Mason Queensbury in the Parlour of the Occult

By Patrick Casey

The Great White Lion is back! Though Mason Queensbury was once one of the most famous men on earth (he was reportedly the model on which both Tarzan and Indiana Jones were based) he’s been nearly completely forgotten by today’s public. “Mason Queensbury in the Parlour of the Occult” is the first new story featuring Victorian England’s Greatest Hero in over fifty years. The story, which tells the incredible tale of a visit by Queensbury and his faithful valet Pup-pup to the palatial country estate of the young occultist Aleister Crowley, contains all the elements the classic Queensbury books were well known for: suspense, action, frightening villains, a touch of the supernatural, and, of course, a great hero, the always-impeccable Englishman, Lord Mason Queensbury, the Earl of Daring. Experience the thrill of savage battle along with Queen Victoria’s chief adventurer as he protects the God-fearing people of England from the dark magic of Aleister Crowley!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Patrick Casey
• Release date: Dec 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301038954

Patrick Casey

Patrick Casey is a screenwriter, comedian, actor and author. He lives in Hollywood California and his film credits include "National Lampoon's Dorm Daze," "Gamebox 1.0," "Shotgun Wedding," and the upcoming animated series "Golan the Insatiable" coming soon to Saturday nights on Fox!

Book preview

Introduction

by the author, Patrick Casey

I have been a fan of Mason Queensbury from the time I was a small child. I first fell in love with the jungle adventure genre when I saw the movie Greystoke, starring Christopher Lambert as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ great pulp hero, Tarzan. It came out in 1984. I probably saw it in 1986 or so, when I would’ve been seven or eight. The movie is not even that good (having now seen it again, as an adult), but it fired my imagination. It led me to dig into the original Tarzan books at my local library, an easy bike ride from my parent’s house in the decidedly non-exotic, non-jungle suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.

Soon I had read all the volumes of Tarzan they had at the library, so I began to search for similar books of exploration and adventure. I discovered Alan Quatermain, John Carter of Mars, Doc Savage, Conan the Cimmerian, Solomon Kane, Captain Nemo, and Sherlock Holmes.

Then my grandfather died. My father’s father, Jack, my middle name-sake, was very old, but he was a wonderfully kind man with a great sense of humor, and he had been a presence in my life since birth. My grandmother had passed a few years before, and his quality of life had gone downhill since she’d been gone, but he was still a lovable old scamp who was popular at his church and the local McDonald's where he ate breakfast every day.

His death led to a summer of cleaning out his old house in St. Paul, the house where my dad and his brother grew up, where they’d lived since the fifties. Grandpa Jack had built secret passages into the house. Well, passages may be an exaggeration, as they were just storage spaces and hidey-holes, but the entrances were camouflaged as regular parts of the wall, and I thought it was completely awesome. I had always been jealous of Webster, a young black little person on TV who was adopted by rich white people. They lived in a house with real secret passages in it, including a grandfather clock that swings out to reveal a door, just like in Batman’s stately Wayne manor. Webster used the secret passages to outwit a burglar once. Grandpa’s clever storage spaces were the closest I’d ever come to that.

One day we opened up a long secret storage space that ran the length of the house, behind the walls. You had to crawl to reach parts of it, so my father put me in charge of fishing stuff out of there. I found a treasure trove in long rows of boxes. Old comic books, Uncle Scrooge, silly 50’s Superman (the ones where Lois was constantly trying to prove Superman and Clark were the same person yet Superman always managed to trick her in the end into thinking she was wrong and then he would laugh at how stupid she was), racist old Disney comics like Brer Rabbbit and old pulp paperbacks.

Old paperbacks including Mason Queensbury adventures.

What made Mason Queensbury different was that he was real. It said so right on the back of every book. He was a real man who had lived in Victorian England and in the early twentieth century. He was a rich English lord who explored Africa and India and South America and had all kinds of adventures, often battling pirates, or lost tribes, or animals or monsters. I found myself thinking about him during class, drawing pictures of Mason Queensbury fighting tigers and Zulus on the back of my math assignments.

I was fascinated by him. As I got a bit older, I went into research mode. What I found shocked me. Queensbury really had been a real man. He was hugely famous at the time, and his adventures were printed as serials in Sunday magazine editions of the biggest newspapers of the