London: Faber, 1941

8vo, pp. 304. Original yellow boards, lettered in red to spine. Pink printed dust jacket, lettered in blue. Light offsetting to endpapers, a very good copy in a very good dust jacket with irregular fading to spine and a little light wear to corners and spine ends.

First edition, INSCRIBED BY MASSIE TO HIS PARTNER: 'With love to Nell - from Chris, Sep. 1941.'

A happily married young woman, a mother of two, travels to London with a secret. She's going to meet an old lover. Who is dead. She's going to visit her old lover at Madame Tussaud's, where his wax effigy is the newest exhibit in the Chamber of Horrors...

Corridor of Mirrors, a story of obsession, voyeurism, fetishistic cosplay and murder, was published by Faber in 1941, who describe it in the dust jacket's blurb as 'one of the strangest novels we have ever published: a book you will have to finish whether you like it or not.' One reader who liked it very much was Robert Aickman, the master of strange stories: his own copy of Massie's book is preserved with his papers at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and in his short story The Insufficient Answer (1951) the leading character pulls Corridor of Mirrors from a library shelf. But Massie and his work have completely -- inexplicably -- vanished from the literary landscape, and any details of his life are missing from the standard reference books or online. But the papers of the poet and critic R.L. Megroz, held at the University of Reading, provide some biographical information about Massie's later life.

Christopher Massie was born in 1880. The first half of his life was poverty-stricken and itinerant, largely spent in and out of workhouses and the army. (A later letter refers to a fractured skull sustained in France, probably during wartime.) He had an adopted son called Benjamin Smith, from whom he was estranged by the mid-1920s. In 1925 he had a novel called Lady published by Heinemann; it made him £15, 'and it doesn't look much more, as Heinemann's have dropped me out of their advert list, and yet I've has splendid reviews.' By 1926 he was homeless, alcoholic, and living in Hackney Union workhouse; a little later he was under the care of the Psychological Clinic at Whitefields Central Mission on Tottenham Court Road. A new novel, They Being Dead Yet Speak (Chapmand & Hall, 1929) sold 293 copies, but Confessions of a Vagabond (Sampson Low, 1931), recounting (not always reliably) his early life, was more successful. Flood Light (Sampson Low, 1932) was about an interracial marriage, but Death Goes Hunting was refused by both Sampson and Low and Heinemann on the grounds that it was 'macabre', 'perverted' and 'full of sadism', and was never published. The lead character of A Modern Calvus (Sampson Low, 1936) is a midget; Esther Vanney (Sampson Low, 1937) is about women's suffrage. He contributed a short story, A Fragment of Fact, to the first ever edition of the Pan Book of Horror Stories. No-one ever accused Chris Massie of lacking range.

By 1931 Massie had stopped drinking, He moved out of the workhouse in 1932, and by 1934 he was working as a literary advisor to his publisher Sampson Low, where he had his own headed stationery. In 1936 he was living in Pinner with a woman called Barbara, although by the time Corridor of Mirrors was published in 1941 his partner was called Nell (to whom this copy of Corridor of Mirrors is inscribed).. He seems to have earned a modest living as a poet, novelist and critic for the rest of his life. He died in 1964.

Corridor of Mirrors has had a much longer shelf life than the rest of Massie's output. The book was filmed in 1948 -- bowdlerised but just as bizarre as the book -- and gave both Christopher Lee and director Terence Young their debuts. Lois Maxwell was also among the cast; all three would later find lucrative employment in the James Bond franchise.

First editions (which were usually the only editions) of any of Massie's books are rare. This copy of Corridor of Mirrors, in its dust jacket and inscribed to his partner in the year of publication, is unique.