’He Cometh and he Passeth By’ by H.R. Wakefield

I feel threatened or unclean simply by divulging here the exact title of this Wakefield work as its own intrinsic accursed spell upon the reader. A sense of “something sniggeringly evil”, a phrase this work slips into its own text, no doubt first written in ink of a “smoky sullen scarlet.” A barrister called Bellamy trying to avenge his single-lunged friend by the name of Franton, a friend who is himself more adept than Bellamy, but Franton was an adept overmastered by someone even adepter, a man with the ring of the name of Oscar Clinton, a man who also reminds me strongly of the wayward ways and wiles of one of our past prime ministers who was then, at the time of this story, a future prime minister. Read it and simply compare, I say! And indeed this work conveys the essence of evil more than most others I have read, for example, the nature of a certain esoteric pattern adeptly drawn on paper, like words can also be seen as forming a pattern, with the paper pattern creating a potentially lethal and recurrent lengthening of a shadow across the page as well as in the plot.
I should be grateful — for a reader like me who seeks out such things in fiction literature — that this new Wakefield collection has brought such a work to my attention for the first time. I particularly relished the nature of Oscar’s confidence in himself, his ability to foster his personal “stud-farms” wherever he went, and his blindness to his own badness of motive. And his future, as well as, past reincarnations, no doubt! And “ornate and gaudy” or “decorated with violence and indiscretion” being other phrases slipped surreptitiously into this text.

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Full context here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/10/28/the-frontier-guards-by-h-r-wakefield/