<p><span class="full-image-float-right ssNonEditable"><span><img alt="" src="/storage/images/wine_dark_sea.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1229096367449" style="width:200px;" /></span></span>Here’s one thing you can thank the internet for: some great lost authors are no longer as lost as they were. Only recently I was able to pick up two decent-quality secondhand paperbacks of&#160;one of my favourite writers, <a class="offsite-link-inline" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Aickman" target="_blank">Robert Aickman</a>, a man who’d once seemed lost to the world though he only died in 1981.</p>
<p>Aickman is an author desperately deserving of a revival. As the world of books grows ever more literal and demanding of certainty, he reminds us that fiction can have a darker, looser, more feral side too, one in which stories and worlds are freed from the need to ‘make sense’. Imagine Jorge Luis Borges crossed with MR James and you get a little of what Aickman is about, though even that comparison fails to do the man justice. He was an absolute original. As Peter Straub puts it in the foreword to the 1990 edition <em>The Wine-Dark Sea</em>, ‘In nearly all the stories collected here, the world of ordinary experience is as porous and malleable as a dream’.</p>
<p>That is Aickman to a tee. Lounging somewhere in Greece, ouzo in hand, dreaming about three sensual sibyls waiting for the next victim on their island offshore, in this collection’s title story. Or dreaming sweatily about a strange and dangerous girl from the circus who agrees to come to the narrator’s squalid digs in the Midlands in <em>The Swords</em>, one of the most disturbing short stories I’ve ever read. You can find a complete list of his work <a class="offsite-link-inline" href="http://home.epix.net/%7Ewallison/ra.html" target="_blank">here</a>. I’d give the anthologies he edited a miss, though I’d be interested to see his non-fiction books on the inland waterways of England (in ‘real life’ this very cultured and imaginative man was co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association).&#160;</p>
<p>The two books I picked up through third parties on Amazon were this one, <em>The Wine-Dark Sea</em>, and <em>Cold Hand in Mine</em>. They contain some of his very best work and I felt pleased to get them for around a tenner a piece (though I note one had 50p written inside the cover and the second ‘Front cover - reduce’). A <a class="offsite-link-inline" href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Collected-Strange-Stories-Robert-Aickman/dp/1872621872/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1229096458&amp;sr=8-5" target="_blank">bespoke two-volume collectors edition</a> goes for a stonking £350 which is a bit much to be honest.&#160;</p>
<p>There’s so much to enjoy about Aickman but let me pick out three things. He was utterly original, producing work that was unfairly tagged as horror though, as Straub notes in his foreword, he was ‘sublimely uninterested in monsters, werewolves, worms, rats, bats and things in bandages’. He was catholic in his tastes, setting his stories in the most mundane of English locations as well as parts of the Mediterranean which would have been considered exotic when he was writing. More than anything though he eschewed completely the need for resolution. For Aickman, there were no ticks to be completed, no circles to be closed. A mystery could remain a mystery and lose none of its value. In these prosaic times we’re apt to forget that.</p>
<p>If you would like to find out more about this intriguing man you will find<a class="offsite-link-inline" href="http://hauntedriver.co.uk/page35a.html" target="_blank"> an illuminating article by Christopher Barker here </a>beneath a review of Aickman’s last story <em>The Stains. <span style="font-style:normal;">Until I read it must admit I never knew Aickman was a lover of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s or that he had such a difficult personal life, though perhaps one ought to have guessed it. Barker also makes the claim that Aickman’s work inspired both Robert Bloch’s story-turned-film </span>Psycho<span style="font-style:normal;"> and Daphne du Maurier’s red dwarf in </span>Don’t Look Now </em>adding, <em>‘<span style="font-style:normal;">These hugely successful films created several startling images which Aickman should probably be credited for’. </span></em></p>
<p><em><span style="font-style:normal;">True or false? I’ve no idea, but he certainly deserves to be a lot better known than he is.</span></em></p>