Blurb
Harry Stubbs, a heavyweight boxer turned investigator, faces eldritch horrors in the colourful world of small time criminals and eccentrics of 920s South London,. Based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos
The Book of Insects – Harry joins a quest for the original of the Necronomicon. The book is dangerous, and so are those who will kill to get it.
The Ghost Door – When a man goes missing through an impossible, one-way doorway, Harry follows into the unknown to bring him back.
The Snake in the Garden – A baffling murder in the back room of a pub, and an elusive suspect with the key to an ancient mystery.
The Body Snatchers – Harry is drawn into a conflict between occult powers which centres around something buried in West Norwood cemetery.
Review
THE HARRY STUBBS series by David Hambling is a collection of short stories and novellas set in the Cthulhu Mythos. They’re different from most examples of the Cthulhu Mythos in the fact that they star a working-class man of limited education that is also a veteran of WW2. Harry is much more salt of the Earth than a Randolph Carter or Professor Armitage, being more interested in survival than the surreal implications of the Mythos on his view of reality. There’s some subtle critique of Lovecraft’s xenophobia and Anglophilia both, pointing out just how diverse the British Empire was in the 1920s as well as the posh delusions about it that Lovecraft attributed to it. It is a rough place in Hambling’s work and all the more interesting for it.
THE CASE BOOK OF HARRY STUBBS is the sixth book of the Harry Stubbs series and a collection of four cases. These stories are reprints from the Books of Cthulhu series that is published by Crossroad Press but have had the Harry Stubbs-related stories put together into one volume. This is good for both collectors and fans of the series both, in my opinion. Still, you’re probably going to be a bit lost if you don’t start with the original The Elder Ice or other volumes before this. These can be read without being familiar with the Harry Stubbs series but I wouldn’t recommend it.
The first of the short stories is an introduction to Harry Stubbs by Arthur Renville, who is a supporting character in the main series. He is basically a London gangster that just so happens to also work with Harry on occasion and has a somewhat offbeat attitude to everything from the occult to murder. It works a bit like a roast but much of the character’s charm requires you to be familiar with him. Still, it explains who Harry Stubbs is and why you should care about him.
“The Book of Insects” finds Harry attempting to find an original copy of the Necronomicon and doing all the various hoop jumping that you might expect needs to be required to acquire such a book. It’s less about supernatural affairs and more about the people willing to kill for a rare book, which is something that separates Harry Stubbs from lesser Mythos stories. There’s monsters, yes, but they’re held in reserve.
“The Snake in the Garden” is a story that involves the Yig, one of HP Lovecraft’s lesser-known creations. Serpent men tend to be considered far more a Howardian thing than a Lovecraft thing despite the two fitting together as much as they can. I was particularly fond of this story and felt that it was my favorite of the four tales.
“The Ghost Door” brings Harry to dealing with an object that transcends time and space. It moves out of the way of the more grounded Harry Stubbs series and takes him up against the more physics defying and otherworldly. I admit I prefer the more street level Harry Stubbs series, but I still had a lot of fun with this one.
Finally, there’s “The Body Snatchers”, which deals with what the heck do you think. Basically, Harry is asked to investigated a mental patient who absolutely insists that he is someone else than he appears to be. Harry is skeptical, can’t imagine why, but runs into the kind of person that can switch their forms. It also contains a clever reference to a scifi-comedy by Arthur Conan Doyle that reads as horrifying today (the premise being a guy switches with his son in law and finds his daughter is incredibly horny in their private life—yikes).
In conclusion, I don’t necessarily recommend The Case Book of Harry Stubbs to newcomers but I don’t unrecommend it either. Instead, I would recommend people pick up The Elder Ice and enjoy the series from the beginning. However, these stories are all quite entertaining and each would work as an introduction to the character if you haven’t heard of him before. Harry is a great occult investigator in the fact he’s not a genius detective but he can certainly pull off most jobs by knowing who to punch and follow.
