“The Mystery of the Grave-Yard,” Or, “A Dead Man’s Revenge,” A Detective Story by H.P. Lovecraft
This story was written in 1898, making Lovecraft under ten year olds when he wrote it. This text has a lot of spelling mistakes in the base text, dutifully transcribed on the H.P. Lovecraft website maintained by Donovan K. Loucks. The story is divided into twelve extremely short chapters, most only a few sentences long — but who am I to question young Lovecraft’s vision?
Note to Hollywood: please make a young Lovecraft movie, a la Young Frankenstein (it’s Franken-SCHTEIN.) I would watch it. I mean, maybe only I would watch it, but that’s besides the point.
This story is very much indicative of Lovecraft’s love of adventure tales and detective stories. It features everything: tombs, tunnels, hidden mechanisms/traps, a manhunt, and ‘treasure,’ in the form of the ransom money and the golden ball. We see the usage of a lot of stock characters: the detective with guns, the ‘kidnappers,’ and the person who escapes a situation using McGuyver-esque solutions (making a key out of a mold they made of wax.)
There really wasn’t a lot of detective work done in this ‘detective story.’ It’s a detective story insofar as there is a detective. King John doesn’t do any actual detective work. He shows up with guns at the right place at the right time, as a contributor/s so astutely stated on the Lovecraft Fandom wiki. If King John is a detective, so is the Payday squad in every single job.
I didn’t know if King John was a stock character from pulp stories but I can find no trace of him via a cursory Googling, so this may be one of Lovecraft’s original characters.
This is Lovecraft’s first story to be clearly stated to be set in England, given the mentions of Kent and usage of pounds in description of the ransom, but there’s no ‘Mainville’ in England as far as I can tell.
This was the first one of Lovecraft’s stories I had to censor when reading because of his description of the ‘hackman.’ He used a term that isn’t racist, just descriptive but antiquated. The hackman may be the first person whose skin tone is described in the works of Lovecraft. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the first person of color to appear in a work by Lovecraft. The lack of description of any character’s skin tone does not mean that we should assume Lovecraft wrote them — or intended them to be read as — a given ethnicity or not.
My policy for now will be to give any words Lovecraft used that same treatment, because his word choice wasn’t key to the story he was telling. Substituting it or removing it doesn’t change the story, here or in the majority of Lovecraft’s works. I’m just trying to read the stories, not get into an academic debate, and I’m also not trying to get my YouTube account banned.
This story opens with a funeral. “The Secret Cave” closed with a funeral. Lovecraft was no stranger to death at the age he wrote this story, and perhaps this story was inspired by the imagination of that fidgety boy in a scratchy suit attending long quiet New England funerals. The usage of a funeral as a plot device to lead into why someone would go into a tomb was very elegant.
I didn’t see the twist in this story coming. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t. The twist was rather silly.
I think it’s adorable that someone, perhaps Lovecraft, wrote a price on the back of the folder. I don’t know if the writing on the folder was from Lovecraft as a child, put on by an adult, or put on the folder when Lovecraft’s work went to auction. Either way, it’s a cute touch.
