posted on 19 Aug 2025

The Scarlet Boy by Arthur Calder-Marshall

I first discovered Calder-Marshall’s work when I read his extraordinary book, The Fair to Middling which I loved so much that I spent many hours hunting down the wonderful first edition hardback that boasts a marvellous jacket by Raymond Briggs. This in turn prompted me to do some digging into the background career of Calder-Marshall and quite a story it turned out to be – one I wrote about and published elsewhere on this site.

So, unsurprisingly in the light of all this, I tend to keep my eyes open for other fiction by the same author in the hope that it will live up to the off-centre, downright oddness of Middling. When I came across the 1961 first edition of The Scarlet Boy, I rather hoped I had hit gold.

Sad to say, it didn’t quite turn out that way. The blurb on the flyleaf is enticing enough:

“This time he has assembled a moronic ironmonger, a Spanish painter, a barrister knight, a local historian – and a dead boy. He gathers this unlikely selection of people around a haunted house where a child, who turns out to be a natural psychic, plays with the dead boy because he is so much nicer than the girls at school.”

You’d have to be very hard of heart to resist such a concise and thrilling synopsis – I certainly couldn’t. And, on top of that, there’s another tip-top jacket by the highly regarded artist Blair Hughes-Stanton. Surely, it’s a winner all the way?

Well, actually no it isn’t. It’s an interminable pudding of a book and reading it is a bit like running on a muddy morass. All those mouth-watering elements of the story listed above in the blurb are absolutely true and accurate but they are buried in a story that is plodding along, over-burdened with unnecessary detail and tedious cul-de-sacs and which lacks any sense of pace. The desire to shout out loud ‘Just get on with it!’ is tangible – but when he does, the story finds itself becoming a sort of unconventional but preachy religious allegory.

Clearly Calder-Marshall wanted to use his ghost story to make some telling points about family ties and relationships as they change over the years and to suggest that simple cold rationalism isn’t necessarily the only way to see the world and what it has to tell us. But, quite honestly, by the time any sort of exposition around the ghostly goings-on gets underway, I’d pretty much lost interest in everyone and everything that is being presented to me.

In fairness I have to say that my negative views are in the minority when it comes to comparing them with other reviews I’ve seen on literary websites, nearly all of which are full of praise for what they see as an inventive and meticulously well-written novel. I don’t like doing reviews of books that have disappointed me but I have been so fulsome about Calder-Marshall elsewhere on Letterpress that I thought it was only right to suggest that maybe not all he touched turned to gold. It also gives you the chance to make your own mind up by reading it for yourselves – and that’s always worthwhile in my opinion.

There is a paperback reprint available from 2023 – expect to pay a little over £10 – or you could spend £30-£40 for the hardback with the great jacket.

 

Terry Potter

August 2025