Guest post written by Midnight Streets author Phil Lecomber
Phil Lecomber was born in Slade Green, on the outskirts of South East London. Most of his working life has been spent in and around the capital in a variety of occupations. He has worked as a musician in the city’s clubs, pubs and dives; as a steel-fixer helping to build the towering edifices of the square mile (and also working on some of the city’s iconic landmarks, such as Tower Bridge); as a designer of stained-glass windows; and – for the last quarter of a century – as the director of a small company in Mayfair, which specialises in the electronic security of some of the world’s finest works of art. Twitter/X: @PhilLecomber
About Midnight Streets (out March 18th 2025): A pacy, evocative dark historical thriller about a working-class private detective in 1920s London’s Soho, who has grown up alongside the morally dubious characters who are key to cracking the cases he investigates, for fans of Dominic Nolan and Laura Shepherd Robinson.
I have a vivid memory from childhood of standing in the small porch of my family home. It is a hot summer’s day and the sunlight blazing through the glazed panels has parched the air and made the small lobby uncomfortably stuffy. I thrust a hand into the pocket of my shorts and retrieve a wad of folded paper. In memory, this is a furtive act, a secret not to be revealed. I unfold the papers – two or three lined pages torn from a school exercise book, covered in a confident cursive script, obviously the handwriting of someone older (I am, perhaps, eight or nine). I begin to read: “Once upon a time …” A folk tale (a form destined to glitter brightly in my magpie brain well into adulthood) – called Mr Fox. I skim the first page, turn it over… My eye catches on a stanza of verse, a legend which the heroine of the piece, Lady Mary, finds etched above the doorway to a chamber: “Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest that your heart’s blood should run cold!” Regardless of this warning, the bold young Mary enters the room and what she discovers there – even in the broiling heat of that stuffy porch – sends a delicious shiver down my spine.
I learnt, years later, that Mr Fox comes from the same source story as the Grimms’ The Robber Bridegroom. But this is an English tale, with a provenance predating the German brothers’ collection, referenced in both Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. It tells of how, along with her brothers, Lady Mary befriends the mysterious and wealthy Mr Fox and after succumbing to his charms becomes betrothed to him. One day, curious about her future marital home, and with her brothers out hunting, Lady Mary decides to visit Mr Fox’s castle. In a secret chamber there, to her horror, she discovers the gruesome remains of his previous wives. When Mr Fox returns unexpectedly with another unfortunate victim, she hides behind a wine cask and witnesses her murderous fiancé lopping off the hand of his captive in order to steal her diamond ring. The dismembered hand flies through the air and lands, of all places, in Lady Mary’s lap. Mr Fox searches for it for a while but soon returns to deal with his prey, allowing the brave Mary to escape. At their wedding feast, pretending to recount a strange dream she’d had the previous night, Lady Mary reveals the severed hand, and thus her bridegroom’s gruesome crimes; the brothers and wedding guests promptly draw their swords and cut Mr Fox “into a thousand pieces”.
How many children nowadays have access to such folk tales, I wonder? I don’t mean the sanitised Disney versions, but those fascinatingly dark fables which have been passed down through generations and become woven into the fabric of culture. There has been a trend for some time in modern parenting to shelter the child from the darker side of life; to marinate our little ones in the syrup of sunny benevolence and life-affirming tales. But just like the physical body, the developing mind requires a balanced diet; a child will soon learn that in real life the sun doesn’t always shine. Only a well-nourished psyche can weather those bleak winter storms ahead.
The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim explores the importance of fairy tales in his excellent book The Uses of Enchantment. In it, he points out that if we teach our children that all people are fundamentally good, if we hide from them the stark truth that, as humans – out of anger or anxiety
– we all have the propensity to be aggressive, cruel and selfish, then there is a danger of that child (who knows that they are not always good, and even when they are, often desire not to be) becoming a monster in their own eyes. According to Bettelheim, in order to cope with the inner pressures of its unconscious, a child needs a certain understanding of its conscious self and best achieves this, not through rational comprehension, but by exercising the imagination: “spinning out daydreams – ruminating, rearranging and fantasising about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures … It is here that fairy tales have unequalled value, because they offer new dimensions to the child’s imagination which would be impossible for him to discover as truly on his own.” Bettelheim also makes the important point that the fairy tale could not have its psychological impact on the child were it not first and foremost a work of art.
There are many variations of The Robber Bridegroom tale. Along with Mr Fox, we have Fitcher’s Bird, The Enchanted Pig, Mary’s Child – all with the central motif of a secret chamber which must not be entered. But by far the most famous of these is Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard, a French fairy tale about a wealthy but sinister nobleman with a blue beard, who hands over the household keys to his new young wife, Fatima, but forbids her from entering a particular room in his castle. Driven by curiosity, she disobeys him and rushes to unlock the door to the forbidden room. Inside, she finds a scene from Hell: a room awash with blood, in which her murderous husband has stashed the corpses of his previous wives. In her panic to get away, Fatima drops the key, and so seals her fate. For, try as she might, she cannot remove the bloodstain from it. Soon, her husband returns, discovers the evidence of his wife’s betrayal and announces that she is to join the victims in his bloody chamber. The smart young Fatima buys some time by asking leave to pray before she dies. She then summons her brothers, who arrive just in time to lop off our villain’s head. Fatima inherits his vast fortune, and we are once again at the happily-ever-after.
There is much in this story, rich with symbolism, to exercise the imagination. On the surface it is simply a cautionary tale about disobedience. But many – including Bettelheim and the mythographer Marina Warner – see more complex lessons woven into it. Extending the cautionary tale idea, it can be seen as a version of The Fall (with Bluebeard as both the Old Testament God and the tempting serpent), in which Eve manages to escape divine punishment. Or perhaps the test for the young wife is one of sexual fidelity? After all, in Perrault’s story, when Fatima is left alone in the castle, she immediately invites her friends over for a party. Or maybe the story’s lesson is to prepare the young for the revelation of carnal knowledge itself? It’s not hard to see the sexual imagery in a key, to a forbidden chamber, which gets stained with blood. The phallic symbolism of Bluebeard’s key has been highlighted more than once by illustrators of the tale, such as Gustave Doré and Alfred Crowquill. In Fitcher’s Bird, the blood-stained item which gives the wife away is an egg – an ancient symbol of female sexuality. For the child, struggling with emerging unconscious pressures, this dark tale might also facilitate the exploration of two powerful emotional influences: jealous love, where the partner is so desperate to keep a loved one, that, in order to prevent a change of loyalties, they are prepared to destroy them; and the tantalising fascination of sexual urges, which might lead the innocent into peril. It is also, of course, a story of domination and submission, and of the abuse of male privilege.
But what about that beard? Well, it’s long been a symbol of male potency, of Pan, the Devil, the priapic goats of ancient myth. And the colour? Blue is the hue of both the heavens and the abyss, of desire, knowledge, pornography (blue movies) and, for the French, raw meat (un steak bleu) and fairy tales themselves (les contes bleus). But actually, Perrault got the name from a real-life French killer, whose soubriquet, Barbe bleue, had become a byword for abject evil. In the fairy tale there is good and evil, and Perrault’s villain has obviously chosen the left-hand path. But his inspiration was someone of a far more problematic character. On the one hand, the original Bluebeard was a Renaissance man; a chivalric knight, cultured, refined, and devoutly religious. On the other, blood-stained, appendage, he was a monster of perversion; a serial killer who took voluptuous pleasure in committing the most unspeakable acts of sadistic violence against hundreds of child victims. This villain’s name? Lord Baron Gilles de Rais.
Born in Champtocé castle in 1405, Gilles was raised in one of the most prestigious and influential households in the Brittany region. He became an orphan at a young age and was placed under the guardianship of his formidable grandfather, Jean de Craon, who played a significant role in shaping his early education and career. Trained in the chivalric arts of warfare and courtly conduct, Gilles demonstrated early promise as a skilled soldier and rose to prominence as a companion of Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years’ War. But by 1433 Joan was dead and the army disbanded. Gilles retired to his estates. Throughout his life, the nobleman had exhibited strong signs of religious devotion. He was known for his intense personal piety and had spent vast amounts of money on commissioning lavish religious spectacles. But Gilles longed to kill. As part of the military aristocracy, he had been trained for it. His society legitimised and honoured it. And so, in the luxurious languor of his forced retirement, he turned to the throngs of ragged refugee children, made homeless by the war, who wandered the countryside begging for food. With the same connoisseur’s eye he had once used to orchestrate his religious spectacles, he now curated a menu of horrific sadistic tortures, cruel sexual perversions to enact on the innocent bodies of hundreds of young boys. Gilles’s crimes were so monstrous that until relatively recently the details were censored from his biographies. As one of his biographers explained: “It is impossible to relegate such a man to the ranks of ordinary criminals. He must be studied as an artist, in some respects the supreme artist, in evil.”
But we must be careful of how we view such epicures of cruelty. As Dostoevsky says, in The Brothers Karamazov, “In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden – the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain.” Another of Gilles’ biographers, Jean Benedetti, goes to lengths to point out that he wasn’t just some abomination of nature: “It is important, at the outset, to emphasise how typical he was of his period … The difference between Gilles and his contemporaries was one of scale. In an age of extravagance he was super-extravagant; in an age of crime he was a super-criminal.” I explore the idea of murder as an art form, and whether such criminals should be viewed as evil monsters, or merely those who have succumbed to the most abhorrent of human vices, in my debut novel MIDNIGHT STREETS – a dark historical thriller about a working-class private detective in 1920s London’s Soho; the book also references our murderous baron, Barbe bleue. Another of his biographers, Leonard Wolf, said of de Rais, “I see him for what he is: a crystallization out of the human essence. A miserable instance of who else we are.” Of who else we are? Perhaps. But maybe if the young Gilles had read more folk tales rather than poring over those medieval religious tracts, he might have better nourished his psyche to weather those winter storms, and thereby spared all those innocent young victims.
Midnight Streets by Phil Lecomber ($18.99, Titan Books) will be published on 18th March.
