A book titled “Unknown Immortals in the Northern City of Success” (1917) on the topic of “Eccentrics and Eccentricity”. How could I resist the click? Sadly Archive.org was in its usual unresponsive mood, and on Hathi the book is locked down due to the EU’s excessive ‘copyright’ terms.

But I eventually got through. It turns out that his book is a collection of character studies of unregarded ‘queer people’ in what seems to be the city of Belfast in the earliest part of the 20th century. Most are quite short, and the book only has 96 pages in total…

The Willick woman.
The rent man.
The rag, bone, and balloon man.
The fish man.
The soul of Smithfield.
That which is called Johnston.
Monsieur among the mushrooms.
The boiler of bones.
The madman.
Julius McCullough Leckey Craig.
The little child, the wisest of all.

I’ve only skimmed it so far, but it’s obviously a beautiful-written little set of inspirations for a historical fantasy/steampunk novelist, looking for unusual and inspirational character traits. The Kindle ereader .mobi is here.

The book is by a name new to me, the Ulster novelist and speculative historian Herbert Pim. He became a Catholic convert in 1910, but before his conversion wrote several supernatural novels, such as The Vampire of Souls and The Man with Thirty Lives, and a number of short stories. In the years after conversion it appears that his energies went mostly into giving pro-Catholic speeches, Irish nationalist politics, magazine editorships, and some very conventional poetry. Then at the end of the war he became a proto-fascist, and so abrupt was this conversion it makes one wonders if his stint among the Catholics and nationalists had been as some sort of undercover ‘mole’ and provocateur? He then published an insider expose memoir called Adventures in the Land of Sinn Fein (later the IRA), among other things.

The Spring 2017 issue of the journal Wormwood (#28) has a scholarly article on him. There was also an article “The Man with Thirty Lives: An Indiscreet Portrait of Herbert Moore Pim” in the 1916 special issue of The Green Book (#7, April 2016), a journal on the history of Irish supernatural and gothic writing. He died 1950, so is not set to be out of copyright in the UK until 2020.