THE STORY OF THE LOCH NESS MONSTER by Tim Dinsdale

 “Another type of Monster was attracting world-wide attention (in the '30s) - a political Monster in the evil form and posturings of Adolf Hitler,” - Tim Dinsdale, The Story of the Loch Ness Monster, page 47.

"The great Asian country known today as Communist China," - Dinsdale, Loch Ness, page 16.

Dinsdale! Here's a vintage Loch Ness Monster primer by one of the grand old men of monster hunting, aimed at a younger audience hungry for the facts on Nessie, with updates up to the minute circa 1974! Target is UK publisher Tandem's imprint for young readers, and is best known nowadays for their long running line of Dr. Who novelizations (or is that novelisations?) still being published today.

No time to watch Dr. Who? Try the books!

A loyalty badge for Target readers, from 2017

Dinsdale does well writing for a younger audience, speaking in plain language but never sliding into treacle or condescension. The intro goes over some other famous mysteries like the Mary Celeste and the Indian rope trick to set the scene. Dinsdale makes a perceptive comment here, as an Indian friend of his has never heard of this supposedly famous trick: it was ultimately revealed as a piece of classic American yellow journalism. Dinsdale ropes in the Yeti, Sasquatch, and the Great Sea Serpent as backup muscle for Nessie - it might be hard to recognize now, but the Loch Ness Monster was always a bit thin on the ground, so to speak, and it makes sense that Dinsdale rallied the reputations of these other more famous monsters to bolster Nessie's.

The sixth edition, 1982. Quoting Naish: "You might doubt

that encounters as close and thrilling as this ever occurred."

Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology has written an essential series of posts on classic Loch Ness books, and again, you might be surprised nowadays by how much of the Loch Ness Monster legend was promulgated by a handful of dedicated amateurs and a hungry tabloid media, ultimately all out of proportion to any purported evidence. It's worth quoting Naish here on Dinsdale's well meaning credulity:

“On that note, and while it again shames me to say it, I’m impressed – if that’s the right word – by Dinsdale’s naivety when we look at specific parts of his Loch Ness experience. Take his interaction with Tony Shiels, the self-proclaimed Wizard of the Western World. In 1977 Shiels claimed to capture on film the most remarkable colour photos of Nessie ever taken, an object affectionately known today as the Loch Ness Muppet. Any familiarity with Shiels and his adventures quickly reveals that he has, and seemingly always has had, a tongue-in-cheek, jovial take on monsters and how they might be seen. They’re not really meant to be undiscovered animals lurking in remote places, but interactive pieces of quasi-surreal art akin to open-air theatre, the ensuing cultural response in literature and news being as much a part of the event, if not more, as the claimed sighting and photo. While I undoubtedly write with the benefit of hindsight (and, dare I say it, some quantity of insider information), Dinsdale was seemingly unable to perceive this. And thus the muppet photo appears – as a legit image of the Loch Ness animal – on the cover of the fourth edition of Dinsdale’s The Loch Ness Monster, a decision that speaks volumes.”

Dinsdale's 4th edition of Loch Ness Monster -
not to be confused with this title,
The Story of the Loch Ness Monster

This title serves well as a fair minded but ultimately pro-monster Loch Ness reader, and perhaps Dinsdale's greatest achievement is navigating the oft-tumultuous scene of professional monster hunters at Loch Ness. He's scrupulously fair to competing identities for the monster, ranging from the well known plesiosaur to giant eels and sturgeons, wayward giant seals, and occultist F.W. Holiday's bizarre but lovable invertebrate Tully Monster, last seen 300 million years ago! Dinsdale presents the classic version of the Nessie story, beginning with St. Columba's miracle routing of a water monster in the River Ness circa 564 AD - this must be a true story, Dinsdale affirms, because no author of a saint's biography would tell lies! Never mind that St. Columba's biography as written by Adamnan (around 700 AD) is full of many miraculous feats just as outlandish as Nessie's revocation, being a hagiography of a miracle man written for the faithful. But maybe that's just more evidence for Nessie's reality, as Dinsdale brings in legends of water horses and kelpies as mythological support for the monster. 

Dinsdale on the battlements

Dinsdale's monster identikit

Per Dinsdale, the Loch was an isolated locale prior to highway blasting in the early '30s which provoked Nessie and also brought witnesses to the lakeside. Foundational writers Rupert T. Gould and Constance Whyte are trotted out as serious researchers setting the stage for the "modern" '70s investigations which are going to yield rock solid proof any day now. Skeptical writer Ronald Binns has shown how the Loch was actually a popular tourist destination all through the 1800s, without any attendant monster legend prior to the '30s. His Decline and Fall of the Loch Ness Monster (2019) is another essential text for reinterpreting the classic Ness legend. But back in 1974, Dinsdale was positive that cutting edge tech like sonar and autogyros would expose the monster - wait a minute, we know all about the sonar and Rines' underwater photos, but autogyros? Yes! Dinsdale details how pilot Ken Wallis flew his one man gyrocopter over the Loch taking gorgeous large format photos ... no monster, unfortunately, but Dinsdale says the pics were spectacular anyways. Wallis also gave his chopper and flying talents to the Bond entry You Only Live Twice back in 1967, another subject perfect for Target readers.

Wallis in later years, still flyin'

The irascible Frank Searle gets a brief but fair review of his monster watching action, stationed in a van by the lakeside. A decade later, Searle would be the main suspect in an attempted firebombing of a Loch Ness Monster Project vessel in 1983! Searle also started shilling obvious hoax photos to the tabloids around 1973, and perhaps Dinsdale would revise his opinion in later years.

One of Searle's monster photos ...

... taken from a postcard being sold locally!

Dinsdale makes a lot out of the 1972 Rines "flipper" photos, touched up beyond recognition from their original grainy nothing images. The infamous "surgeon's photo" is defended, because it may look primitive, but, Dinsdale claims, we should keep in mind that photography was a primitive art form in the '30s! This is ridiculous on the face of it and an unfortunate example of the special pleading that undergirds the Loch Ness Monster legend. Still, this title is an enjoyable snapshot of an era, and benefits from Dinsdale's affable prose and clean cut image. There's no railing against scientific elites here, no bitter recriminations, just some classic midcentury scientific positivist faith. It's fun! Dinsdale warns potential monster hunting teenagers to be careful around the Loch, and take water safety seriously. Hear, hear! He ends with an abrupt chapter on Morag of Loch Morar, another potential lake monster. Unlike Loch Ness, Morar is privately owned, and Dinsdale believes this may have given Morag some solace and privacy. It also leads into the most famous Morag story, as a couple of deer poachers in a dingy claim they were attacked by Morag and broke an oar defending themselves! Dinsdale quotes a completely invented Scottish lay about Morag, and that's all she wrote:

"Morag, Harbinger of Death,

Giant swimmer in deep-green Morar,

The loch that has no bottom ...

There it is that Morag the monster lives."

Target, 1974 (original pub. 1973)

THE FURIES by Keith Roberts

The USA and USSR have cocked things up again in their struggle for world domination, this time detonating dual nuclear tests that blast a crack in the world and set the poor old UK on a collision course with intelligences from the outer spheres, energy beings that materialize in the form of gigantic wasps and immediately set about conquering our shattered planet. This is illustrator and ad-man Keith Roberts' first novel, and a helluva debut it is! He blends high concept cosmic slop with painful portraits of characters like Bill Sampson (also an illustrator in advertising) who should be living up the bachelor life but now finds himself thrown into the apocalypse, grasping out for others like poor little rich girl Jane and cockney slattern Pete, two female characters imbued with depth and power far beyond the usual genre standards of the time, or our time for that matter. Roberts does not shy away from human ugliness but he also approaches everything with a reserved humanism, and Bill's first person narration reflects a witty, understated understanding of our foibles and of life and death among the new rulers, the wasps. Yesterday Bill had a fancy flat, a dynamite sports car, and a loyal Doberman - but now it's all gone to pot, the car and flat smashed to bits and the hero dog just one more victim of the Furies. Communications from overseas are cut off, the government's dissolved, and would-be military saviors are reduced to scavengers along with the other survivors, as Britain slides into a new dark age under an alien dictatorship. Roberts writes with grit and emotion as Bill and company navigate this new nightmare world, jacking lorries and ransacking drug stores to survive while holed up in a cave, reduced to savagery while feeding off the corpse of the old world.

Comparisons to Ballard and Wyndham are inevitable and accurate, but Roberts does Wyndham's cosy catastrophe one better. The triffids merely reflected our self-inflicted impotence back at us - in the country of the blind, the crawling plant is king. The Furies, meanwhile, are truly a superior species, swarming in incalculable numbers as they sting and shred our soft, yielding bodies to pieces, dragging us from our boltholes and barricades, stopping at nothing in their alien quest to dominate. Part computer, part demon, so near to us and yet so far beyond our imagining, not simply a monstrous threat but the indicators of a paradigm shift so jarring that there simply may not be a place for us in the new universe. The wasps quickly enslave the remaining humans for menial labor in the massive hives now splattered across the English countyside, but Bill and the rest wonder how long this is going to last before they're expediently put out of their misery and endeavor to go out fighting instead. A perceptive review by Leonard at Goodreads notes that "the uppermost goal of our little band of resistance fighters is the destruction of edifices made of *pulp*. No SF critic in nearly a half-century has noticed this?!" Indeed, Roberts is operating on levels far above simple pulp SF action, and his Furies are at once stunningly phenomenologically plausible and also almost besides the point. In the same way that the grinding of the earth's crust may explode into an earthquake that leaves thousands dead, so too did some obscure cosmic twitch beget these Furies, who sever our gossamer thread of civilization in an instant between their vicious jaws.

Above, a Pan edition from 1969 with a lo-fi cover that seems to call forth the creature features that would swamp the UK market a few years later in the wake of James Herbert's The Rats - a story with its own bleak but simpler vision.

"The Keepers still haunt the conscience of mankind; I think in the end they justified the name we gave them so lightly. To us, they were the Furies."

The Furies rates 4/4, a masterpiece.

A Berkeley Medallion Book, 1966

DELUGE by Richard Doyle

"Kennington Park Road - water entering from north-east," called out the officer in charge and another marker was moved up. The pattern was becoming clear; the surge had spilled over in Bermondsey and was cutting across the bend in the river into Lambeth. By the time the tide overtopped on the other side, along the Albert Embankment, people trying to escape southwards would find themselves trapped with the river at their backs. His thoughts were interrupted by an urgent shout from Carswell.

"Derek," the Controller's face was pale with dismay, "it's the Undergound," he said in an unnaturally high voice. 

"They still have passengers in the tubes."

It's panic on the streets of London (and all up and down the eastern English coast for that matter) as hurricane force winds drive the storm of the century up the Thames, threatening seven million souls with a horrible death via an inescapable DELUGE!

After an exciting opening with a threatened freighter in the North Sea and reports of record surges from coastal towns, we quickly bog down into bureaucratic exposition as Peter Collins (Flood Room officer on standby) and displaced Kiwi Derek Thompson (Chief Engineer to the London City Council) feel out the first warning signs and begin their doomed attempts at prodding the system into action. We know exactly how that's going to go, don't we ... This is a necessary part of any disaster narrative, the pregnant menace, the foreknowledge that something's terribly wrong. We spend a little too much time here, though, and the first third of the story starts to feel like we're wading through hip deep water, sloshing and straining to make any progress. Eventually the storm arrives and things really get bent, as we're hoping, but it's rough going getting there, with too much back and forth with a slimy Labour pol named Miles Wendoser doing everything he can to stymie emergency efforts for fear of panic. Big mistake, we know! Wendoser is a plastic politician in the Tony Blair mold, with no real principles or scruples beyond what's best for his image in any given moment. Oh yes, and to make things worse, the American President is due for a tour!

Hardcover jacket artwork

Thompson has a memory of a flood back in New Zealand, which wiped out a tiny village, and he shudders at the thought of that power brought to bear on a modern metropolis. Doyle takes a ghoulish glee in showing us exactly how awful a flood could get in a modern city, with bridges smashed by loose barges, power plants blown up, slums flooded out and gas lines exploding, hospitals becoming death traps, those poor bastards in the tube, all this and more, and everywhere masses of people trapped by the rising waters and left to die by a government paralyzed by indecision and ignorance. Doyle doesn't mind dispatching his characters with clinical precision, sometimes scores at a time, sometimes in singular vignettes, and he does a good job for the most part in sketching people in before they meet their fates - it's a cross section of '70s society in the UK here, with "colored" chaps and working girls, pensioners and posh types all in danger from the flood. Nobody deserves what they get, and here Doyle is effective in illustrating the sheer waste and folly on the human level within a massive catastrophe, and the very human decisions that play into the death toll from a "natural" disaster.

Above, an American edition from Bantam Books, 1978. There's much to like here but the pacing is just too off. Doyle would revisit this setup a quarter century later as Flood, from 2002. The description makes it sound like more of a modern thriller, with American and NATO forces aiding Britain and "an explosion the size of a small Hiroshima" ... I wonder how much Doyle's style evolved over the years, for better or for worse? A great-nephew of Arthur Conan Doyle as noted above, Richard Doyle (1948-2017) has a brief but intriguing wikipedia page and was especially concerned, it is said, with the effects of climate change. After slogging through this bleak but unsatisfying read, maybe you'll spare a moment in thought as well ...

Deluge earns a disappointing 2/4 rating.

Pan, 1978 (original pub. 1976)

MAPS OF THE UNKNOWN: Deadly Equines

Click to embiggen this very horizontal image

Today's map comes from a more modern source than usual, but it's just as out there as any classic UFO or paranormal entry. This is a map of historically recorded meat-eating and killer horses, from Deadly Equines: The Shocking True Story of Meat-Eating and Murderous Horses, by CuChullaine O'Reilly, FRGS. The author grapples with the oft-forgotten bloody history shared between human and horse, in an intriguing style that's sometimes provocative, sometimes thoughtfully restrained. Not a crank text as it might be judged from its amateur origin, this is well worth reading regardless of your relationship (or lack thereof) with the horse. More info on the book is available at the Long Riders' Guild's website, along with a superior color version of this map.

Courtesy Long Riders' Guild Press, 2011.

COVER UPDATES: THE FLYING SAUCER STORY

A cool tropical vision for this later UK edition of Brinsley Le Poer Trench's UFO psychohistory The Flying Saucer Story, advertised with new updated material! Courtesy Tandem Books, 1973 (original pub. 1966).

MYSTERIOUS PYRAMIDS AROUND THE WORLD by Warren Smith

Here it is: the full text of Warren Smith's versatile article on mystery pyramid powers around the world, as it first appeared in the October, 1973 issue of Saga magazine! Smith would reprint this verbatim in Martin Ebon's 1976 anthology Mysterious Pyramid Power, and also adapted it with alterations as a chapter in his own The Secret Forces of the Pyramids from 1975. It's the same wild mix of everything-and-the-kitchen-sink we've come to know and love from Smith, but sadly our only illustrations are some standard pyramid stock photos.

Saga was a men's lifestyle magazine with a slick, punchy style, presenting a broad mix of sexy, serious, and screwy articles (like Smith's) leavened with an impressive spread of self-help and get-rich-quick adverts aimed at its male readers. In this issue the infamous John Keel also gives us a quick hit of disappearing persons and contact from the space intelligence Ashtar, in a two page installment of his column "Ancient Astronauts, Modern Mysteries" ... but that, dear readers, is a story for another time. Until then, make sure to keep your pyramids oriented along the north/south axis for ultimate restorative power, and keep an ear open for messages from the space brothers!

From Saga, Volume 47 - Number 1, October 1973.

WRITE YOUR OWN HOROSCOPE by Joseph F. Goodavage

Celebrity astrologer Joseph F. Goodavage returns to the blog to show us how to WRITE YOUR OWN HOROSCOPE! Goodavage was last seen writing some exceptionally stupid piffle around JFK's assassination in a chapter of Strange, Stranger, Strangest, and he doesn't disappoint here with more dumbass pontificating on the stars, society, and man's journey through the universe. Like the Creationists popping up on the scene around the same time, Goodavage takes issue with materialistic scientists and their billion year spree through evolutionary theory - after all, Goodavage tell us, the scientists claim that every organism on earth has the same genetic code, and how can that be possible? He's either clumsily misunderstood basic science writing or he's just grandstanding for his alternative audience. Another good bit has Goodavage asking us how so many cultures around the world could develop the "same" science of astrology if it's all a load of bull ... this ignores that the Chinese, Mayan, Egyptian, and European (and on and on) versions of astrology are all very different from each other, which is something Goodavage acknowledges elsewhere in the text! You're killing me, Joe! Apparently none of this fast and loose foolishness was a deal breaker for fellow superstar astrologer Sydney Omarr, who blurbs the book as a challenge to the open-minded.

As in his Strangest chapter, much opprobrium is heaped onto unnamed astrologers for giving the field a bad name with their poor work, as if Goodavage isn't guilty of all that and more. Noted fringe figure Richard Hoagland makes an early appearance, before his NASA coverup career - here he's just a concerned astronomer, saying we'd better find someone out there to talk to, and fast! In keeping with Goodavage's basically positive visions in the book, there's a brief bright spot (amidst a field usually littered with Cold War paranoia) where he reminds us that though America may see itself as a shining beacon of progress, the Communist Bloc thinks the same about themselves, and many worldwide agree. Regardless, Goodavage writes, all this "progress" is enforced at the barrel of a gun! That's part of his point about historical cycles and the relativism of our supposed "fact based" systems for navigating this crazy mixed up world. Of course, he just happens to think that he's got it all figured out himself ...

Goodavage, captivated by the unknown

To grant Goodavage some more credit, the actual how-to work on doing your own star chart is very involved, and it would take someone well-versed in the field to determine if he's bullshitting, giving bad advice, or just copy and pasting basic instructions - that ain't me! Apologies if that's a letdown after all this kvetching. All I can say is, the attendant fluff is simultaneously entertaining and aggravating. Joseph F. Goodavage, I shake my fist at you on the posthumous astral plane!

Goodavage's daughter Maria is also an author, albeit on more down-to-earth subjects.

Signet Books, 1975 (original pub. 1968)