Thirty Hours with a Corpse, and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol

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MAURICE LEVEL (1875–1926) is the forgotten man of French literature. Although he published thirteen novels, dozens of plays, and hundreds of short stories, and was a star contributor to the celebrated Grand Guignol Theatre in Paris, Level today is virtually unknown. He does not appear in any English-language dictionaries or encyclopedias of French literature—and, incredibly, does not appear even in multivolume and presumably authoritative French encyclopedias of French literature. Not a single article has been published about him in an academic journal, and the most basic features of his life are unknown. All we have is his work.

And yet, Level enjoyed remarkable popularity in the English-speaking world during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, when two novels, The Grip of Fear (1911) and Those Who Return (1923), were translated, along with a volume of short stories, first published in England as Crises (1920) and, later that same year, in the United States as Tales of Mystery and Horror. (To add to the oddity, Level’s stories never appeared in a collection in French.) In 1921, H. P. Lovecraft, who admitted that he had not yet read any of Level’s work, wrote a paean to him based solely upon his increasing reputation:

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