BOOKWORM (Bookhounds of London)

 BOOKWORM wants young lady to catalogue library. Answer in own hand writing. Box 520. 

Lured (Cohen Film Collection)

Lured is a fun little film. Made in 1947 with George Sanders as suave clubman Fleming and Lucille Ball as showgirl Sandra who gets recruited by Scotland Yard to find a killer, it bounces along with verve and has some interesting twists before the end. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys cozy crime, or crime in general. It’s fun, it has laughs, it has Boris Karloff chewing all sorts of scenery, while Ball and Sanders bounce off each other nicely.  

The conceit is interesting. The Killer places an advert in the personal column of the paper, victims write in applying for the post, and whoops, strangle, strangle. The audience never sees the strangle, strangle. There’s a chiller moment about halfway through the film when Saunders is brought into the coroner’s office to identify a victim who’s been in the river for … a while … but the audience never sees the remains. Kudos to Saunders on keeping his composure. And his lunch.  

The personal ad has a long and studied history which I shan’t bore you with. Boredom is what Wikipedia is for.  

However, Lured isn’t the only example of a personal ad killer; far from it. There have been all sorts but the one I want to draw your attention to is Béla Kiss, the Hungarian vampire.  

Kiss, a tinsmith, practiced the romance bunco. He engaged in passionate correspondence with lonely women, drew them to his house, at which point they vanished. This was all pre-1914, and he was able to dispose of the bodies in tin drums filled with ‘kerosene’ that Kiss claimed he was hoarding in case war broke out. Lucky old Kiss: war did indeed break out. He was called up, went to the front, and in the meantime left the house in his housekeeper’s care. 

Kiss’ landlord decided to renovate while he was away. He raided Kiss’ workshop for supplies and found a quantity of tin drums. Cracking open the drums revealed horrors; corpses embalmed in alcohol, each drained of their blood, 24 in all. Documents found at the house showed he’d been corresponding with many more than 24.  

Kiss was off fighting the foe and was able to slip away when the authorities came looking for him. Some reports suggested he may have died. Sporadic sightings, most if not all of which were probably mistaken, cropped up over the years. The last recorded sighting was in New York, 1932.   

Then we have BOOKWORM’s personal ad, which crops up among the many that Lured’s Sandra Carpenter goes through in her search for the mysterious strangler. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it reference, but it’s there.  

From these we get: 

Brain Worm

The Hounds are asked their advice. 

One of the shop's regular customers (or perhaps a staff member) has been corresponding with a Lonely Heart that they met through the personal column. The writer, Bookworm, says he has a library that he wants the young woman to catalogue, and he seems ecstatic about her handwriting style. It's just what he's been looking for, he says, and he urges her to meet with him to go over details of the arrangement. She asks the Hounds: what do they think about her friend?

Going over the letters he's sent her indicates (0 point spend) that he's a foreign national, probably well educated judging by his language choices, and signs himself Kiss, which may or may not be an affectation. A 1 point spend indicates that the writer is probably Austro-Hungarian, judging by some of his word choices and grammar, and remembers the Béla Kiss story. The address is a post box; Kiss wants to meet her at an A.B.C. (Aerated Bread Company) shop not far from London Bridge Train Station. It seems harmless enough - it's a public place, after all. 

Option 1: Hungarian Nightmare. The writer is Béla Kiss himself. Having fled the front and escaped to London, he's set himself up as a tinsmith again but he can't get by on his own money so he's gone back to his old ways. This is one of his early attempts to lure in someone with the promise of work and then kill her, stealing what little she has. He's even gone back to his old methods of corpse disposal and leaves the bodies in tin drums at his shop. There are four such drums at his shop right now. What he doesn't understand is why those drums seem to be talking to him at night. Kiss is one short hop from becoming a ghoul, and the local ghoul population is watching him carefully.

Option 2: Copy Cat The writer is inspired by Béla Kiss. Occultist and fringe cultist Sam Scarlett has been trying to get the attention of the Keirecheires for some time but they've rebuffed his advances. He's come up with a new scheme: vampire-inspired pornography, complete with photographs. That's his ticket in. His lonely heart is destined to become his latest subject, and after that will be pickled in a tin drum. Scarlett's gotten moderately competent at tinsmithing; it's part of his Kiss persona. The Keirecheires are moderately amused by Scarlett's efforts; less so, at the Hounds' interference.

Option 3: Brain Bugs This is a Shan operation. The Bircester bugs have obtained a Mythos text that they're particularly interested in, but they've noticed that the text is difficult for their insect minds to decypher. If they can't do it they'll find a human who can. The library cataloguing is an invention but there really is a library; they just have one book that they want read. Just one. Then they'll take the head off for further study.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!