The Beetle de Richard Marsh

The Beetle

Richard Marsh

'The Beetle' tells the story of a fantastical creature, ""born of neither god nor man,"" with supernatural and hypnotic powers, who stalks British politician Paul Lessingham through fin de siecle London in search of vengeance for the defilement of a sacred tomb in Egypt. Marsh's novel is of a piece with other sensational turn-of-the-century fictions such as Stoker's Dracula, George du Maurier's Trilby, and Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels. Like Dracula and many of the sensation novels pioneered by Wilkie Collins and others in the 1860s, The Beetle is narrated from the perspectives of multiple characters, a technique used in many late nineteenth-century novels (those of Wilkie Collins and Stoker, for example) to create suspense. Richard Marsh was the pseudonym of the British author born Richard Bernard Heldmann

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Richard Bernard Heldmann, an English novelist who was born on 12 October 1857 and died on 9 August 1915, wrote under the pen name Richard Marsh. He wrote a lot in the later years of the 19th century. His supernatural thriller book The Beetle is his best-known work. In 1880, Heldmann started writing and publishing fiction, first as boys' school and adventure stories for magazine publishers. Recent research has revealed that Heldmann was condemned to 18 months of hard labor on 10 April 1884 in the West Kent Quarter Sessions for issuing several counterfeit checks in Britain and France throughout 1883. After being released from prison, Heldmann chose a pseudonym, and in 1888, fiction written under the name "Richard Marsh" started to appear in literary magazines. In 1893, two novels were published under this pseudonym. In the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century, Marsh wrote and published a lot. On August 9, 1915, at Haywards Heath, Sussex, he passed away from heart illness. Many of his books were released after his death.