Mason Queensbury:White Adventurer
in
The Parlour of the Occult
by Patrick Casey
Copyright 2012 Patrick Casey
The following is a work of fiction.
*****
Introduction
by the author, Patrick Casey
I have been a fan of Mason Queensbury from the time I was a small child. I first fell in love with the “jungle adventure” genre when I saw the movie “Greystoke,” starring Christopher Lambert as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ great pulp hero, Tarzan. It came out in 1984. I probably saw it in 1986 or so, when I would’ve been seven or eight. The movie is not even that good (having now seen it again, as an adult), but it fired my imagination. It led me to dig into the original Tarzan books at my local library, an easy bike ride from my parent’s house in the decidedly non-exotic, non-jungle suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.
Soon I had read all the volumes of Tarzan they had at the library, so I began to search for similar books of exploration and adventure. I discovered Alan Quatermain, John Carter of Mars, Doc Savage, Conan the Cimmerian, Solomon Kane, Captain Nemo, and Sherlock Holmes.
Then my grandfather died. My father’s father, Jack, my “middle name-sake”, was very old, but he was a wonderfully kind man with a great sense of humor, and he had been a presence in my life since birth. My grandmother had passed a few years before, and his quality of life had gone downhill since she’d been gone, but he was still a lovable old scamp who was popular at his church and the local McDonald's where he ate breakfast every day.
His death led to a summer of cleaning out his old house in St. Paul, the house where my dad and his brother grew up, where they’d lived since the fifties. Grandpa Jack had built secret passages into the house. Well, passages may be an exaggeration, as they were just storage spaces and hidey-holes, but the entrances were camouflaged as regular parts of the wall, and I thought it was completely awesome. I had always been jealous of Webster, a young black little person on TV who was adopted by rich white people. They lived in a house with real secret passages in it, including a grandfather clock that swings out to reveal a door, just like in Batman’s stately Wayne manor. Webster used the secret passages to outwit a burglar once. Grandpa’s clever storage spaces were the closest I’d ever come to that.
One day we opened up a long secret storage space that ran the length of the house, behind the walls. You had to crawl to reach parts of it, so my father put me in charge of fishing stuff out of there. I found a treasure trove in long rows of boxes. Old comic books, Uncle Scrooge, silly 50’s Superman (the ones where Lois was constantly trying to prove Superman and Clark were the same person yet Superman always managed to trick her in the end into thinking she was wrong and then he would laugh at how stupid she was), racist old Disney comics like “Brer Rabbbit” and old pulp paperbacks.
Old paperbacks including Mason Queensbury adventures.
What made Mason Queensbury different was that he was real. It said so right on the back of every book. He was a real man who had lived in Victorian England and in the early twentieth century. He was a rich English lord who explored Africa and India and South America and had all kinds of adventures, often battling pirates, or lost tribes, or animals or monsters. I found myself thinking about him during class, drawing pictures of Mason Queensbury fighting tigers and Zulus on the back of my math assignments.
I was fascinated by him. As I got a bit older, I went into research mode. What I found shocked me. Queensbury really had been a real man. He was hugely famous at the time, and his adventures were printed as serials in Sunday “magazine” editions of the biggest newspapers of the day, including the London Times and the New York Post. His adventures were considered, at the time, to be completely true and it’s said that his stories, which at their most popular were more widely read than any fictional serial ever, did much to shape people’s attitudes in the early 20th century towards the third world and imperialism in general. Winston Churchill once famously mused that without the bombastic nature displayed by Queensbury in his adventures and his effect upon popular culture, the Great War (World War One) may never have happened.
So why had I never heard of him? Apparently, after his mysterious disappearance in 1917 and the resulting loss of the revenue stream of constant new Queensbury adventures, his publishers began putting out new, fictional, novels featuring a character named Mason Queensbury. These new adventures, by failing to be “true,” were roundly rejected by critics and the public alike. That, combined with new exploration of the interior of South America and Antarctica which sometimes directly contradicted accounts in Queensbury’s stories, led to the widespread belief that all of the Queensbury stories were fiction. Soon most of the public accepted that Lord Mason had been making them up himself at the time, like a more convincing Baron Munchhausen. After his new adventures failed to sell, paperback collections of his classic, “true” adventures also went out of print. The last publication or reprint of a Mason Queensbury story was in 1953, a small reprinting of 1000 illustrated copies of “Mason Queensbury and the World Beneath The Waves” (considered by critics to be among the best novel-length Mason adventures). Now, Mason Queensbury, who at one time was one of the most famous people on earth, is largely forgotten, most likely to be mentioned, if at all, listed among famous hoaxes or by social critics examining historical attitudes towards race and imperialism. Only old men like Grandpa Jack, who had been a fan of Queensbury as a boy in the early twentieth century (and had, luckily for me, held onto many of those old publications), still remembered Queensbury as a hero.
But what if his stories weren’t made up? According to official records, Queensbury’s newspaper serials were written by a succession of writers, thirty-two over the course of Queensbury’s career, most of whom died of various misfortunes while on expeditions with Lord Mason. Also, according to government records, members of the so-called “Queensbury Corps,” a special unit of men on loan from Her Majesty’s Navy assigned as Queensbury’s guard, had an astoundingly high casualty rate. If these men were not being killed and maimed as described in the Queensbury newspaper stories, what was happening to them? Were the stories some sort of elaborate cover-up? If so, for what?
I was haunted by these questions, which I asked but was unable to answer. So imagine my surprise to find myself, at thirty-three years of age, living in Hollywood, California as an occasionally employed screenwriter and author, when I received a call from my acquaintance Declan Snelling. Declan and I had a relationship dating back to when we had worked together at the Daily Free Press back in Boston. Now, he informed me, he had been hired by Daring Press, an English publishing house. It was the very house that had sold and syndicated the Queensbury serials and still owned the Queensbury library. Declan remembered that I had told him about Queensbury over beers several years ago and wanted to know if I’d be interested in doing some work.
Of course I was interested! Mason Queensbury had fascinated me since I was a kid. He was the reason I had briefly tried to take up boxing (my giant, easily-breakable nose soon put a stop to that).
It turned out the publishers had recently found, in their Queensbury files, boxes of notes, early drafts, journal entries and accounts specifically marked “not for publication.” A wealth of unpublished material! No one had even looked at them since the 1950’s, or possibly even earlier. Declan wanted me to go through the box, looking for material that could be exploited for modern publication.
I eagerly agreed. A few days later, twenty-six long boxes were delivered to my Hollywood bungalow. I picked a box at random and started going through the documents while my cat Sokka climbed the great
stacks of boxes in my living room. There were so many documents I didn’t know where to begin. So I just sat down and started reading.
As I read the assembled material, barely making a dent over the next couple of weeks, I became more convinced than ever that the Mason Queensbury stories were, by and large, true accounts. Contained in the boxes were hand-written journals kept by the famous members of Queensbury’s crew, including Pup-pup, Father Callahan, Marti Sholtz, and others, and all added to my surety that most of even the most outlandish details in the published stories were true. I do allow that some of Queensbury’s writers may have exaggerated certain elements in the name of poetic license, or out of legitimate confusion after having barely survived a near-death encounter, but the fact that Queensbury was a great explorer and a mighty combatant can no longer be legitimately disputed, unless his entire career is one of the greatest and most elaborate hoaxes ever conceived.
I wasn’t sure what to do with these notes. What deserved publication in its current state? What should I adapt? What would Declan’s company agree to finance after a half-century of obscurity? Finally, the question answered itself for me when I found Queensbury’s own personal notes on his greatest untold adventure, as well as further notes on the same sequence of events by another celebrity writer, who apparently entrusted Queensbury with the notes in order to keep them secret. Queensbury left specific instructions that they remain hidden from the public, but the publisher's lawyers inform me that the estate has waived all such rights. I believe Queensbury never wanted this story told because of the spectacular and dangerous nature of the narrative, which involves a recipe for evil which even a modern-day reader might follow in order the recreate the events of that dreadful day. To honor Queensbury's intentions, I took it upon myself to change a few small details to make it vastly more difficult for a copycat to make good on such an effort.
I proposed to Declan that I use Kipling's and Queensbury's notes to construct a new account of Queensbury’s lost adventure in the style of the original serials, a style I had so enjoyed when I was a boy. Declan and his supervisors approved, and I was given a small advance and explicit instructions to take it easy on aping the style of the original stories and to do my best to make it palatable to the audiences of today, the so-called “Hunger Games” crowd. I said I would think about it, but I really wanted to keep the original pulpy style as much as possible, as a challenge to myself as a writer. Declan repeated that I should give up my dreams of an experiment in style, and I told him I understood completely. Luckily for me, and you, my loyal and adoring readers, my fingers were crossed when I made that promise and thus, by the unwritten laws of Western society, I was free from any obligation of honor.
I tried to tone down the very unfortunate racist content (an attribute, unfortunately, that really jumps out at a modern reader trying to enjoy the original serials), but the racial commentary was so ubiquitous throughout the original stories and Sir Mason’s own personal notes that I included a bit of it so as to accurately represent attitudes of the time and Mason Queensbury’s character and beliefs. He was a man of strong opinions and to pretend otherwise would be to betray the memory of the man himself. Although I must admit, re-reading the old stories, the racially offensive nature of some of the books would be very off-putting for any modern reader.
So now, presented here for the first time anywhere and against the explicit written instruction of Lord Mason Queensbury, is the Adventure of Mason Queensbury in the Parlour of the Occult.