Qx

by Mark Valentine

When I first visited the garden, there was a piece of ragged topiary, once carefully shaped but now left untrimmed. It stood, oddly on its own, on a patch of tired lawn. It did not seem to have been fashioned like a chess piece, or a fabulous beast, or a pyramid or a cone or a toadstool, as such carved greenery often is. It was hard indeed to make out what it was originally meant to be, but as I gazed at it I thought it looked like a key. There was a sort of oval head at the top, a thin column and then some shapes towards the base which might be the slots to fit the wards of a lock. So then I fell to thinking about a mystery which would only be solved when someone noticed this topiary and had the same idea about it. Suppose they made a sketch of the little tree, copying it quite precisely, and then had a key made in its shape. Then they searched until they found the lock that it fitted, either in a door or in a chest.

180 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2023

About the author

Mark Valentine is an English author, biographer and editor.

Valentine’s short stories have been published by a number of small presses and in anthologies since the 1980s, and the exploits of his series character, "The Connoisseur", an occult detective, were published as The Collected Connoisseur in 2010.

As a biographer, Valentine has published a life of Arthur Machen in 1985 (Seren Press), and a study of Sarban, Time, A Falconer (Tartarus Press), is published in 2010. He has also written numerous articles for the Book and Magazine Collector magazine, and introductions for various books, including editions of work by Walter de la Mare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Saki, J. Meade Falkner and others.

Valentine also edits Wormwood (Tartarus Press), a journal dedicated to fantastic, supernatural and decadent literature, and has also edited anthologies, including The Werewolf Pack (Wordsworth, 2008) and The Black Veil (Wordsworth, 2008).

Reviews

[Silke Brandt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written account of the British countryside, always with touch of lost places and the abandoned. Some of the short pieces are descriptions of vintage travel brochures and though this might not sound exciting, this was one of the most captivating, engrossing books I've read lately.
The style is very close to Derek Jarman, and occasionally to Robert Edric (The Broken Lands, The Wrack Line or The World made of Glass - his darker, melancholic works).
The publisher, ZAGAVA, features literature off the beaten track, some of it weird, some speculative; and its books are small - sometimes crafted by hand - masterpieces.

[Andrew Nolan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another strong collection of essays and vignettes from Mark Valentine.

Not all the material is in the same vein, but a broad approach of a written flâneurism through cultural ephemera and literary detritus emerges.

Valentine uncovers hidden histories via the accumulation of multiple marginal cultural artefacts. History hidden not because it’s clandestine, but because taken on its own it is frequently disposable, of the moment, and relegated to the ranks of inconsequential and forgettable.

Valentine quotes from a brochure for a 1967 art exhibition that may or may not have had some Age of Aquarius leaning:

“Simply the knowledge that no knowledge is useless and ignorable”.

And this encapsulates Qx neatly.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Valentine making everything from tour brouchres to defunct bus lines seem erie, and other worldly