Friday's Forgotten Books

Philip Maitland Hubbard, better known as P.M. Hubbard (1910-1980) studied at Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize for English verse in 1933.  From Oxford he moved into the Indian Civil Service in northwest India, returning to England in 1947 to work for the British Council. Hubbard then turned to freelance writing — at first, short stories and poetry for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, some articles and, oddly, Parliamentary reports to Punch magazine, before finally focusing on writing novels full time. He penned 16 suspense/mystery titles from 1963 to 1977 with modest success, although one of his novels, High Tide, was adapted for television as part of the ITV network's Armchair Thriller series in 1980.

Hubbard's work is particularly known for his settings, mostly small rural villages or lonely isolated houses in places like secluded woods, along the coast, or in the Highlands. Hubbard once wrote that "As to my planning of a book, the plain answer is that I don't. I have some general theme in my head, and I marry that to a place (always imaginary, but imagined to the last detail and compass-point). The place is generally in fact the principal character in the book, because, again, places mean more to me than people. However, I start with the one or two characters necessary to carry the theme, and then I just start writing and see what happens."

His writing style is direct, minimalist and terse, which Anthony Boucher once noted: "Avoiding clichés as much as possible, interested in people yet devoid of sentimentality, without even any overt physical action, Hubbard can suggest untold horror in a few deft passages." Some may find this type of writing to be slow by today's standards, as Hubbard draws out the suspense quietly and gradually, like slowly playing out a guide rope until it suddenly snaps.

Hubbard didn't create any series characters or detectives, using only three or four main characters in each story, with little dialogue and large chunks of interior monologue narration from the POV character.  The Dancing Man, from1971, is what Tom Jenkins of Mystery File noted was the epitome of Hubbard's style:  a limited cast of characters, his sparse dialogue, and his plot complexities, all woven into the settings of an isolated Victorian house in Wales, a ruined Cistercian abbey and a Neolithic ring larger than Avebury and older than Stonehenge.

The leader character of The Dancing Man is Mark Hawkins, engineer, cynic and loner, who has always resented his adventurer-archaeologist brother. Then Dick vanishes, allegedly dead in a climbing accident. A reluctant Mark starts investigating the site his brother was excavating, a Cistercian monastery, and meets three strange souls who were the last to see his brother alive — gruff professor Roger Merrion, who has more than an academic interest in the ruins, his fearful young wife, and his enigmatic virginal sister, whom Mark starts to fall for.  The Dancing Man of the title is a pornographic carving at the ancient ruins that begins to exert an influence on Mark, but is it witchery, as a mysterious old man he meets tells him, or is something altogether real, but equally sinister? And why was his brother working at an 11th-century monastery, when his specialty was Neolithic archaeology?

It's definitely not the type of novel for fan of more modern, fast-paced punchy fiction, but if you're in the mood for well, "mood," and a dark psychological story, then you can allow The Dancing Man to reel you in slowly as you become immersed in the almost claustrophobic pull of the protagonist's frame of mind as he gets closer to a murderous secret.

Comments

[George Kelley]

I have a stack of P.M. Hubbards' books. At one time, I found them everywhere. Now, I rarely see a Hubbard book in a used bookstore. They've vanished. After reading your review, I'll have to dig THE DANCING MAN out of the stack and read it.

[BV Lawson]

He's definitely got a style all his own. I doubt he'd make it in today's publishing environment, but you never know.

[Todd Mason]

He'd be writing for specialist presses, I'd bet...love his early ghost stories in F&SF, have meant to seek out BOTANY BAY and his other novels...

[BV Lawson]

You're probably right. I'd like to think that writers who take a thoughtful, slower-moving pace with their stories could still find an audience in this hectic, fast-paced, McWorld.

[Patti Abbott]

I remember this guy,