — I want to tear into it and chew on it. I want to read everything about it I can get my

hands on, and evaluate all the different points of view on it there may be, and try to figure out what happened and why. As always, the first reader I have in mind is myself. I want to read this damn story — so I’d better write it.

And as I’ve continued to produce Bizarrism, so have many others continued to produce zines. They may have gone into a decline in the late 1990s, but since then there has been a resurgence. There’s something beautiful and tactile and personal about a paper zine that a screen full of pixels just can’t match, and so what if you only reach a few hundred readers?

They’ll be the ones that matter.

6

O BIZARRISM – VOLUME TW

8

e h t f o e s a C e Th LOCKIAN

G A R RO T T E D S H E R L O hen I was a young reader just graduating from picture books, I developed a fascination with myths and legends. I was fortunate in that my school library had quite an extensive collection of books on them, which I devoured, and the first ‘favourite author’ I can remember having (apart from, perhaps, Dr Seuss) was Roger Lancelyn Green. He specialised in beautifully written retellings of the Greek and Norse myths, the stories of King Arthur, Robin Hood and so on, which were published in attractive editions by Puffin Books. I still have all of them on my shelves.

The school library was also well stocked with Sherlock Holmes, who may also be said to have entered the realm of myth and legend. I still remember how excited I was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles and the short stories for the first time. As anyone who has read them or taken an interest in the immense subculture they have spawned will know, Arthur Conan Doyle’s coldly rational detective has a peculiar effect on some readers. Holmes has long been the fictional character most commonly assumed to have been a real person (and indeed a real and immortal person, given that letters to him are still being sent in large numbers to 221B Baker Street in London). Some of this stems from Doyle’s vivid and economical writing

style. The stories are full of evocative details such as the contents of Holmes’ famed study — the violin, the Turkish slipper filled with tobacco, the jars of chemicals and so on — and they still effortlessly conjure up a picture of fogbound 19th century London. Then there is the imperious figure of Holmes himself, who offers the promise that all the problems of the world could be solved with a sufficient application of reason.

Doyle, as is well known, grew heartily sick of his creation, thinking his historical novels were of far more importance, and at one point killed him off by sending him over the Reichenbach Falls (only to bring him back later due to near hysterical public demand).

It was no doubt because of his disdain for the character that Doyle was somewhat cavalier about keeping the facts of the Holmes saga consistent, so that certain details found in some stories flatly contradict others. For Sherlockians with time on their hands, this has opened a fertile field. Taking as their starting point that Holmes was a real person, and all of Watson’s accounts are true case records, they have created a vast literature which attempts to explain the contradictions in ingenious ways. It’s all rather silly, but it can be quite amusing as well, and when I started reading the stories I also began to acquire some of this secondary literature. In this way I came upon the name of Richard Lancelyn

9

O BIZARRISM – VOLUME TW Green, who was considered one of the leading Sherlockians, and whom I assumed, correctly, was Roger Lancelyn Green’s son.

I had not thought about Richard Lancelyn Green for many years when, in March 2004, I turned the page of a newspaper and read an account of his extremely curious death. He had been found in his London flat, amid his fabulous collection of Sherlock Holmes books and memorabilia. He was lying on his bed, with a bootlace around his neck and a wooden spoon near his hand. He had been garrotted.

The question was, had it been suicide or murder?

he produced a massive Doyle bibliography, then set his sights on writing the definitive biography of him. He knew that to do the job properly, though, he would need to have access to a large archive of Doyle manuscripts and other documents which had attained legendary status among Holmes enthusiasts.

This had once been in the possession of Doyle’s ne’er-do-well son Adrian, who had stored it in his house in Switzerland. It had been used by the American crime fiction writer John Dickson Carr (who specialised in locked room mysteries) when he produced a lacklustre Doyle biography in the 1950s, but since Adrian’s death in 1970 it had vanished.

Green set himself the task of finding it. He met with many members of the Doyle family, and his sleuthing paid off when he gained the trust of Doyle’s youngest daughter, Dame Jean Conan Doyle. One day she took him to her solicitor’s office where he was shown part of the archive, packed away in boxes. She told him that its ownership was still being settled among the family so he could not read any of it yet, but assured him that, on her death, the archive would be donated to the British Museum. Green became so close to Dame Jean that she thought of him like a son, but they eventually had a falling out when she took exception to certain things he had written about her father. Green was devastated by this turn of events.

Dame Jean died in 1997, but the fabled archive failed to arrive at the British Museum.

Once again it seemed to have slipped from the grasp of Doyle scholars. Green’s despair can be imagined.

In the second half of 2003, Green’s friends

Richard Lancelyn Green had been besotted with Sherlock Holmes since the age of eleven.

Born in 1954, he was the youngest of Roger’s three children, and grew up in the family’s huge, ancient but rundown home, Poulton Hall near Liverpool. He was a shy boy who had been blinded in one eye in an accident, and took refuge in a fantasy world based on books.

When he was thirteen he began scouring junk shops and putting together a meticulous recreation of Holmes’ study in the attic, which became the envy of Holmes fans around the country, and soon afterwards was inducted into the Sherlock Holmes Society of London.

Green’s interest in Holmes extended to his creator, and he began to collect every piece of material related to Doyle he could get his hands on. He eventually amassed a collection of some 40,000 items, the largest in the world, and was acknowledged as the leading expert on Doyle and Holmes. With a colleague,

10

N

GARROTTED SHERLOCKIA began to notice a change in his personality.

He hinted that he had enemies, and these were somehow connected to the archive.

One individual, whom he referred to as ‘the American’, was a particular persecutor.

Then, in March 2004, Green was astonished to read in a newspaper of the imminent auction of the archive at Christie’s.

With mounting concern, he noted that it was to be sold in 137 lots, which meant that it would almost inevitably be broken up.

He went to Christie’s to inspect the archive, which included the manuscript of Doyle’s first, unpublished novel, notebooks and unused plots for Sherlock Holmes stories, and was convinced it was the same material Dame Jean had shown him.

It was being sold on behalf of three Doyle family members, and Green immediately suspected, as Holmes might have put it, foul play. The archive belonged in the British Museum, as Dame Jean had intended, and these Doyle relatives had clearly stolen it. He contacted other Sherlockians, journalists, members of Parliament and anyone else who might be able to help stop the sale.

In the last two weeks of his life, Green was clearly under considerable strain. He told several people, including a journalist, that his life was under threat. He sent his sister, Priscilla West, a piece of paper on which three phone numbers were written, with a note reading, “PLEASE KEEP THESE NUMBERS SAFE.” On 26 March, he rang one of his oldest friends, Mark Rathbone Utechin (a relative of Basil Rathbone, who had played Holmes in films in the 1940s) and made accusations

against several people, including Utechin himself. When Utechin, disturbed, asked him why he was doing this, he replied, “Perhaps it’s because I’m strange.”

Green was an intensely private man, and his family had no idea that he was homosexual.

That evening, he had dinner with a man named Lawrence Keen, who had been his lover some years before. After the dinner, at which Green drank heavily, they went back to Green’s townhouse in Scarsdale Villas, Kensington. Green was afraid to talk inside the house, saying he believed it was bugged, and they sat in the darkened garden, drinking coffee. Green spoke about the archive, the threats to his life, and ‘the American’.

The following morning, Green’s sister rang him but he did not pick up the phone.

Instead of hearing the familiar message on his answering machine, which he had recorded years before, she heard an American voice saying, “Sorry, not available.” She was concerned enough to ring the police, who went to the house and, also receiving no answer, broke in. They found Green on his bed with the bootlace around his neck, surrounded by his Sherlock Holmes collection. Also on the bed were his childhood teddy bear and some other soft toys — a Snoopy, an Elmo. There was a half-empty bottle of gin nearby, but no suicide note. There was no sign of forced entry to the house, and nothing missing from his Sherlock Holmes collection, which was estimated to be worth millions of dollars.

The police seem to have assumed from

11

O BIZARRISM – VOLUME TW asphyxiation, an S&M game involving another person gone wrong, murder or suicide.

The first two possibilities can be dealt with fairly briefly. Although autoerotic asphyxiation cannot be absolutely ruled out, there was nothing in the way that Green’s body was found which suggested it. There was also no evidence that anyone else — a fellow bondage enthusiast perhaps — was in his house at the time of his death. Admittedly the police investigation was perfunctory, but, to me anyway, the presence of the soft toys on the bed argues against anyone else being there.

Could it have been a case of murder, then, as many have suspected? Green, when telling people in his final months that he feared for his life, always made it clear that these fears were connected to the archive. For the murder theory to be plausible, then, there would have to have been some genuine skulduggery behind the archive sale, but it seems that there was not. Green never knew it, but shortly before her death, Dame Jean Conan Doyle had made a new will. She left the bulk of the archive to the British Museum, while proceeds from the sale of the remainder would go to the three heirs of the widow of her brother Adrian. This was the material which was eventually auctioned at Christie’s on 19 May 2004. As it happened, the British Museum was able to buy most of the lots, and sometime after this, the remainder of the archive — the most important part of it that Dame Jean had withheld from sale — was also delivered to the museum. So the archive that Green had fretted about for years remained essentially intact in the end, just as he had wanted.

the beginning that it was suicide. They failed to summon the CID or dust the room for fingerprints. Later, at the inquest, the coroner had so little evidence to go on that he was forced to deliver an open verdict.

The news of Green’s strange death quickly spread through the Sherlock Holmes community. The idea that he had managed to commit suicide with a bootlace seemed so inherently unlikely that speculation soon turned to the possibility he had been murdered. Sherlockians the world over reached for their metaphorical deerstalker hats and pipes (and in some cases their real ones) and pondered this intriguing new problem.

There are four possible explanations for the death of Richard Lancelyn Green: autoerotic

12

N

GARROTTED SHERLOCKIA The matter of the sinister-sounding American also appears to have an innocent explanation. The writer David Grann, who went to England to research the case for a 2004 New Yorker story, was given the American’s name by one of Green’s colleagues, and interviewed him when he returned to the U.S. He worked at the Pentagon, and in his spare time devoted himself to Sherlockian pursuits, being a member of the pre-eminent American Holmes fan club, the Baker Street Irregulars. He had originally been a friend of Green’s, and they had collaborated on several projects. The American also acted as a representative of the Doyle literary estate in America, and it was this that led to a falling out between the two men. Green accused the American of poisoning Dame Jean’s mind against him by pointing out certain innocuous passages he had written about Doyle, and making them seem derogatory. Green, as we have seen, was hit hard by his estrangement from Dame Jean — a direct physical link to his hero. When interviewed by Grann, the American denied any malice on his part, saying that it been a misunderstanding, and that he had been unaware Green had become so fixated on him in recent years. He said that he had been in London on the night Green died, but had spent it attending one of London’s ever-popular Jack the Ripper walking tours with his wife.

As for the singularly eerie detail of the American voice suddenly appearing on Green’s answering machine, that turned out to be a piece of the sheerest coincidence, a red herring that would have made Arthur Conan Doyle himself proud. The answering

machine had been made in America, and what seems to have happened is that on the night that he died, Green, methodical to the last, removed the message he had recorded on it.

The machine therefore reverted to the default message placed on it by the manufacturer, which had an American voice.

Taking all of that into account, it seems likely that Green’s death was suicide. The question, then, is why he did it, and here there are two broad possibilities. The first, of course, involves the archive. Green had made an enormous emotional and intellectual investment in this over decades. He had come to believe that what would have been his crowning achievement in Sherlockian scholarship — and therefore of his life — the definitive Doyle biography, depended on his having access to it. He also believed that the archive was so important in itself that it

13

O BIZARRISM – VOLUME TW needed to be kept intact and in England, and that the act of selling it was in fact a criminal conspiracy carried out by members of the Doyle family, whom he had come to despise.

Perhaps he blamed himself for not doing enough to save it. The idea that it was about to be dispersed was too horrible to contemplate, and in the end it unbalanced his mind. He became paranoid, internalising the drama of the situation, conflating the destruction of the archive with his own demise.

Sounds good, but there are problems with this analysis. Green’s friends were adamant that, prior to the last few months when paranoia seemed to set in, he had never exhibited any signs of mental illness or depression. If it was a complete mental collapse, it happened with extraordinary suddenness. And why did he kill himself when he did, almost two months before the auction, when there was still every chance of stopping it?

The second possibility, and by far the most intriguing one, is that, having decided to end his life, Green chose to do it in a way that would leave a mystery as tantalising as anything in the Sherlock Holmes canon.

There is no doubt that, once we accept this as a possibility, various elements of the story seem to fall neatly into place. Green assiduously laid the ground for it, muttering darkly about the people out to get him, sending the list of phone numbers to his sister (which turned out to be nothing more than the numbers of a couple of journalists and Christie’s auction house). He set up a suspect — the American — and took care to kill himself when the American was in London.

And he left no suicide note which, considering the compulsive writer he was, would be sure to raise eyebrows among his associates.

Again, it all sounds good. But consider for a moment the practicalities of killing yourself by garrotting. It is rarely used as a method of suicide for the simple reason that you will almost always lose consciousness before achieving the desired aim of strangulation (a pathologist, Sir Colin Berry, told the inquest into Green’s death that he had only come upon one other such case in thirty years).

Garrotting is also an excruciatingly painful way to die — especially if a bootlace is being used to accomplish the deed, rather than the more usual length of rope or cloth. To carry the act through would require the sort of grim, almost superhuman determination a Samurai needed to commit seppuku. Could the pudgy, bookish Green have mustered this sort of willpower for what was, in the final analysis, a sort of dark joke on his fellow Sherlockians?

Green was a keenly intelligent man with a prodigious memory. His writings, even those on arcane subjects which would only have been of interest to the most obsessed Holmes fan, were invariably incisive and often hailed as brilliant. Ever since his discovery of the Holmes stories, he had taken the detective’s precepts for investigating cases to heart, and approached life in the same coolly rational manner.

There was, however, a glaring irony in a man like Green devoting his life to the study

14

N

GARROTTED SHERLOCKIA of Doyle, for towards the end of his life the famous writer had become a veritable paragon of irrationality. It was not always like this, though. Doyle had originally been as sensible and methodical a thinker as his most famous creation. Indeed, he had used Holmesian techniques to analyse a number of real-life criminal cases, and was utterly dismissive of subjects such as life after death. Then came the First World War. When it began, he had been one of the most jingoistic supporters of British involvement, absolutely certain of the rightness of the cause and the inevitability of victory. When it ended four years later, with millions dead including his son Kingsley, he was a changed man. In a desperate attempt to make contact with his son he became an ardent and extremely credulous spiritualist, while all vestiges of reason seem to have deserted him when he took up the cause of the Cottingley Fairies. (Between 1917 and 1920, two young English girls, Francis Griffiths and Elsie Wright, took a series of photos of ‘fairies’ which were actually drawings they had copied from books and stuck on hatpins. It had basically begun as a practical joke, but Doyle wrote an article about them in the Strand Magazine which later became a lavish book, The Coming of the Fairies.)

Green found this change in his hero hard to fathom. He discussed the dilemma with his friends, wondering aloud whether he had wasted his life by devoting it to the study of such a writer (for Green, a terrifying possibility). I suspect it may have been his difficulty in reconciling the two halves of Doyle, the rational and the irrational, rather than his inability to get his hands on the

archive, which prevented him from writing his long anticipated biography.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s father, Richard, a noted illustrator, was mentally unstable and spent time in asylums, and it has often been surmised that behind Doyle’s creation of Holmes, and his championing of reason, lay a fear of hereditary madness. It is ironic indeed that the same tensions between reason and unreason which characterised Doyle’s life should also surface in the life of the man who became the world’s greatest expert on him.

For my money, the curious end of Richard Lancelyn Green is one of the most intriguing cases of unexplained death since the body of an unknown man was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia, in 1948. As with Somerton Man, no matter what scenario you apply to the facts, there are some which stubbornly refuse to fit. Of course it may well be that there are important elements of the story which we simply do not know about, and perhaps never will. In the meantime, all we can do is speculate and wonder, and give credit where credit may be due. If Green really did intend to leave behind an insoluble mystery, he appears to have succeeded.

15

O BIZARRISM – VOLUME TW

16

These are sample pages from a Headpress book copyright Š Headpress 2017

For more information or to buy a copy of the book visit www.worldheadpress.com