In Beam Piper’s story, Bathurst has a fit of dizziness while inspecting a team of coach horses, and he finds himself in an alternate universe where the American Revolution failed and the Napoleonic Wars never happened. Beam Piper’s classic 1948 alternative history tale “He Walked Around the Horses,” which riffed off an actual historical mystery: the disappearance of British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst in Prussia in 1809. Querdilion’s peace of mind isn’t helped by the fact that Sarban provides no explicit rationale or explanation for his transposition to an alternative timeline. I ought to be able to find out why I went out of my mind for a period, because, don’t you see, that would be the best proof of sanity - not my own sanity alone, but the sanity of all this order that we believe in, the proper sequence of time, the laws of space and matter, the truth of all our physics because you see, if I wasn’t mad there must be a madness in the scheme of things too wide and wild for any man’s courage to face. Set in a framing narrative about foxhunting in 1949, it opens with the declaration, “It’s the terror that’s unspeakable,” as country gentleman and Royal Navy veteran Alan Querdilion recounts his bizarre wartime experiences as an escaped POW on the run in eastern Germany - experiences which pose an existential challenge to the entire postwar world. Sarban’s shorter fiction has its curiosities and its charms, not least the author’s luminous and sometimes fantastical descriptive prose, but The Sound of His Horn is by far the most powerfully imagined and most resonant tale he ever produced. Tartarus released these tales for the first time in a print collection, and with Ringstones and Other Curious Tales (first published in 1951) and The Doll Maker and Other Tales of the Uncanny (1953), Tartarus has now released nearly all of Sarban’s published works. Tartarus Press, the leading independent English publisher of fine editions of weird and dark fiction, specializes in limited fine-quality print hardbacks and equally well-produced but much cheaper DRM-free ebooks, and now it has produced a new edition of The Sound of His Horn, adding in the four short stories previously collected in The Sacrifice and Other Stories (2002). His entire literary output was apparently confined to a brief period after the war, penned while he was counsellor at the British Middle East Office in Cairo. THE ENGLISH DIPLOMAT John William Wall (1910–1989) is best remembered for the fiction he published under the pen name Sarban, especially the pioneering and deeply unsettling alternative history novella The Sound of His Horn (1952), set in an alternative timeline where the Nazis won World War II.
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