With Wells and Sherriff and Bramah, we observe a 
peculiar aspect of the mycophobia of the English in its 
unconscious and spontaneous workings. Doubtless many 
other examples could be assembled, and we shall men- 
tion a few. But first let us note and celebrate one excep- 
tion. Anne Parish in her novel The Perennial Bachelor 
dispatches one of her characters by means of a dish of 
mushrooms. Unlike all the other writers about whom 
we speak, she shows herself thoroughly versed in the 
properties of the deadly amanita. The episode is only 
incidental to her plot, and this makes the accuracy of her 
details even more astounding. It is not as though she 
had worked hard on mushrooms and then hung her story 
on them. 
In December 1949 Wllery Queen's Mystery Magazine 
published a yarn by August Derleth in which the mur- 
derer killed his victim by substituting for morels some 
specimens of Gyromitra esculenta—a species that no vil- 
lain bent on murder would ever rely on. In Murder 
with Mushrooms, ‘Gordon Ashe’ (pen name for John 
Creasey) has his victim die the same night that he dines 
on poisonous mushrooms—a tragic sequel that could not 
occur. In R.'T.M. Seott’s Ann's Crime, the victims in- 
hale spores of Amanita phalloides that have been con- 
cealed in a cheese cloth inside a pillow, and forthwith 
they die, for no doctor, we are told, could save a person 
whose head had once touched that pillow!.... Has 
there been a single writer of detective or mystery stories 
who has done justice to the genuine drama hidden in 
the properties peculiar to Amanita phalloides ! 
‘The German author Gustav Meyrink in his Bal Ma- 
cabre deals with mushroom intoxication. The story is 
drenched with a pathological atmosphere artfully con- 
trived. There is much about mushrooms in the narrative, 
but the hallucinations that hang over the whole story 
[ 108 | 
