The Case of the Curio Dealer, the Red Herring and the Drum of Saccharine

William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an English author. He produced a large body of work, consisting of essays, short fiction, and novels, spanning several overlapping genres including horror, fantastic fiction and science fiction. Early in his writing career he dedicated effort to poetry, although few of his poems were published during his lifetime. He also attracted some notice as a photographer and achieved some renown as a bodybuilder. He began a four-year apprenticeship as a cabin boy in 1891. In 1899, he opened W. H. Hodgson's School of Physical Culture offering tailored exercise regimes for personal training. He wrote articles such as Physical Culture versus Recreative Exercises (1903). Hodgson turned his attention to fiction, publishing his first short story, The Goddess of Death (1904). In 1906 the American magazine The Monthly Story Magazine published From the Tideless Sea, the first of Hodgson's Sargasso Sea stories. His first published novel, The Boats of the Glen Carrig, appeared in 1907. Amongst his other works are The House on the Borderland (1908), The Ghost Pirates (1909), Carnacki: The Ghost Finder (1910) and The Night Land (1912).