I
first read G. D. Holbourne when I was about thirteen. My ma has more books than
anyone. Really, anyone. When she left school and until she was married she
worked in the British Museum Library and may well have taken most of it with
her when she left. I’ve mentioned the character Martin ‘fucking’ Luther before
now and it was one of his that I first read, and have not read since. You can’t
find the books anywhere, mostly because apart from a very few rough collections
most of them appeared in periodicals in the 50s and 60s.
What stuck with me from that first read
was that Martin fucking Luther was haunted by the ghost of Jayne Mansfield. I
has no idea then who that was, but she seemed very annoying. And so she was,
probably raised by Martin in a previous story and he stuck with her since. I say
‘probably’ because I honestly have no idea, as I’ve not read the story where
that happened (or even know if it even exists).
Now I know that Jayne Mansfield was a film
starlet famous for her chest, a blonde 50s celebrity of great fame, a regular
in Playboy. But at the time the story was written it wasn’t common knowledge
that she was also a member of Anton LeVey’s Church of Satan. Perhaps G.D did,
or heard such rumours of it, but what is true is that the story was written
before her death at age 34. There’s nothing eerie about that. He probably just
found her irritating. Certainly in the story she is an unpleasant, unhelpful
sort of familiar like some devilish version of Barbara Eden in I Dream of
Jeanie. The story was probably extremely satirical, but that all went over my
head at the time – what I remember is a young magician stuck for the moment
with a ghostly, extremely sexual familiar who wouldn’t (despite his best
efforts as an aside to the main story) just fuck off.
I don’t have to rely on memory for that
last. Martin said ‘fuck’ a lot in every story he appeared in. No one else ever
seemed to swear.
And so another quick challenge-sketch.
And this time of a devilish, ghostly Jayne Mansfield.
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