Yates, Dornford
Entry updated 1 December 2024. Tagged: Author.
Pseudonym of UK lawyer and author Cecil William Mercer (1885-1960), Saki's first cousin; in active service during World War One, 1914-1917, and in World War Two; in France and Africa from the early 1920s. Some short stories in his well-known and once very popular Berry sequence of English social comedies contain fantasy elements, including dowsing (see ESP), dream-portents and Precognition; The Courts of Idleness (coll of linked stories 1920) contains at least one Timeslip tale; some titles in the linked Chandos thriller sequence have a Ruritanian air. Both Anthony Lyveden (1921) and Valerie French (1923), which are standalone novels, contain supernatural elements.
The Stolen March (August 1925/May 1926 The Windsor Magazine, each episode surtitled "Etchechuria"; coll of linked stories/fixup 1926) is set in a Lost World, the Ruritanian kingdom of Etchechuria, a polder (see Zone) between Spain and France that is only reachable when those searching for it understand that it is hidden by compass-jamming magnetic mountains (see Magnetism). This sf frame soon devolves into Fantasy as the kingdom turns out to be a kind of comic fairyland that echoes children's books – in particular the verbal whimsy and logic-chopping of Lewis Carroll's Alice tales – with a traditional panoply of magic devices, including Invisibility, and unwelcome metamorphoses for those who break the highly arbitrary rules [for Wonderland see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The four demurely madcap but safely married protagonists, entranced by a land whose regulations they cannot long survive, discover the Philosopher's Stone (see Transmutation), which they sell to the British government, which destroys it to save capitalism (see Imaginary Science), and settle into an ideal country estate adjacent to the land of dreams. It might not be taking The Stolen March too seriously to think of it as a contrarian response to the cultural disillusion that succeeded World War One (see also Scientific Romance). [JC/DRL]
Cecil William Mercer
born Upper Walmer, Kent: 7 August 1885
died Umtali, Southern Rhodesia: 5 March 1960
works (highly selected)
- Anthony Lyveden (London: Ward, Lock, 1921) [hb/]
- Valerie French (London: Ward, Lock, 1923) [hb/]
- The Stolen March (London: Ward, Lock, 1926) [coll of linked stories/fixup: first appeared August 1925/May 1926 The Windsor Magazine: each episode surtitled "Etchechuria": hb/S F Campbell]
collections and stories
- The Courts of Idleness (London: Ward, Lock, 1920) [coll of linked stories: some in the Berry sequence: hb/]
- And Berry Came Too (London: Ward, Lock, 1936) [coll: see ESP: Berry: hb/]
about the author
- Richard Usborne. Clubland Heroes: A Nostalgic Study of Some Recurrent Characters in the Romantic Fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan and Sapper (London: Constable Publishers, 1953) [nonfiction: hb/Alma K Lee]
links
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