Doubtless the innocuous title is partly to blame. 247).Ī murder mystery soaked in horror and the uncanny, missed by bibliographers for a century. 'Who ever see a pink warsp wi' a mouth like a purse and blue inside?' (p. A gravedigger, talking with the hero about macabre doings in the churchyard, is frightened by a wasp. The book is shot through with dozens of little touches - gruesome ditties and feverish babblings, references to folkloristic magic and superstition - that build up a sense of the uncanny and dreadful. 'By lowering factory and grimy wall by squalid streets peeled of uncleanliness in the teeth of the bitter blast by lowbrowed taverns, that gushed red on us a moment and were gone, he sped on with crooked paces, and I followed' (p. Not the least of its virtues are stylistic.

Its themes are weighty and its plot construction is intricate and polished.

The atmosphere of the book is soaked in a 'high spectral gloom.' The overtly supernatural incidents are few, but to call the book's weirdness 'subdued' would be grossly inaccurate. As well as his stories and articles for the periodicals he wrote around 40 volumes across novels, poetry, history as well as romance and mystery novelsīernard Capes died on 2nd November 1918 in the flu epidemic.What's not generally known is that the Mill of Silence is a fully fledged weird tale replete with curses, fate, prophecies, a magnificently haunted room, and a pair of ghosts, one sinister, one the other kind. He exceeded that by winning it the following year with ‘The Lake of Wine’.Ĭapes quickly became both prolific and popular. As well as being published it garnered second prize at a competition sponsored by the Chicago Record.

His initial success came with ‘The Mill of Silence’. It took him many years to decide that writing full-time could be a sustainable career path. His early work was as a journalist and this developed into writing many short stories for the periodicals of the time including Blackwood's, Butterfly, Cassell's, Cornhill Magazine, Hutton's Magazine, Illustrated London News, Lippincott's, Macmillan's Magazine, Literature, New Witness, Pall Mall Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, The Idler, The New Weekly, and The Queen. Bernard Edward Joseph Capes was born on 30th August 1854 in London.

The Mill of Silence by Bernard Capes