Machen being Machen categorically refused.
This year, though, was the one that saw Oscar Wilde being charged with gross indecency, which fired up an almighty moral fervour so that Machen was asked to tone down his new work. This was a time when lending libraries such as W.H.Smith protected their customers from shock by censoring their bookshelves. The Three Impostors first appeared a couple of years after Machen’s The Great God Pan came out to much public acclaim in a series of books by publisher Bodley Head which expressly tested the limits of what was then acceptable reading. It is, perhaps no coincidence that Machen was chronicling the strange adventures of the city streets in The Three Impostors at the same time as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was sending Sherlock Holmes out into the murky world from his flat in Baker Street. Indeed Machen’s The London Adventure, or the Art of Wandering (1925) is a mad gazetteer of those self-same thorughfares and one of the earliest psychogeographies to boot, helping to spawn a genre in itself. As one of the book’s characters puts it ‘Before us is unfolded the greatest mystery the world has ever seen – the mystery of the innumerable, unending streets, the strange adventures that must infallibly arise from so complicated a press of interests.” The main protagonists of the book are two decadent, literary fellows, the Orientalist Dyson and the rationalist Phillips who enjoy nothing quite so much as wandering London, much as Machen did. The publication of their namesake title by Newport-based Three Impostors underlines their ongoing commitment to re-presenting Machen to a new audience and features specially commissioned prints by the Penarth artist Pete Williams which both decorate and interrogate the text, adding value and extra meaning to an already lovely edition.
Machen plays fast and loose with narrative and gives us what might be seen as an outsize crossword puzzle, yet the prose seduces and pulls you along. Within this Russian doll of a book, you find 13 tales of such things as human sacrifices in London suburbs, disappearing gentlemen, torture dens and public lynchings, often included within tight, oddball novellas such as the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ and the ‘Novel of the White Powder.’
A cult figure, even in his day, the work of this “master of the macabre” is shot through with grand moments of horror or ecstasy and The Three Impostors, first published in 1895, is no exception. If straight-up weird’s what you’re after then the Caerleon writer and mystic Arthur Machen is your go-to-guy.
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