Brooks (Collin) Mad-Doctor Merciful

London, Hutchinson, [c.1933].

‘7th thousand’. 8vo. Original red cloth.

Brooks founded the Manchester Press Agency at twenty, was a major figure at the BBC, and moved in circles ranging from literary to political to financial; when he died in 1959, T.S. Eliot was among those who spoke at his memorial. Mad-Doctor Merciful, first published by Hutchinson in 1932, is his acknowledged masterpiece of supernatural fiction. The plot involves a lawyer named Godfrey Leybourne, whose old girlfriend married another man and had a child; the woman was killed by cannibals while travelling, and her daughter, who witnessed the murder, went mad… It was reprinted by Ramble House in 2014 with an introduction by the late John Pelan, who described it as the author’s “masterpiece of shockers”