Table of Contents
The first time I came across the name Cay Van Ash was as the author of a novel entitled Ten Years Beyond Baker Street. The book was published in 1984 and, as the title implies, it was a fanciful addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon. It dealt with an imaginary encounter between Arthur Conan Doyle’s super-sleuth Holmes and Doctor Fu Manchu, the oriental arch villain created by Sax Rohmer. It was an entertaining read. The prose conveyed a strong sense of period, there was a vivid feeling for location, and the author had succeeded brilliantly in the challenging job of meshing together the chronologies of two sets of characters created by two different authors.
And the author had a rather unusual name. In my suspicious way, I started to wonder whether “Cay Van Ash” might be a nom de plume. It just sounded a bit… made up. Bit by bit, I started to find out more about the man. It turned out eventually that I was about half right. Cay Van Ash, I discovered, began his life in 1918 as Kay Hammond. Of course, many authors use pen names – sometimes multiple pen names – although most do choose to retain their birth names for official purposes. But the name that Kay Hammond used professionally was a bit more than just a pen name. It turned out that in 1951 Hammond had taken the rather extreme step of changing his name by Deed Poll, so that, from that point onwards, Kay Hammond ceased to exist and Cay Van Ash took his place.
So of course I started to wonder why…
1: Kay
Horsham, Sussex: 1918 – 1935
He was born in the Sussex market town of Horsham on the 27th of March 1918, and the name on his birth certificate was Lauraine Walter Kenneth Hammond. He grew up in the family home at 21 Barttelot Road. It was a Victorian terraced house, not a labourer’s cottage but something a degree grander, a house for the more prosperous tradesman and his family. Lauraine’s father Walter was the oldest of three boys. He had married a local girl Mabel Chriss in 1911, but for seven years there were no children, so that by the time Lauraine was born, both of his parents were over thirty-five. He was to be their only child.
Walter Hammond was a saddler by trade, operating his business from a shop in Horsham’s bustling East Street. Saddlery and harness-making had been the Hammond family’s business for at least a century. Walter’s brother Albert, his father Alfred, his grandfather William, and his great grandfather, also William, had all been saddlers. The only exception was Walter’s youngest brother Herbert, who chose a different line of work and trained as a solicitor’s clerk. It was a large family but, by the time of the 1921 census, Walter’s parents had both died and Herbert had left home, so that the Barttelot Road house was occupied by a small family unit: Walter, his wife Mabel and their three year old son Lauraine.
It was not long before the name Lauraine became an embarrassment to its bearer. Most people would have thought of it as a girl’s name and, indeed, the song Sweet Lorraine, composed in 1928 by Cliff Burwell and Mitchell Parish was enjoying its full popularity during his schoolboy years. It is not hard to work out the name-calling that must have gone on. He soon adopted a different first name and, using his third initial in its phonetic form, became known as Kay. Kay Hammond was a bright boy and at the age of eleven he was enrolled in the nearby Horsham Grammar School. The school’s history dated back to 1822, when it was built on the site of the much older Collyer’s School, founded in 1532. In the time before the 1944 Education Act, grammar schools were mainly fee-paying establishments, but the law decreed that a quarter of the places should be funded by scholarship grants. It is unlikely that Kay Hammond’s family could have afforded to pay for school fees and school uniform and schoolbooks, so it was as a scholarship boy that he began his education.
By this time, Kay Hammond’s character and interests were beginning to develop, and we can start to see the man that he was to become. Very early in life he started to take an interest in the culture and history of Japan. The writer and traveller Lafcadio Hearn was an influential voice in oriental studies at this time and two of his key works – Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan and Kwaidan – had been published in the Jonathan Cape Traveller’s Library in 1927. This material was therefore readily available to the teenage Kay. Many years later, like Hearn, he was to settle and marry in Japan.
Picture courtesy of Ciaran Murray
He also grew to love tales of mystery and suspense – discovering in particular the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. And by the time he was nine, perhaps encouraged by his uncle Herbert, he had learned to type. But he was also starting to develop the symptoms of asthma that would force him to rely on inhalers for the rest of his life. His father too was asthmatic, and although this condition had saved him from the trenches in the first world war, it would soon force him into early retirement from the saddler’s shop. Kay did not want the same fate for himself. So instead, he started to write.
Another interest was the cinema. Kay Hammond regularly attended Horsham’s two main picture palaces, alternating between the large and very plush Capitol, and the smaller and rather more modest Electric Theatre. In the autumn of 1931, at the age of thirteen, he chanced to see a film entitled Daughter of the Dragon. Third and last in a short series from Paramount Pictures, the film was just 70 minutes long and, lacking any major established stars in the cast, was most likely presented as second feature on a double bill. The title role was played by an up-and-coming Chinese actress named Anna May Wong – famous later but relatively unknown at this time. Second on the bill, playing the villain of the piece, was an obscure Swedish-born actor named Warner Oland. Perhaps because of the particular cast of his features, Oland was generally type-cast in Oriental roles. (The casting of western actors as non-western characters, although widely accepted at the time, would not of course be tolerated today). Oland later became famous, playing the detective Charlie Chan in a long series of pictures. But in Daughter of the Dragon, the villainous character that he played had the memorable name of Doctor Fu Manchu.
Young Hammond was intrigued both by the character and by the film. From the film’s credits he gleaned that the screenplay was based on a book by an author named Sax Rohmer. And so he began to seek out Rohmer’s other books – and he quickly discovered a large body of material Kay Hammond started reading, and he discovered that there were four Fu Manchu novels in print, plus many other novels, short stories and works of non-fiction. The most recent Fu Manchu novel, completed in 1931, was Daughter of Fu Manchu. This was filmed the same year and re-titled Daughter of the Dragon.
Like Kay Hammond, Sax Rohmer came from very modest origins. He was born Arthur Henry Ward in Birmingham, the only child of Irish parents. His father worked as a clerk for a civil engineering firm. His mother, a lifelong alcoholic, died of tuberculosis when Arthur was seventeen. The young Arthur Ward worked at various times as a journalist, as an inventor, as an illustrator, as a lyricist, and as a short story writer. By the age of twenty his first stories had been accepted for publication. By the time of Kay Hammond’s birth, he had adopted the name Sax Rohmer and was working at a prolific rate, producing numerous novels and short stories for publishers both in Great Britain and in the United States. During the 1930s Rohmer was at the height of his fame and wealth, with a home in Mayfair and a cottage named Lovelands Way – near Reigate – which he built for his wife Elizabeth.
In 1935, the Rohmers decided to build a much more substantial country house in the same part of the country. It was named Little Gatton, and it was a huge, opulent dwelling, with domestic staff housed in cottages in the grounds. Little Gatton became the Rohmers’ main home, and, as it happened, Little Gatton was situated just eighteen miles from Horsham. When Kay Hammond came to hear about his new neighbour he was naturally eager to meet him. He had continued to read Rohmer’s work, and he was also trying his hand at writing his own fiction. So he decided to visit the great man and to seek his guidance. One spring afternoon he mounted his bicycle and set off in the direction of Little Gatton. It was an eighteen-mile ride, quite a challenge for an asthmatic seventeen year old, but Kay Hammond was a determined young man with a goal in mind. He swerved through the gates of Little Gatton and approached the front door.
Little Gatton: 1936-1944
King George V died early in 1936 and, during the few days that followed, his body lay in state at Westminster Hall. 800,000 members of the public filed past to pay their respects. Kay Hammond was among those who attended, and the event made a deep impression on him. His father Walter was by now a sick man, so perhaps Kay had begun to seek another father figure – or male role model – in his life. And Sax Rohmer did not have a son. So, although Rohmer did not generally encourage visits from his fans, he did take a liking to this particular young man. Over the next few months, Kay Hammond became a regular visitor to Little Gatton. Gaining Sax Rohmer’s confidence, he was soon given a job of work to do. Rohmer was working on a long series of radio adventures featuring Fu Manchu. Between December 1936 and November 1937, fifty-two of these fifteen-minute programmes were to be transmitted on Radio Luxembourg. Rohmer had started out writing the scripts single-handed, but in time he started to delegate some of the work. Elizabeth and Kay were both called upon to do their share, drafting the dialogue and passing it to Rohmer for a final polish. In return for this assistance, Rohmer spent some time helping Kay with his literary efforts, reading the stories he submitted and offering him advice. Within a year, Kay Hammond had had his first story published, and later there were to be more stories and even a novel. But Hammond always spoke very disparagingly about these early works and gave no hint of the titles or of what pseudonyms he might have used.
Picture courtesy of Ciaran Murray
So trying to track down Hammond’s published work during this period is a frustrating business. There was indeed an author named Kay Hammond who was active at the time, publishing several stories in the horror and fantasy genres as well as other stories and a novel under the name Kay Hammond Davies. These tales appeared in magazines published by Gerald Swan, with such enticing names as Yankee Science Fiction and Weird Pocket Library. However, this author has been identified by Steve Holland, one of the leading authorities in this rather specialised field, as Kathleen Eleanor Hammond (1894-1967) an Irish writer whose married name was Hammond-Davies. So here is another mystery that remains for now unsolved.
At the start of the second world war, the British Government compiled a weighty hand-written reference document known as the 1939 England and Wales Register. It was similar to a census, although less detailed, and it recorded, among other things, the whereabouts of every British civilian at the start of hostilities. The Register, now in the public domain, is a fascinating read, telling us for example that the Rohmers were living at Little Gatton with five servants, and that Kay Hammond, then aged 21, was still living with his parents at Barttelot Road and working as a telephonist for the General Post Office (he was exempt from military service because of his asthma).
Kay’s father Walter Hammond died on the ninth of December 1941 aged just sixty. Walter’s death was registered by his son, named on the certificate as L.W.K. Hammond, and the causes of death were listed as myocardial degeneration, bronchitis and asthma. Walter had been ill for some time –the 1939 Register describes him as a “retired” saddler – and saddlery as a trade was not kind to the lungs. The air in the workshop was foul with the smell of adhesives and solvents and thick with leather dust. Among workers in the trade, lung complaints were incessant and Kay, asthmatic himself, was now more keen than ever to pursue alternative sources of income. So, rather than joining the family business, he continued to alternate between the glamorous and sophisticated life of Little Gatton and the more humdrum atmosphere of the GPO telephone exchange. Walter’s one-page will had been written in 1929 when Kay was ten. He left his estate, eventually valued at £864 net, to his wife Mabel. So Mabel Hammond was able to remain at Barttelot Road until her own death thirteen years later.
Just four weeks after his father’s death, Kay Hammond was married for the first time. A teenage romance had ended tragically, but Kay was now 23 and his wife, Claudia Dawes, was 29. Claudia was a schoolteacher, born in Neath, who had arrived in Horsham at the start of the war when her school was evacuated from South Wales. The 1939 Register tells us that she was sharing lodgings with two other teachers. But by the time of the wedding, she had abandoned teaching and was working as a clerk in the Ministry of Labour. (Strange as it seems today, before 1944 women teachers in England were not allowed to marry!) The ceremony took place at the Register Office in Horsham. Neither family was in attendance, suggesting a lack of parental approval. Sax and Elizabeth Rohmer were there to support Kay.
For the next few years, Kay Hammond would spend a great deal of time at Little Gatton, working as Sax Rohmer’s full-time secretary and even living on site for one period of fifteen months. He continued to have a hand in the production of Rohmer’s literary output, although it is hard to identify exactly which words were his. Years later, writing as Cay Van Ash, he did mention a radio series titled Myself and Gaston Max, the commissioning of which necessitated a trip to London and the wining and dining of the BBC’s Val Gielgud. The outcome was a set of six stories which eventually aired on the BBC Forces Network. Work was split three ways, so that Sax, Elizabeth and Kay each drafted two episodes, Kay being responsible for the third and sixth episodes, titled The Broken Eagle and The Kravonian Panelling. Part of the work involved the changing of names and the Gallicisation of the lead character. “It was a good summer,” he recalls, “and I remember doing most of the writing while sitting on the long terrace in front of the lounge windows.” He revealed many years later that he was not very happy with the results of this literary donkey-work, but if any copies of the scripts survive, it would be interesting to see what, if any, credit was given him.
During this time, Hammond also had a unique opportunity to observe the Rohmer household at close quarters. His secretarial and administrative duties occasionally expanded to include shopping trips to Reigate, restaurant visits, errand-running in London, and even caretaker work looking after the house during the Rohmers’ occasional absences. It is hard to work out how he and Claudia could have managed any sort of married life during this time, having also to work around the demands of Claudia’s work and the difficulties of wartime travel. Their life as a couple was probably very similar to the lives of many other couples at that time.
But all this was about to change. Sax Rohmer’s style of writing was starting to be seen as old-fashioned, and it was becoming harder to find publishers for material in his genre. Eventually the financial pressures became unsustainable and the Rohmers were forced to put Little Gatton on the market. It was sold in 1944 to the racing driver Malcolm Campbell. Sax and Elizabeth had retained the flat in Sloane Street, so this once again became their main home. Kay and Claudia Hammond moved to London in the same year.
There has been much speculation about whether, during his years at Little Gatton, Kay Hammond was allowed any hand in co-authoring or ghosting Rohmer’s work. The earlier account of his contribution to Rohmer’s radio episodes is based on Hammond’s own words but, apart from this, little is known for sure. No printed acknowledgement has been found in any of the books or stories written in this period. There has been some conjecture surrounding a stage play entitled The Body’s Upstairs on which Rohmer was working in 1939. Although never produced on stage, the play was later re-worked as a novel and published in 1949 as Hangover House. Very unusually, Elizabeth was given a partial credit for the book, but neither Kay Hammond nor Cay Van Ash gets a mention. So, unless a new cache of documents is discovered, this particular mystery seems destined to remain unsolved.
Picture courtesy of Ciaran Murray
Islington, London: 1945-1953
From 1945 onwards, Kay and Claudia Hammond can be found on the electoral register for the London borough of Islington. Their address, 26 Hilldrop Crescent, was in Tufnell Park, which was well-situated for Kay’s continuing work as a telephone operator. In the course of the war, the area had suffered extensive bomb damage, and the new blocks of the Hilldrop Estate would soon be under construction. But the Hammonds found their home in one of the surviving older buildings. Number 26 was a tall Edwardian house divided into flats, and it was to be Kay’s home (although not always Claudia’s) for the next six years. Amateur criminologists might recognise the street name – number 39 was at one time the home of the notorious murderer Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen!
During this period of his life, Kay Hammond was starting to teach himself Japanese. He had no access to personal tuition, nor to any of the forms of self-study that were to become available in the post war era. In 1945 the Berlitz language schools, the Linguaphone collection and the Teach Yourself library were not yet offering Japanese courses, but there was one other way in which it was possible to learn Japanese at this time, although not a way open to everyone. With Japan’s entry to the war, there was a sudden demand for translators and interpreters who could assist in the efforts to make sense of huge quantities of written and spoken communication. This included intercepted documents and wireless transmissions (including some in Japanese Morse code!), confessions from prisoners, letters requiring censorship and, later on, the war crimes trials. Government training programmes were hastily set up, and two main centres were established at which Japanese language tuition could be carried out. These were the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury, and the Japanese language school in Bedford. However, recruitment to both centres was strictly by invitation. The Bloomsbury school was approaching sixth-formers aged 17 and 18, while the Bedford school concentrated on Oxford and Cambridge graduates. Neither of these categories included Hammond, and his fragile health would have served as a further barrier.
So Kay Hammond’s only means of access to the Japanese language was through textbooks and dictionaries, and his chosen medium was the kanji script. This is a vocabulary of ancient Chinese symbols which still forms a major component of modern Japanese. The traditional method of learning kanji is by repeated copying of the script in longhand. This was a feat that required a great deal of determination – one Japanese-speaking friend reckons that it is “probably the most cumbersome and complicated writing script that exists”. But this was how Hammond filled his spare hours at Hilldrop Crescent and his spare minutes at the various telephone exchanges to which he was allocated. Here the main hazards were the V2 rockets which now and again exploded nearby, and flying glass from the occasional shattered window. Working in a top-floor exchange, one of his colleagues was blinded. Hammond’s asthma had kept him away from front line duties, but in war time nowhere was truly safe.
Meanwhile, across town in Mayfair, Sax Rohmer’s luck had not improved. Although he still managed to sell the occasional radio play to the BBC, his style was now definitely old fashioned. The sale of Little Gatton had yielded a temporary financial respite, but nevertheless Rohmer started to think about America. Over the past two decades he had been a frequent visitor to the States, and had developed a useful network of publishers and agents there. His contacts had come up with some promising leads, so in 1947 he decided to try his luck and, within a couple of years, Sax and Elizabeth decided to take up permanent residence. Their furniture and other belongings, in storage in the Harrods depository, now had to be shipped to New York and it fell to Kay Hammond to organise this. A number of items ended up in Hammond’s possession, including some manuscripts and Sax Rohmer’s treasured Tiffany-style reading lamp, which item remained in pride of place on Hammond’s writing desk for the rest of his life. And although he remained in touch with Sax and Elizabeth, from this point onwards he saw little of them.
For the reasons mentioned earlier, the Hammonds’ marriage had been under strain for some years. Claudia petitioned for divorce in 1948, and both parties re-married the same year. Kay’s new wife, another Horsham girl, was Audrey Jack. . Claudia’s new husband was rather tantalisingly named in the Marriage Register as “David Jackson or Nakano” – she seems to have had a penchant for men with two names!
Audrey was a labourer’s daughter, and she was five years Kay’s junior. They chose the Islington Register Office as their marriage venue, but this time both families were present to witness the happy occasion. The new marital home was to be the flat in Hilldrop Crescent where Kay had until very recently been living with his first wife. The couple continued to live there until 1951 but nothing is known of their whereabouts for the three years following. Hammond briefly mentions in his writings that he spent a period in the theatre, working in stage management in the north of England, so perhaps this provides a clue.
It was also during these years that Kay decided to continue his formal education. Up to now he was very much the self-educated man in the fields of Japanese language and culture but, now aged thirty, he decided to study for a bachelor’s degree and enrolled in London University’s School of Oriental Studies, a short bus ride away in Bloomsbury. Among his tutors was the legendary orientalist Arthur Waley. Born in 1889, Waley had worked for fifteen years at the British Museum, but from 1924 he began to lecture in Oriental Studies and continued to do so for the next quarter century. He was a hugely influential figure in his field, and his early translations of Japanese and Chinese poetry could well have been among Cay’s boyhood reading. He was a regular associate of the Bloomsbury group and numbered Osbert Sitwell and Ezra Pound among his acquaintance. He was also an enthusiastic advocate and practitioner of the Bohemian lifestyle. He was also one of the many characters in this account who was operating under an alias. He came from a Jewish background and was born Arthur Schloss but changed his name just before the onset of the first world war – not because it sounded too Jewish, but because it sounded too German.
2: Cay
The Lost Years:1951-1954
In November 1951, at the age of thirty-three, Lauraine Walter Kenneth Hammond changed his name by deed poll to Cay Van Ash. It has already emerged that he did not want to follow his father’s trade, still less to die his father’s death. It seems now that he did not even want to keep his father’s name. And, moving in a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan world, he might well have become embarrassed by his modest origins. At any rate, it was as Cay Van Ash that he decided to live the rest of his life.
Fortunately for this investigation, changes of name were among the items recorded on the 1939 Register. Entries to the Register were constantly updated as people’s circumstances changed, and this procedure remained in place until the surprisingly late date of 1952. The majority of updates related to women who had changed their names by marriage, but changes of name by Deed Poll were also included. The 1939 Register is thus one of the very few sources which links the life of Lauraine Walter Kenneth Hammond to the life of Cay Van-Ash – note the hyphen, by the way! Hammond’s change of name was added to the register in 2nd February 1951.
It was his literary mentor Sax Rohmer who first encouraged Kay Hammond to adopt a nom-de-plume. Together they set out to devise something that had a touch of glamour, a touch of the exotic, and an elegant format – Rohmer reckoned that three words of three letters each would look good on the spine of a book! One story had already been published under the Cay Van Ash name. It appeared in Galaxy – no, not the American science fiction magazine, but a rather more modest pocket publication which enjoyed a brief lifespan in Britain between 1946 and 1949. Published by Eric Hale, Galaxy featured short humorous pieces and cartoons, thus putting Kay Hammond somewhat outside his comfort zone. Little else is known about it, except that one of Hammond’s fellow contributors was later to become very famous indeed. He was a very young comedy writer named Bob Monkhouse.
But where did the new name come from? It doesn’t seem to be an anagram, or a place name, or a family name. But it is worth looking at how Sax Rohmer devised his own pen name. He was born Arthur Henry Ward, and it took a few years of trial and error to arrive at Sax Rohmer. According to his own account, sax (or sæx) is an old Saxon word meaning blade, and rohmer is a phonetic variation on roamer, one who comes and goes at will. In other words, a free-lancer. So the key would seem to lie in a cocktail of ancient languages and phonetics. Well…. there is a Saxon word, æsc, which refers to a long-hafted spear with a leaf-shaped blade. And the Celtic boy’s name Cayvan (or Keavan or Kevan) means noble, handsome or gentle …and of course Cay is a phonetic variation on Kay… So Cayvan Æsc becomes Cay Van Ash – a handsome spear-carrier! And of course, in the theatre, a spear-carrier means a supporting character. Bearing in mind the professional relationship between the pair, it rather seems to conjure up an image of the knight and his squire.
Between the last part of 1951 and the first part of 1954, it is hard to give a clear account of the whereabouts of Cay Van Ash. He spent a year in Paris studying for his Master’s degree, and he has said that he did this at the Sorbonne with the great French orientalist René Sieffert. However these statements are hard to reconcile. There was indeed an oriental studies department at the Sorbonne, but Sieffert had no connexion with it. He taught all his working life at the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris, except for the years from 1950 to 1954,during which time he was seconded to Tokyo where he occupied the role of director at the Maison Franco-Japonaise. Quite how all this fits together is unclear, and it becomes even more unclear in the light of Van Ash’s statement in Master of Villainy that he was at this time working in stage management somewhere in the north of England. In the absence of any new evidence, there seems unlikely to be any definitive solution to this particular mystery.
Swansea, South Wales: 1954-1959
On the second of November 1954, Kay’s mother Mabel Hammond died at her home in Horsham. She left a will that had been signed and witnessed the previous September, and her estate, after probate, amounted to £2091. Her choice of executor was not her son but her nephew William Chriss who was then working as a piano tuner in Skipton. William Chriss therefore had the responsibility for funeral arrangements and solicitor’s fees, and he also ensured that small bequests of £50 went to a niece and to one of Elizabeth’s neighbours, and that the contents of the house in Barttelot Road passed to her unmarried sister Susan. A final £50, plus the residue of the estate, defaulted to her son, “Lauraine Walter Kenneth Hammond, of 10 Eaton Crescent, Swansea”. It is hard to escape the feeling that the money was bequeathed somewhat grudgingly. Mabel clearly knew her son’s new address, but she either did not know, or did not want to know, his new name.
The Register of Electors for Wales confirms that Cay Van Ash had taken up residence at Eaton Crescent by 1954, along with his wife, listed in the Register as Audrey Van Ash. Perhaps Audrey too had changed her name by Deed Poll although, in light of later events, that would suggest a somewhat unlikely degree of devotion. Cay Van Ash (although not Audrey) was to remain in the area for seven years, moving around the corner in 1956 to Bryn-Y-Mor Crescent. Both houses were in multiple occupation, and both belonged to the nearby University College Swansea. But if either of the pair was studying or working there, it must have been not Cay, but Audrey.
The nearest drinking place, both for the neighbourhood and for the university, was the Bryn-Y-Mor Hotel. Dylan Thomas had been an occasional patron until his death in 1953; another literary figure who regularly used the facilities was a young university lecturer named Kingsley Amis. Amis had already published his debut novel Lucky Jim and was well on his way to becoming a literary celebrity. In his Memoirs, he writes very fondly of the years he spent in Swansea, painting a vivid picture of university life, and also mentioning his favourite drinking place. So it is quite likely that the two men rubbed shoulders there. And perhaps it is worth noting that among his various fields of literary study Amis was a great connoisseur of genre fiction. His later published work included some exploration of science fiction and of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books. Amis and Van Ash would certainly have had much to discuss.
But Cay Van Ash’s main occupation during these years was in the theatre as a stage manager. As well as his throwaway mention of theatrical work in the north of England, he had already spent some time in the industry during his years in London, perhaps initially making use of Sax Rohmer’s contacts to find work and even (not very successfully) making one attempt to write and produce a play. His script concerned the problems faced by the German people after the war, so in the prevailing atmosphere it seems likely that the choice of subject would have gone against him. He once mentioned to a friend that his London-based theatrical work had been in Hampstead, although the author has not succeeded in identifying which theatre might have employed him.
The post-war years were a difficult time for the British entertainment industry. Succumbing to the twin threats of cinema and television, many regional theatres had already closed their doors or, alternatively, accepted the humiliation of being repurposed as bingo halls. The only theatre in Swansea that remained fully active during the whole period Van Ash was there was the Grand, which was starting to enjoy a revival under the charismatic management of John Chilvers. The Palace and the Empire continued to function sporadically, but perhaps not regularly enough to offer secure employment. The author’s ever-diligent research team continues to search for corroborative evidence of any of this, perhaps in the form of a theatre programme bearing the Van Ash name among the technical credits; sadly a random handful of programmes from the Empire and the Grand have yielded nothing.
But during his time in Wales Cay also managed to find the time to explore the nearby coast and countryside, including the beautiful Gower Peninsula. He was to develop a deep affection for this part of the country, once describing it as “the most beautiful place on Earth”. Thirty years later, it became the setting for one of his novels and, as we will learn later, the connection did not end there.
On the first of June 1959, Sax Rohmer died. His time in America had not been a success and by the end of his life his output was confined to television scripts and down-market paperbacks. The Rohmers were living in an apartment building in White Plains, and a lengthy legal dispute with an agent had left Rohmer seriously depleted in finances and failing in health. Eventually, sick and broken, he decided to come home to England. Because of his frailty, the voyage had to be postponed more than once and, soon after his disembarkation, he died at University College Hospital. There was to be no reunion with Cay Van Ash, and there was no mention of him in Rohmer’s will. Sax Rohmer’s estate, totalling less than £1000, passed to Elizabeth, with literary rights divided between his British and American agents. He was buried alongside his parents in the Catholic section of Kensal Green cemetery. There was no money for a memorial stone until years later.
Audrey Van Ash had accompanied Cay on his move to Swansea but in 1959 she abruptly vanishes from the record. No further trace of her has been discovered, not as Audrey Van Ash, not as Audrey Hammond, not as Audrey Jack. Although very fond of Cay, she did not share his restless spirit, rather seeking a quiet and stable life – and Cay’s plans for the next phase of his life were quite the opposite of what she wanted for herself. Before long, though, a new partner was on the scene for Cay. Brenda Lewis had grown up in nearby Gorseinon, situated at the foot of the Gower peninsula – a significant location for Cay. Brenda was a student nurse and, although nearly twenty years younger than Cay, she also had her sights set on a life in Japan. The pair were to remain together for the next ten years, eventually marrying in Tokyo. They did not live together in Swansea, Brenda staying in her parents’ house until 1961, when the couple finally emigrated. Brenda’s British nursing qualifications unfortunately turned out to be no use to her in Japan, however they both managed to find teaching work.
Tokyo, Japan: 1961 – 1970
Following the unhappy years of the second world war, Japan was now entering a period of economic revival, and the educational sector was one of many areas to benefit from the new boom. In particular, there was a surge in the recruitment of native English speakers – British, Irish, American – to teach English-language classes. In the post war years, young Japanese people had had very little contact with Western culture or with spoken English. So, for the next three decades, Cay Van Ash was to be found in the Department of English Literature at Tokyo’s very prestigious Waseda University, where he was employed to give English language classes, incidentally occupying the same position that had been occupied sixty years earlier by his boyhood hero Lafcadio Hearn. Cay Van Ash (and many of his colleagues) bore the title of Professor, but it should be noted that this was not the same as a professor in a British University. Japan follows the practice of the American academic world, where “Professor” is roughly equivalent to the English “Teacher”.
Although Cay Van Ash had worked hard to master the written Japanese script, he had still had very little contact with native Japanese speakers, and therefore had much catching up to do with the spoken language. It is debatable whether he ever became truly fluent, as very few foreigners have ever truly really learned to think in Japanese. So, along with the less gifted majority, Van Ash worked by translating his English thoughts into Japanese words as well, and as quickly, as he could. In, the later part of his life, his spoken Japanese was variously described as “workmanlike” and “bookish”, and yet he commanded great respect among the Japanese people who knew him. This seems to have been not so much based on his linguistic mastery, as on account of his broad knowledge and his very idiosyncratic wisdom – which are qualities much valued in Japan.
However, none of the language issues initially posed a problem, at least not with Cay’s teaching; it was a departmental requirement that his lessons should be delivered entirely in English. And, just as he himself had learned his Japanese from written texts, he quickly worked out that his key to success lay in using the English alphabet as the primary focus of study, and then working from this towards a grasp of the spoken language. And, during his early years in his teaching role, Cay Van Ash did indeed begin to develop effective ways of doing this. At times he found language teaching a frustrating business – he never had the opportunity to teach English Literature – and he once said (in confidence) that he felt much of his work was wasted on his students! Incidentally, the equivalent role still exists in the department today, although some of the nomenclature has changed. But, of the current thirteen teaching staff, only one of is a native English speaker. His post bears the title of Second Language Acquisition.
While Cay was feeling his way around in the academic world of Waseda, Brenda was teaching English at the unexpectedly named Athénée Français. Situated in a dramatically modern building in the cosmopolitan Kagurazaka district, this school catered for the many Japanese students who now wished to explore Western language and culture, and its curriculum included both English and French classes. It was publicly funded and entry to its courses was free of charge. And, although he did not himself teach there, Cay could often be spotted meeting Brenda after work.
Cay and Brenda both began to acquire some local habits, stopping now and then at traditional Japanese inns and adopting some of the local styles of clothing. Brenda wore geta, the Japanese clogs – “you could always hear her coming” – and Cay, at least when he was at home, wore the lightweight kimono known as the yukata. Cay’s taste in clothing generally veered towards the theatrical – in the winter months he could be glimpsed around Tokyo sporting a leather greatcoat and fur hat! They were eventually married at the British Embassy in 1965. Brenda’s occupation was given as English Teacher, Cay’s as Author – although it would be some years before any more of his work appeared in print. One of the witnesses, Gerald Morrey, was a fellow member of Tokyo’s English-teaching community and co-author of a textbook entitled Basic Expression in Spoken English. The second witness, Hana Hagiwara, remains unidentified.
The Rohmer Review: 1965-1981
In the ten years following the death of Sax Rohmer there was, inevitably, a gradual revival of interest in his work, and especially in the tales of Fu Manchu. The first indication came with a series of five films from the maverick international writer and producer Harry Alan Towers. This began in 1965 with The Face of Fu Manchu, closely followed by The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), The Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1967), The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968) and finally The Castle of Fu Manchu (1969). All five films starred the villain of the moment, the very sinister (and very tall) Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu, along with the very sensuous (and very petite) Tsai Chin as Fu’s daughter, for some reason renamed Lin Tang for the series. Other roles were played by a distinguished company of British stalwarts including James Robertson Justice, Rupert Davies, Howard Marion Crawford, Nigel Green and Shirley Eaton. Incidentally, in his screenwriter incarnation, Towers was known as Peter Welbeck. Another man with two names….
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Sax Rohmer Society was beginning to make its presence felt. This was just at the time when the phenomenon of mystery fandom was starting to gather momentum. First on the scene had been The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore (founded 1923), followed by The Baker Street Irregulars (1934) and The Saint Club (1936). In the late 1960s there came a flurry of fanzines, starting in 1967 with The Armchair Detective and The Mystery Lover’s Newsletter. The Sax Rohmer Society and its publication The Rohmer Review arrived on the scene the following year. Both were founded by Douglas A Rossman, supported by a circle of academics and enthusiasts and, as their names suggest, both the Society and the Review were dedicated to honouring the work and memory of Sax Rohmer. Over its eighteen issues the Review contained contributions from a wide variety of literary figures, some famous and some obscure.
The first four issues were edited by Rossman himself, at which point the eyeshade passed to Robert E Briney, who was to continue in this role until the magazine folded in 1981. By day, Briney he was an academic at Salem State University, specialising in mathematics and computer science, but by night he was a major figure in the world of mystery fandom. He had already contributed to a bibliography of the works of John Creasey and would later become a well known figure at mystery conventions. The fifth issue of The Rohmer Review in August 1970, the first one edited by Briney, contained a letter from Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, the first of a handful of contributions in her name. The following year, Cay Van Ash also heard from Elizabeth. She was writing a biography of her late husband, and wondered whether Cay would be able to lend a hand.
In the years since Sax Rohmer’s death, Cay had remained in touch with Elizabeth. She seemed to like Brenda too, because in 1967 she had inscribed a copy of Sax’s 1925 novel Yellow Shadows to her. And Elizabeth already had some credentials (and a few pseudonyms) as a writer. Years before her contributions to The Rohmer Review, she had written two short stories titled Spikey (1924) and ‘arker (1932), using the name Lisbeth Knox. Following this, but now writing as Elizabeth Sax Rohmer, she had written for radio and television and in 1958, with some guidance from Sax, she produced a novel, Bianca In Black. This was an atmospheric, darkly romantic mystery whose action alternated between London and the Riviera. The romantic content must have seemed pretty dated even in 1958, but the central mystery is cleverly-constructed and stands up well even in the 21st century. It was published in America with a cover blurb which mistakenly described the author as “Sax Rohmer’s daughter”!
Elizabeth had spent a great deal of time pondering over her memories of Sax, sifting through his notes and anecdotes, and also scanning the material contained in Pipe Dreams, a series of reminiscences published in 1938 in the Manchester-based Empire News. But Elizabeth was not finding it easy to shape all this diverse material into a coherent whole. It turned out that Cay Van Ash, literary jack-of all-trades, was more than happy to assist, and happy too to throw in a few stories of his own. Their joint effort, entitled Master of Villainy and credited to Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer (in that order) was published in the UK and in America in 1972. The book included a foreword contributed by Bob Briney, and an index which was also Briney’s work.
By this time, relations between Cay and Brenda had run their course. Both were very independent-minded individuals, but their ideas had evolved in very different directions. Brenda had become involved in Tibetan Buddhism and in a variety of associated practices to which Cay referred (probably in jest) as “drumming with human bones”. In short, she had adopted the hippie culture of the period. Cay’s rather more pragmatic ideological stance was concisely described by one friend as “English common-sense individualism”. At any rate, by the end of the 1960s Cay and Brenda had parted company. Although Brenda apparently cherished a hope that they would meet again in a future incarnation, she eventually returned to Wales, where she lived with her parents for a couple of years before re-marrying in 1976.
Before long, Cay had started to develop a rapport with one of his students, a young, very bright Korean woman named Okchon. She was fun-loving, hard-working and determined. Relations between Japan and Korea at this time were complex and not always happy, many Koreans in Japan being relegated to second-class status and menial employment. Okchon’s family, middle-class and prosperous, were still based in Korea and, understandably, they had not been at all happy about their daughter coming to Tokyo to study. However she had kept contact with the Korean community through an uncle and other family members, sometimes helping out as a translator.
After the split from Brenda, Cay had stayed in touch with some of her friends at the Athénée Français. One of this group, a young woman named Fumiko, had recently become engaged to an Irish journalist who had just arrived in Tokyo. His name was Ciaran Murray, and he too had been teaching at the Athénée Français. Early in 1973 Fumiko introduced Ciaran to Cay with the words “I’d like you to meet the most interesting person I’ve ever known.” It was the start of a twenty-year friendship. Ciaran Murray’s library still boasts a copy of Master of Villainy signed by Cay and dated 19th July 1973.
Over the course of the 1970s, Cay Van Ash was to develop a close working relationship with Bob Briney. He became a regular contributor to The Rohmer Review, writing a total of five major articles, along with frequent letters commenting on others’ contributions, and quite a few other odds and ends. In one notable piece of scholarship, A Question of Time, Van Ash constructed a detailed chronology which encompassed all of the major characters and events of the Fu Manchu stories. It was a painstaking piece of work and just the sort of thing that he was good at. And it was later to prove invaluable to the various authors (including Van Ash himself) who were to add their own novels and stories to the Fu Manchu canon.
Most of Van Ash’s work for the Review was focussed either on Rohmer himself or on Fu Manchu, but there were some exceptions. Published in September 1976, Ourselves and Gaston Max concerned the radio plays mentioned earlier, with a detailed account of how they were written. And a series of letters concerned the use of Sax Rohmer’s characters in cartoons. Between 1972 and 1983, more of less the lifespan of the Review, Marvel Comics had been granted a licence by the Rohmer estate to use some of his characters, including Fu Manchu, in their series Master of Kung Fu. As might be expected, opinions on this were sharply divided in the world of Rohmer scholarship. Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer didn’t like it!
Elizabeth Sax Rohmer died on the fourteenth of June 1979, twenty years after Sax. She had remained in England and had eventually retired to the south coast where, at the time of her death, she was living in sheltered accommodation in Lewes, Sussex. The net value of her estate was just under £22,000, and the residue passed to two nieces and a nephew, who was also named as executor. All three were members of a mining family in County Durham. The nephew, born in 1934, and bizarrely named Sax Rohmer Noble, also inherited Sax’s gold and amethyst ring. His mother was born Betsy Cromwell Knox and was related, as was Elizabeth, to the theatrical family of that name. The will also contained a long and detailed list of specific bequests to various friends and family members. An ivory casket, a pearl necklace, a mink cape, a Baby Belling cooker and a dozen other items. Four bookcases containing Sax Rohmer’s library went to a neighbour in Lewes, while his wife was awarded custody of the cat (named Micky). Trustees were appointed to manage the Rohmer literary estate – the Society of Authors in the UK and the Authors’ League in America. Elizabeth was buried in the Catholic section at Kensal Green alongside Sax Rohmer and his parents, but it was to be another thirteen years before the long-awaited stone appeared. Cay Van Ash was not mentioned anywhere in Elizabeth’s will, but some manuscripts by Sax Rohmer nevertheless ended up in his possession. These comprised a set of four stories dating from his early years, bearing the titles Rupert, Digger’s Aunt, The Pot Hunters and The Treasure Chest. And, eventually, it was Cay who took on the responsibility of installing a memorial stone at Kensal Green. A photograph taken by Cay Van Ash and copyrighted 1992, shows the new stone, carved in shiny black marble with gold lettering, and standing on raw, freshly dug earth.
Tokyo, Japan: 1983 – 1993
Cay Van Ash’s next book was published in 1983 when he was 65. It had absolutely nothing to do with Sax Rohmer or with Fu Manchu, in fact nothing at all to do with mystery fiction. The book was in Japanese and it was entitled (approximately) Kore wa Eigo da: hiden no Eikaiwa, and the author’s name is rendered as Kei Buan Asshu. The title translates as The Secrets of English Conversation, and, as the name implies, the book was an English language textbook for Japanese readers, doubtless owing much to Van Ash’s long experience of teaching English language classes at Waseda. Incidentally, to a Japanese speaker the word hiden carries a flavour of occult mysteries which, given the author’s other interests, makes it a very appropriate choice. His forename Kei, incidentally, translates as respect. The book remains a popular work in its field.
Van Ash did some work on another textbook dealing with a related subject area, inspiration coming this time from his experience of learning Japanese. The author had set out, working from books, to teach himself the kanji script and eventually, through long perseverance and practice, was successful in this. But it was a frustrating experience. He found the existing kanji dictionaries extremely difficult to follow, and eventually had the notion of creating a kanji reference book that would have a more logical format and would therefore be easier to use. This was a significant challenge. Others had attempted the task but, even today in our new age of electronic communication, no-one has achieved total success. It was a long and complex project, but it did eventually result in a finished manuscript. Sadly, for one reason or another, Van Ash did not succeed in finding a publisher; and the manuscript is not believed to have survived.
The title page of The Secrets of English Conversation incidentally listed a co-author named Okchon Van Ash. Okchon and Cay were now a happily married couple, and were to remain so for the next twenty years – until death did them part. They had kept in touch with Ciaran and Fumiko Murray, and continued to see them socially every few weeks. The Murrays had spent some time in America shortly after their marriage, as Fumiko had won a scholarship to Cornell. Inspired by some of the lectures he attended there, Ciaran developed an interest in Japanese garden design and its influence on the English garden. He too had now entered the academic world and was teaching English Language and Literature at Chuo University. Both Ciaran and Cay had found that the Japanese academic world extended a somewhat frosty reception to those not themselves from an academic background – such as journalists or stage managers!
The Murrays were now parents, and their daughter Genevieve, perhaps feeling the lack of an older sister,became firm friends with Okchon. Another familiar presence at the Van Ash apartment was the cat Norshim who was able to enter and leave the apartment via her own trapdoor. At their regular get-togethers, food and drink were always a highlight – Cay was particularly proud of his recipe for the Fu Manchu cocktail. Musical tastes tended towards the operatic, encompassing Wagner, Bizet and Gilbert and Sullivan. Cay was fond too of the tenor Peter Dawson, whose recorded repertoire included the old country ballad Sussex By the Sea. He also displayed a gift for mimicry, relating rustic anecdotes in the dialect of his native county. Murray described his conversation as “abounding in irony, wit and epigram.” Cay had no patience with the fads of the moment; his stance was always one of rugged individualism. And Cay was a dedicated pipe smoker, wielding a monstrous curly appliance described by Murray as “Sherlockian”. Now and again, the tales of Sherlock Holmes would come up in conversation. The Baker Street sleuth was a favourite of all. And both Ciaran and Cay were later to contribute stories to the Conan Doyle canon.
Ten Years Beyond Baker Street: 1984
Despite the demands of the university and of his marriage, Cay Van Ash managed to keep a diligent eye on the latest trends in mystery fiction and, significantly, his attention was caught by two books published in the mid-1970s. First was The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Penned by the American author Nicholas Meyer, this was published in 1974, and was made into a film two years later. It was a Sherlock Holmes story and it included among its supporting characters the founding genius of modern psychiatry Sigmund Freud. Initially brought into the story to assist Holmes in combating his cocaine addiction, Freud sticks around for much of the subsequent action and, as a parting shot, throws in a brief psychoanalytic session.
Following his psychoanalysis, Holmes found himself back in shape for his next fictional encounter, which occurred in 1978, in The Holmes-Dracula File. This unlikely collision was the work of another American author, Fred Saberhagen, whose oeuvre was eventually to include a long series of Dracula-derived novels. Surprisingly, Saberhagen’s narrative concerned not a confrontation but a collaboration between Holmes and Dracula against a common foe.
But, in his study of this developing sub-genre, it seems that Cay Van Ash was not always impressed by what he read. “I could have done it better” he mused about one of these offerings. “Why don’t you?” Murray retorted. Some years later, Van Ash returned to the theme. “Sherlock Holmes has been paired with the most unlikely people,” he reasoned. “Someone is going to pick up on Fu Manchu before long, and I think I can do it better than anyone else because I have the necessary background.” Eventually his detailed knowledge of Rohmer’s work enabled him to locate a total of five possible gaps in which new novels might be inserted; although this ambitious project was sadly never to be fully completed. But following considerable encouragement from Okchon, the first of the novels, Ten Years Beyond Baker Street appeared in 1984.
In constructing his narrative, Van Ash was careful to respect the chronologies of both Rohmer and Conan Doyle. The book is set in the early part of 1914, falling between The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu and The Hand of Fu-Manchu, the second and third novels in Rohmer’s series. Through this handy time window tumbles Sherlock Holmes, dragged half-unwillingly from his retirement and his beehives by Sax Rohmer’s Doctor Petrie, our narrator and protagonist. Holmes’s customary companion Dr Watson appears very briefly (he is a medical acquaintance of Petrie). Fu Manchu, as always, appears in a number of key scenes, but Nayland Smith spends most of his time offstage, having been kidnapped early on by the Si-Fan. In the opening chapters, the action takes place in familiar London haunts, but soon shifts to South Wales, taking in Cardiff, Swansea, Merthyr Tydfil and, especially, the Gower Peninsula and a long narrow island known as The Worm.
In the acknowledgements at the end of the book, the author mentions the proprietors of the Worm’s Head Hotel, as well as a journalistic contact on the South Wales Evening Post. He does not mention that he lived for several years in nearby Swansea, but these years obviously contributed a great deal to the intimate knowledge of local topography that he displays in the text, as well as a strong empathy with Welsh speech rhythms. Acknowledgement is also given to Ciaran Murray (whom we have already met) and to Jack Torrance (who will arrive later in the narrative).
The book was not an immediate hit with publishers – Van Ash’s Rohmeresque style was widely seen as belonging to a bygone age. But eventually Okchon had the idea of exploiting this supposed defect as a sales device, and the American publishers Harper & Row were persuaded. The book appeared in the States in a lavishly designed edition aimed at the Christmas market, with a splendid illustrated cover – featuring Sherlock Holmes rather than Fu Manchu – and monochrome illustrations in the text. It is a handsome production which would make any author proud.
One surviving review, from the Washington Post, was generally enthusiastic but the writer did have a couple of significant reservations. They noted Van Ash’s enthusiasm for location and landscape but felt that he sometimes tended to indulge in travel writing at the expense of a tight narrative. They didn’t much like the illustrations and they concluded, rather disappointingly, that the author, although talented, lacked the striking genius of a Sax Rohmer or an Arthur Conan Doyle. The well-made point about travel writing was to recur in the future… but ideas for the next tale of Fu Manchu were already starting to form.
Cay and Okchon Van Ash were passionate about travel, languages and music and, over their years together, they visited many countries in pursuit of these interests. They enjoyed South Wales and Cay’s beloved Gower Peninsula, and they also fell in love with the choral music of Wales. Likewise in France they developed a passion for French chanson. They crisscrossed America in Greyhound buses and Cay, ever the old theatre man, was mightily intrigued by the special effects in the Hollywood studios. Other destinations included India and Korea, but Cay was less enthusiastic about these. And then they went to Egypt.
Sax Rohmer had always had a habit of combining travel with research, and Cay Van Ash followed his mentor’s practice. With Ten Years beyond Baker Street safely in print, he was free to turn his attention to another Fu Manchu tale. Having decided on Egypt for its location, he planned a visit to the country with Okchon the following year. All of their work (and perhaps a little enjoyment too) was packed into a period of eighteen days, and the itinerary included a trip up the Nile and a rough-and-ready crossing of the Sahara. For the sake of authenticity, the author used only one guidebook, and this was the 1914 edition of Karl Baedeker’s Egypt and the Sudan: Handbook for Travellers.
Cay’s book was published in 1988, again by Harper & Row in America. The author’s unorthodox research methods certainly paid off – he paints a vibrant picture of Egypt in 1917. The river and the desert and the city all spring to life with countless incidental details. The hawkers and the tourists of Cairo, the canals and the ferryboats of the Nile, a desert feast, a desert sunset and a graphically portrayed camel ride all form part of the mise en scene. Cay Van Ash could have been an outstanding travel writer and in his first draft he had included even more geographical material. He was eventually advised, by his editor and by his friends, to keep this aspect of his fiction under a tighter rein!
Holmes and Watson are not in the narrative this time, and the principal players are once again Petrie and Nayland Smith. In addition to Fu Manchu and the Si Fan, the forces in play include the Kaiser’s Germany and the Coptic faith. And the tautly-written action sequences include a Zeppelin explosion, a climactic duel in a sandstorm, and a torture sequence involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs. It is tempting to speculate what research the author might have done for the last item…
Van Ash’s prose carries just the right amount of humour. His occasional impish footnotes, purporting to come from an “editor”, convey a certain anachronistic detachment, and there are a couple of very personal references slipped into the text: there is a ride in a decrepit carriage which “smelt pungently of horse and harness”, and we are threatened by a knife with a “leaf-shaped blade”. Even the 1914 Baedeker guide was awarded a cameo appearance! All in all, the book gives the impression of an author just starting to hit his stride. The Fires of Fu Manchu appeared in 1988 but, sadly, it was to be Cay Van Ash’s last completed novel. A few close friends, including Bob Briney and Ciaran Murray, received signed copies. In Briney’s copy, the dedication, in Cay’s dashing cursive script, reads “With sincere thanks for helping me to keep alive the memory of our old friend Sax Rohmer.”
The Mark Schreiber interview: 1988
Photograph by Pamela Fernuik
One striking feature that is apparent in both of the Van Ash novels is the authenticity of the writing style. Cay Van Ash’s prose reads as though it had actually been written in the period in which the action takes place (although the author can be observed to drop his guard slightly when venturing into the territory of the erotic). In 1988, in an interview for The Magazine, Van Ash talked about the mechanics of his literary technique. The piece was titled A Footnote on the Yellow Peril and was the work of Mark Schreiber, a highly regarded and very prolific American journalist, who had been resident in Japan since 1966. He wrote (and still writes) for several English language periodicals, including The Japan Times. Cay Van Ash’s secret, Schreiber discovered in the interview, was to avoid reading anything, including newspapers, published after 1940! “I don’t want my vocabulary affected,” Van Ash explained.
The bulk of the interview was focussed on Cay’s mentor Sax Rohmer and on Fu Manchu. But Van Ash is also given the chance to talk about own published work, about his long friendship with Rohmer, about the cultural background to the Yellow Peril scare, and about the dark charisma of Fu Manchu himself. Finally, for those readers who enjoy a drink, there appears Cay Van Ash’s personal version of the Fu Manchu cocktail: four parts white rum, one part lime juice, one part Crème de Menthe and (masterstroke!) two green maraschino cherries. Ciaran Murray later described this heady concoction as giving “the frisson of belonging to some sinister secret society.” Bottoms up!
Mark Schreiber was accompanied to the interview by Pamela Fernuik, an American artist and illustrator who was living in Tokyo at the time. The photographs that she took on this occasion are among the very few known images of Cay Van Ash in existence today. Van Ash was seventy at the time of the interview, and his face is deeply lined, but he still has a full head of sandy hair (brushed back to form a widow’s peak) a hawklike profile and a powerful jaw. He wears a selection of the Japanese yukata mentioned earlier, and as always he smokes a curly briar pipe. In some of the shots he sits at a cluttered desk in front of densely packed shelves of books. One picture shows the books in close-up – they are all hardback editions of Sax Rohmer! Pamela Fernuik still remembers the occasion: “Mr Van Ash wanted me to photograph him as though he were a character in a play,” she recalled. “A photograph of a writer writing. He chose his wardrobe and he did a costume change. And the pipe was his idea!” Cay’s inclination towards the theatrical is definitely making itself felt here – the overriding impression, if not Sherlockian, is certainly Rohmerian!
The Schreiber interview also carried a brief mention that Van Ash had started work on his third Fu Manchu novel. This unfinished work later gets a brief mention in The Crimes of Fu Manchu, a piece by Andrew Lane for Million magazine. Van Ash is credited as a contributor, and the piece contains, among other things, a detailed chronology of all the Fu Manchu novels to date – with the two by Van Ash now included too. Publication date was May/June 1991.
Last Published Work: 1991-1993
The third Fu Manchu novel turned out to be a slow-moving project because, during the early 1990s, Cay Van Ash found himself sidetracked onto some other original work. First item in print was a short critical piece which appeared in a marvellously eccentric anthology entitled 100 Great Detectives. This was edited by Maxim Jakubowski, a British writer, anthologist, critic and bookseller whose wide-ranging interests included not only crime fiction, but also science fiction, rock music and erotica. 100 Great Detectives was an idea of mad genius, comprising a hundred short essays by a hundred different authors, each piece around a thousand words long. The author of each essay set out to explore the personality, adventures and, perhaps, the underlying philosophy of their favourite fictional detective. For this compilation Jakubowski managed to rope in a fascinatingly wide ranging posse of distinguished writers, with those taking part including Michael Moorcock, Barry Fantoni, Neil Gaiman, HRF Keating, Kim Newman, Julian Symons, Frances Fyfield – and Cay Van Ash.
A hundred authors naturally brought a hundred different perspectives to the task, encompassing the academic, the comedic, the hagiographic and, in a couple of cases, the downright incomprehensible. Cay Van Ash, never very attracted to the theoretical stance, opted instead for a straightforward descriptive piece about his subject along with diversions concerning his working methods and his dwelling place. But the real surprise comes with Van Ash’s choice of subject. Perhaps thinking that the Fu Manchu vein had been sufficiently well-mined in the Rohmer Review, he stayed well away from this subject area and chose instead a relatively obscure character from another set of stories by Sax Rohmer.
Cay Van Ash’s subject was Moris Klaw, a detective who appeared in only a small handful of Rohmer’s stories. These were published sporadically over a decade and finally collected in 1925 in a compendium entitled The Dream Detective. Klaw was an ageing, shambling, scruffy individual who kept a run-down antique shop in Wapping. He was blessed with a wide-ranging professional knowledge of ancient documents and artefacts, especially those with sinister connotations. He was also blessed with an unusual paranormal talent which enabled him to capture, through dreams, the last thoughts and impressions of a dead person. Needless to say, these rather specialised skills came in very handy when investigating certain types of esoteric mystery.
Jakubowski’s anthology appeared in early 1991, and his relationship with Cay Van Ash continued to blossom in the years that followed. One outcome of this was that three new short stories by Van Ash were published in Jakubowski ‘s New Crimes series. These were The Persian Apothecary (1991), The Halo of Islam (1992) and Bismillah (1993).
The stories have a number of common features. All three are set in vividly evoked locations in the Middle East. All three display the author’s enjoyment of language, both English and Arabic. All three are written in the first person and feature an unnamed male narrator. All three are mysteries featuring the weird and the macabre. And all three are ingeniously constructed and boast clever surprise endings. In short, all three take place in a world that evokes the world of Sax Rohmer (as well as evoking a set of attitudes that really belong to Rohmer’s time rather than to ours) – although none of the stories actually includes any of Rohmer’s characters.
The first two tales take place in Cairo in the period immediately after the first world war, when Egypt was still a part of the British Empire. Both feature an English doctor (the narrator) who has a practice in Cairo, along with the rather grumpy Superintendent Frazer of the Cairo police. The Persian Apothecary is a story of revenge, while The Halo of Islam features an elusive object of pursuit which Alfred Hitchcock would undoubtedly have dubbed a McGuffin. Bismillah, another revenge story, is different in its setting – it is set in an unnamed Middle Eastern country sometime in the 1930s – and is consequently somewhat more modern in its feel. The two main characters are members of a theatrical company stranded in a foreign land and filling in as teachers of English, and here the author is able to draw upon two areas of his own experience.
All three stories feature what were becoming Van Ash’s hallmarks; periodic bursts of black humour and occasional shafts of bizarre eroticism. There were also partially successful attempts at creating complex female characters The three stories constitute a small but intriguing body of work and, although nobody suspected it at the time, they were to be the last pieces of fiction that Cay Van Ash was ever to publish.
Of course, Van Ash did not know this, so, in parallel with these limbering-up exercises, he had been preparing to write a third Fu Manchu novel, provisionally titled The Seal of Fu Manchu. His chosen backdrop was the Ottoman Empire in its period of decline, and the action was to be set in Paris, in Istanbul, and on board the Orient Express. Again following Sax Rohmer’s example of using travel for research, Van Ash had negotiated some sabbatical time from Waseda and, with Okchon, set out on the journey back to Europe. Over the next couple of years, Cay and Okchon took research vacations in Turkey and in Paris, and the opening chapters of the book were drafted and passed to an acquaintance named Jack Torrance for appraisal.
At this point, accounts begin to diverge. According to most published biographies (not that there are many of them), Cay Van Ash died in Paris while researching his third novel. However Ciaran Murray, who was the first to hear the news of Cay’s death, remembers things rather differently. According to Murray, Cay and Okchon Van Ash had returned home from Paris early in 1994 and Cay died in Tokyo on the 7th of April. “Okchon phoned us just afterwards,” Murray recalled, “in a state you can imagine. We went over to the hospital immediately and in great shock. They had kept from us the seriousness of the illness – some form of cancer – which we later saw was consideration on their part.”
Picture courtesy of Ciaran Murray
In the course of sorting out Cay’s affairs, Okchon found no notes or manuscript for The Seal of Fu Manchu. And she also failed to find a will. This meant that, under Japanese law, she was required to contact all of his previous wives Claudia, Audrey and Brenda to confirm that none of them wished to make any claim on his estate. Fortunately none did, and matters could therefore be settled without further complication, although Okchon was apparently quite startled at the number of ex-wives that she discovered!
Cay’s parents had been married in an Anglican church, but Cay himself professed no religious faith. Following his cremation, his ashes were eventually divided and scattered in two separate locations, both significant in different ways. The Koma Shrine at Hidaka, just to the north of Tokyo, marks the place where Korea’s exiled kings settled a thousand years ago. Their descendants, serving as Shinto priests, have looked after it ever since. To Koreans in Japan it is a place of great spiritual significance and, despite Cay’s lack of faith, this was the place where Okchon chose to scatter the first instalment of her husband’s ashes. Later she travelled across the oceans to his beloved land of Glamorgan, where his last remains were finally cast to the wind from the cliffs of Rhosilly, overlooking the Worm’s Head on the Gower Coast. “I made a mark”, Okchon recalled wistfully, “but when I returned some years later I couldn’t find it.”
After a time, Okchon returned to Paris, leaving Ciaran and Fumiko Murray with Sax Rohmer’s Tiffany lamp (converted by Cay to run on Japanese mains) and a few books from Cay’s collection. In 1998 she was listed as a company officer working for a Paris-based I.T. firm named, somewhat cryptically, KI.S.KI Ltd. Her colleagues were a mixture of French and Japanese businessmen. Although grief-stricken at the loss of Cay, with the passing of years she had eventually felt able to move on to a new life. And, as she wishes to maintain her privacy, the author has decided to say no more.
After 1994
One character trait that Cay Van Ash inherited from Sax Rohmer was a taste for colourful company – Rohmer’s circle of acquaintance included Harry Houdini and George Robey! Jack Torrance, prominent among Cay’s English-speaking friends in Tokyo, appeared in the Tokyo directory as proprietor of the Torrance Detective Agency. While the Van Ashes and the Murrays lived on the more cosmopolitan west side of Tokyo, Jack Torrance and his Japanese partner had chosen the more traditional East Side. His detective and security activities included the safe-keeping of documents, and at was in this capacity that he had his first contact with Cay Van Ash.
Torrance had a curious range of accomplishments. As well as belonging to the World Association of Detectives, he was also signed up to the International Brotherhood of Magicians and sometimes worked as a vaudeville magician under the name of Jacc Mandrake. So here was another character in our story who for one reason or another chose to operate under a pseudonym. Actually, Torrance operated under two pseudonyms. His birth name was Gerald Lynch but, disliking the racial connotations of the surname, he adopted the name of his town of origin: Torrance, California. Curiously, when Stephen King published The Shining in 1977, he also chose the name Jack Torrance for his lead character. No one seems certain who thought of it first.
Jack Torrance was also a member of an organisation named The Blustering Gales from the South West. This was a California-based network of Sherlock Holmes aficionados, affiliated to the Baker Street Irregulars. It was perhaps because of this last interest of Torrance’s that Cay Van Ash had fallen into the habit of asking his friend to look over the manuscripts of his stories and novels. And, although Torrance was not particularly a Fu Manchu enthusiast, it seems that his input was helpful. Thus, at the time of Cay’s death, various of his papers were under Torrance’s protection. These included the four unpublished stories by Sax Rohmer which Cay had acquired from Elizabeth’s estate and, also under Torrance’s care, were the first three chapters of The Seal of Fu Manchu.
At this point the narrative starts to take on the ambience of one of Sax Rohmer’s novels. For some time, it seems, the Japanese government had been keeping a watchful eye on Jack Torrance, and this was because, in their judgement, some of his activities in Japan could perhaps have been interpreted, by a suspicious observer at least, as industrial espionage. Once this suspicion crystallised, matters came quickly to a head and Torrance was forced to make a sudden exit from the country. This was done with the assistance of the American embassy but the timescale, unfortunately, did not allow him the chance to put his affairs in order – and so the Van Ash documents, including the chapters of the new novel and the Rohmer manuscripts, were left in the hands of Torrance’s Japanese live-in partner. And there they remained until the lady’s death a few years later, at which point her children stepped in to settle her affairs. Sadly, it turned out that her family had never approved of her Western lover, so that all of Jack Torrance’s possessions, including the Van Ash manuscripts, were summarily destroyed. After The Fires of Fu Manchu, there were to be no more Fu Manchu novels for the next twenty years.
William Patrick Maynard, the American author and columnist, was the next to obtain clearance from the Rohmer estate to continue the series. The Terror Of Fu Manchu appeared in 2009, with The Destiny of Fu Manchu following in 2012 In the course of his research and preparation for this work, Maynard had made his own enquiries into the fate of Cay’s manuscripts. Discovering that some items had been copied and sent to Bob Briney (The Rohmer Review), Maynard contacted Briney and eventually, after Briney’s death in 2011, some material did come to light. “He was a true hoarder”, Maynard remarked wryly. The Rohmer manuscripts were subsequently claimed by Rohmer’s literary executors but as yet remain unpublished.
Cay Van Ash made little use of written notes when writing his fiction – everything was worked out in detail in his head. So there was never any paperwork relating to his third novel; and of the manuscript no trace has been found. It would seem, then, that the late Jack Torrance was the one and only person ever to read any part of The Seal of Fu Manchu. And, as they say, dead men tell no tales.
Today, Cay Van Ash is fondly remembered by a handful of friends and enthusiasts but, to the general reading public, his name means nothing. His books and stories remain highly enjoyable to read, but today’s reader, unfortunately, does not get much of a chance. Van Ash’s two completed novels have not been reissued since initial publication, nor has the biography of Sax Rohmer, nor have his handful of short stories. A few of his critical pieces can still be found on specialist websites. And it is believed that a handful of stories, as yet unidentified, were published at earlier dates, under unknown pseudonyms.
Like many in his profession, Cay Van Ash was only ever a part-time author, supported by full-time employment. Apart from working for a time as Sax Rohmer’s assistant, his rather disjointed career included periods as a telephonist, as a stage manager, and, for many years, as a teacher of English in Tokyo. So, like many authors who cannot devote themselves full-time to their calling, he never really had the chance to develop his talent fully.
And Cay Van Ash’s association with Sax Rohmer was part blessing, part curse. A blessing because it gave him the benefit of Rohmer’s experience and Rohmer’s contacts; and a curse because it anchored him permanently within the world of Fu Manchu. In this realm he proved himself an able crafter of pastiche and a skilled biographer – but sadly he never had the chance fully to explore his own imagination and his own originality. Anyone reading his work would surely agree that he was a gifted writer. His descriptive passages, his sudden outbreaks of action, his unexpected shafts of humour all indicate the presence of a very individual talent. In different circumstances, he would surely have done remarkable things.
Picture courtesy of Ciaran Murray
Acknowledgements and Sources Consulted
Books and Stories by Cay Van Ash
- Master of Villainy (with Elizabeth Sax Rohmer) 1972
- Ten Years Beyond Baker Street 1984
- The Fires of Fu Manchu 1988
- The Persian Apothecary (New Crimes, 1991)
- The Halo of Islam (New Crimes, 1992)
- Bismillah (New Crimes, 1993)
Articles by and about Cay Van Ash
- A Footnote on the Yellow Peril (interview in The Magazine, 1988)
- The Crimes of Fu Manchu (article by Andrew Lane in Million, 1991)
- Moris Klaw (article in 100 Great Detectives, ed. Maxim Jakubowski, 1991)
Books by other authors
- The Heirs of Anthony Boucher: A History of Mystery Fandom. Marvin Lachman 2005
- Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain’s War with Japan. Peter Kornicki 2021.
The Rohmer Review: pieces by Cay Van Ash
- Fu Man Chu #9 (Aug 1972)
- Seals of the Si Fan #11 (Dec 1973)
- The Search for Sax Rohmer #14 (July 1976)
- Ourselves and Gaston Max #15 (Sept 1976}
- A Question of Time #17 (Aug 1977)
Cay Van Ash also contributes to issues #10, #12 and #18.
Correspondence
In compiling this account, much of the most helpful – and entertaining – input has come from the various individuals with whom I have corresponded.
Ciaran Murray was a close friend of Cay Van Ash during his Tokyo days and knew him right up until the time of his death.. I have drawn extensively upon Ciaran’s recollections of the time he spent with Cay and Okchon, and also upon his account s of Cay’s reminiscences about his earlier days. Most of this material meshed in seamlessly with the factual information gleaned from UK public records – with only a few inconsistencies which I have pointed out in the text.
William Patrick (Bill) Maynard is the author of two Fu Manchu novels which were written and published after the two novels by Cay Van Ash. In preparing for this task, Bill carried out much detective work in his attempts to track down missing documents, and also in following the trail of the elusive Jack Torrance. Bill is also a regular presence on the Black Gate website and on the Sax Rohmer Facebook page.
Pamela Fernuik photographed Cay during his Tokyo days and offered me a highly illuminating account of their meeting.
Janet Hunter kindly read my manuscript and was able to contribute her very useful expertise in the areas of Japanese language and culture.
I have also corresponded with Peter Kornicki, author of Eavesdropping with the Emperor, with Andrew Lane, formerly of Million magazine, and with the enigmatic Ellis Amdur, who once wrote a story about Jack Torrance, but says that he never met Cay Van Ash.
My thanks to all of them, and to the others that I have doubtless forgotten to include. Without their input, I would have had a much less rounded – and much shorter – tale to tell.
SVC
8 December 2024
Steve Cockayne was born in North London and educated in St Albans, where he shared a physics teacher with Stephen Hawking (although not at the same time). He worked for many years as a cameraman at BBC Television, in the same department as Paddington creator Michael Bond (also not at the same time). His workload included family favourites Only Fools and Horses, Doctor Who and Blue Peter, as well as an impressive line-up of weather forecasts and sports results. Following this, he embarked upon a second career as an author of fantasy fiction, in which field his titles included Wanderers and Islanders and The Good People. He also found time to research and write a full-length biography of the English puppeteer Waldo Lanchester, as well as a selection of shorter pieces on an alarming diversity of subjects. His new work on Cay Van Ash reflects his growing fascination with obscure literary figures. He is fully expecting posterity to count him among their number.
