Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: Simon Raven’s Doctors Wear Scarlet

Academia is as prone to attracting arrogant pricks as it is to honest knowledge seekers. You know the sorts I am referring to, the folks who know enough about a specialized area to think they are somehow vital, influential thinkers. Narcissists. Sharks, around whom swim all manner of minnows waiting to be gobbled up.

Simon Raven’s third novel and his first to deal with supernatural horror, Doctors Wear Scarlet, is peopled with these sorts of erudite jerks. At first, they are a tad difficult to empathize with; over time, they can layer on some charm and give readers a sample of that certain something, which has been missing all along.

The storyline is a complex one, though eventually enough familiar elements seep through to reveal the inner workings. Anthony Seymour is a graduate of Lancaster College, Cambridge (UK not Massachusetts) who returned home one evening to find one Inspector Tyrrel from Scotland Yard waiting for him. Although his grouses about appointments, the Inspector manages to intrude enough to get some of his time. He has come asking about an acquaintance of Seymour’s, one Richard Fountain whom Seymour has known since his days at Charterhouse, an exclusive boarding school in Godalming, Surrey. Although Seymour was four years older than Fountain, he took on the underclassman as his “study fag” (a term that relates to a junior boy who performs tasks for a senior one) and got to know him quite well. After he returned from the war, Seymour attended Lancaster College only to discover he and Fountain were contemporaries there as well, this time both in the same level of study. Their friendship blossomed.

After he was finished with his baccalaureate studies, Fountain had a position earmarked for him in graduate studies. Ever a student of the classics, Fountain made the suspicious decision to take an extended trip to Greece. There, Tyrrel reveals, the man has gone off the radar and ended up making a bit of a spectacle of himself, leading the Greek authorities to suspect immoral activities. Tyrrel is cagey about specifics, and when Seymour sees an inherent discrepancy in the Detective’s understanding of the Greek authorities’ concerns, he focuses in on that discrepancy:

“So now they’ve stopped having vague impressions and become models of precision?”

“No, sir,” [Tyrrel] said steadily. “Their impressions are still vague, but they are the sort of impression which neither they nor anyone else could possibly have unless something … very odd indeed … was going on. Put it like this. You or I might have a vague impression, about some politician, say, that he was a genius or a crook or a sexual misfit, and we might be right or we might be wrong, but in any case these are the sort of vague impressions people have every day and, as such, do not command respect. But suppose we suddenly got a vague impression about this politician of ours that he might be the Son of God, or even just that a lot of other people thought he might be. Now, sir, whether he was the Son of God or not, there’d have to be something very odd going on before we could begin to think in these terms. You see what I mean? However vague, it would be an altogether different impression from what those people normally have. Not at all an everyday affair.”

“So Mr. Fountain thinks he’s the Messiah?” I asked with heavy sarcasm.

“I didn’t say that, sir. I’m just saying that this impression the Greeks have got, however … nebulous—and thank you, sir, for that word—is nevertheless so much out of the run of things that it couldn’t have begun to arise unless there was something–whatever that something might be—something very peculiar in the air.” (15-16)

After a lengthy introduction to the missing man and an eye view into Seymour himself, Tyrrel essentially begs the man to ask around, get some information, and relay information back about Fountain’s intentions and whereabouts. Seymour goes along more out of personal curiosity than any sense of duty to the Yard, and he soon finds himself involved in a mystery.

Richard Fountain was always a bit of an enigma, and this odd behavior lends him still further oddities. Seymour reconnects with two of Fountain’s closest friends, the witty scholar Piers Clarence and a former Army associate Captain Roddy Longbow. They have diverse experiences with Richard, their stories providing wildly different and sometimes incompatible views on the man. None of them knows just what he is up to in Greece, of course, but he has every reason to flee the UK for a while.

Add in a few professors with different agendas, including the domineering Walter Goodrich and the fey Marc Honeydew, and you have some college level drama that is rich with frustrations and fascinating details on its own. However, there is a whole other style of drama waiting in the wings than might appear in a Richard Russo novel (e.g., Straight Man).

Soon enough, a letter finds its way to Seymour’s possession from Richard himself, imploring his old pals to come to Greece for a reunion of sorts. There are things he wants to tell them, show them. Won’t they please come and quickly? At Tyrrel’s behest, Seymour arranges for travel, convincing Piers and Longbow to accompany him, and the men head to Greece. Of course, Richard is not where he said he would be, wanted for questioning as he is by the local authorities. However, he leaves a trail of deeply academic clues only they can follow and the hunt is on.

As Seymour and his companions travel the islands of Greece, they discover a supernatural angle to their friend’s disappearance. This revelation comes in dribs and drabs, slowly developing over the course of their travels, a clue in Minos’ palace and an incongruous encounter on the island of Idra (or Hydra, as it is known in the Greek, a name overflowing with its own mythic connotations). Richard has a traveling companion, a woman who is perhaps more than she seems. She and Richard have been participating in some unsavory practices during their time here. Though the authorities expect Richard to be the guiltier of the two, his friends realize this is a chauvinist expectation. The woman has ties to the otherworldly. Can they rescue their companion? Can they bring him home with a whole mind and body? Can they free him from his psychological and physical dependence on this strange creature masquerading in a comely human guise? These questions drive much of the plot, and the eventual return to Cambridge is not as warm and freeing as they might have wished. Evil has a way of traipsing where least expected or wanted, and as the feast of Michaelmas approaches on October 31st, that evil they discovered in Greece festers, steadily approaching the point of gruesome explosion.

Simon Raven’s Doctors Wear Scarlet is a thrilling tour de force of a novel, a near brilliant examination and excoriation of the kinds of antagonisms and arrogance that manifest in academic environs. Adding the supernatural angle to this is a brilliant way to highlight the dominance and subservience expectations found in such places. However, the supernatural is more than a metaphor. It is also a driving element of the plot, a sense that the otherworldly ties into the everyday in uncanny ways. It takes folks versed in perceiving hidden truths to see it, maybe, or scholars trained to look for patterns and to plumb those patterns for the truth that Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes would have us understand is there, no matter how improbable.

Raven’s work is informed by and in many ways a response to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As with that novel, Doctors Wear Scarlet turns on a lengthy chase of sorts across The Continent. Whereas Stoker’s text puts this chase in the finale, Raven uses it in the second section of his novel’s three sections. While Stoker’s vampire hunters pursue their quarry in hopes of saving a captive woman, Raven’s band of allies are chasing after understanding as much as they are searching for their vanished friend.

As well, Raven’s novel tackles the concept of vampirism both in a literal and metaphoric sense. The antagonists of this piece are ultimately interested in sucking the life and will out of their prey, be they a mysterious and dominant creature who masquerades as a woman (even wearing a cape!) while traveling by night or an overbearing professor who wants to write Richard Fountain’s career path in stone and make the man adhere to that path (including marrying his own daughter Penelope). This is particularly clever, given the novel first saw publication in 1960. In the forward to last year’s Valancourt Books release, author Kim Newman observes “Between Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Stephen Kings ‘Salem’s Lot” (1975), fewer vampire novels were published than appear in any given month these days.” (5) He goes on to explain that while plenty of movies saw production, few novelists had any variations to add to Stoker’s version of legend and lore. Raven adds quite a bit to that particular vein of supernatural fiction, and his work might not stand as easily alongside Stoker’s enduring work, this is only because the author is a witty bastard writing for other witty bastards, as interested in showing off as he is in telling a gripping tale.

Of course, the author’s biography confirms him as something of a snob and cad himself just as so many of the characters in this novel are. He liked to shock with his personality (such as boasting about the titillating effects of having been seduced by a games master into a homosexual act at age nine). He admitted to writing for an intellectual audience. He even sent an infamous letter to his estranged wife who pleaded for money for his starving spouse and infant child, “Sorry no money, suggest eat baby.” What a guy, huh? In today’s social media environment, he would either not stand much of a chance as a beloved personality or he would be championed as the king of intellectual snark. It is hard to say which way that particular penny would drop.

As it turns out, I am enough of a man of letters that I find his satiric jabs at academia to be delightful, I find his characters ultimately endearing (after an initial bout of eye-rolling), and I find many of his references and enigmas to be charming little mental exercises. The book is smarter than I am in some ways, and not as smart as it believes itself to be in others. It is a rich reading experience for the overeducated, though I suspect it would leave some folks who come solely for the story scratching their heads or irritated, wishing the author would get on with it. If the novel enjoys any reputation these days, it is probably solely because it ended up on Karl Edward Wagner’s infamous list of ten best fantasy horror novels of all time. I had not even heard of it until Valancourt announced its release last year—sadly, I am a latecomer to Wagner’s lists, and trying to catch up on what I missed.

One of the more intriguing aspects in the book is its comfort level (and not) with same sex relationships. Raven himself was hard to pin down on that particular topic. He got himself expelled from Charterhouse for homosexual conduct, later married a woman he impregnated and then all but abandoned her (leading to the letter mentioned above). I suspect he was more interested in sex itself than in the gender of his partners, but I cannot find a reference to his being bisexual. He liked to shock, however, and remaining aloof on such a topic was one of the more shocking things he could have done during the 1950s.

There is a refreshing openness to the topic in the book. Tyrrel asks if Seymour and his study fag (what a loaded term that is in Raven’s text!) were lovers “without a trace of insolence or malice,” which is behavior I would not expect from a policeman in the 1950s. (13) Later, Fountain is revealed to have all but abandoned the smitten Penelope Goodrich to pal around with Piers Clarence, a state that led to plentiful rumors about the two being bedmates. Though Piers dispels these rumors at one point in the narrative, he confides a secret to Seymour that Richard exhibited impotence with women and was a virgin. He then freely admits:

“When I discovered this, I was surprised—and rather shocked. It seemed positively . . . immoral that someone should have reached the age of twenty-six and still not slept with anyone. And later on I began to feel downright sorry for him. So I thought to myself that I might be queer, but if, if, Anthony, Richard were to show the slightest sign of wanting me, then such was my affection for him, such was the loyalty I owed him as my friend, I would do anything he asked me and be proud to. And so time went on, and he said nothing and I began to realize that it wasn’t a boy he wanted in any case. But even then I thought I might be able to help him. And one evening, when we were talking about some girl I’d been seeing and he seemed rather upset about it, I said to him, ‘Look, Richard, you’ve no call to worry about this. Girls come and girls go, and very nice too, but if ever you want me,” I said, “in any way whatever, then tell me so and I’ll be happy, happy, Richard, to do anything you ask.” (78-79)

Later, it comes to light that Richard performed obscene and unspecified acts during orgies while in the presence of the mysterious woman. Can we interpret these as homosexual acts? Perhaps. Or S&M. Or whatever activities your own fetish or fear might offer up to fill in the blanks. There are many hints about queer behaviors in the book, followed by a few too many attempts to explain these elements away. As the text is written in first person narrative, there is an inherent bias to the narrative and an inherent unreliable quality to Seymour’s tale, an overt wash attempting to save the reputations of those characters still living and dead following the tale. This could well be the old situation of protesting too much. However, the queer angle is there, easily seen (perhaps too easily?). Because slang and terminology have changed over the last sixty years, it is difficult to read the phrase “study fag” used so easily without it implying another meaning, particularly since the biography indicates the author was kicked out of that very boarding school for that those particular behaviors? That, I suppose, is the danger of using the biographical mode of criticism, the age-old model of applying the author’s life as the basis for understanding the fiction. It is not my preferred mode of interpretation and criticism. I am more inclined toward using a text on its own. However, the tendency toward biographical interpretation does creep into my analysis from time to time much like the unwanted and unexpected evils from remote Grecian isles making their way into civilized Cambridge . . . Whether the biographical read is right or wrong, the book is nevertheless resplendent with queer subtext. You need only scratch the surface to see it.

The book then is a strange and engaging work, a mix of the literary novel and the supernatural thriller, a piece that makes clear its interest in film adaptation and yet appeals more to erudite readers than say the lowest common denominator amongst the movie going crowds. It is a strange book, classy and clever on the one hand and delightfully eerie on another. It is ultimately endearing, a proud literary peacock of a novel from an equally proud peacock of an author.

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Doctors Wear Scarlet is available in eBook, paperback and audiobook editions from the fine folks at Valancourt Books. The reader for the audiobook, Hannibal Hills, has a great voice for this particular material.

Next week, we will continue our Pride Month genre reads with Mira Grant’s spin on the Alien film franchise. Her media tie-in novel Alien: Echo pairs a lesbian protagonist with a sf-horror tale of survival and fright geared toward YA readers. Copies are available in eBook, hardcover and audiobook.

WORKS CITED

Raven, Simon. Doctors Wear Scarlet. Anthony Blond: 1960.

“Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: Simon Raven’s Doctors Wear Scarlet” is copyright © 2020 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Quotes and cover image taken from the Valancourt Books paperback release, copyright © 2019.

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