Keywords: Savoy, Lord Horror, cult, Moors murders, essays, New Worlds

Title: A Tea Dance at Savoy

Author/Artist:

Publisher: Savoy Books

Media: Book

Reviewer: James Marriott
Exquisitely lavish design work here, upping the ante on the publisher's ongoing 'cult classics' series with exquisite attention to detail on each page and a great cover, all by the inimitable Coulthart, as Michael Moorcock aptly puts it in the introduction. The text comprises a series of essays by Robert Meadley, one-time New Worlds contributor and master plumber, most dealing with various facets of the Savoy universe and (narrowly) related issues, from the Moors murderers to September 11 via Diana's funeral. The essays have a lazy, rambling style that often suits the material well - a private view around the meanderings of an insightful mind. The pieces that work best are those not dealing explicitly with Savoy products, in particular the Moors murderers and Diana's funeral, which both have the virtue of never straying too far from their central themes. Meadley is now set to write a book on Satanic landlord Nicholas van Hoogstraaten, which is likely to be more entertaining than the John Blake biography also in the pipeline. A paean to the Spencer clan is the improbable highlight in this very readable collection - I read it in one sitting, as did Ian Brady, who later replied to the publishers answering Meadley's query about his teenage literary tastes, in what is probably a fairly typical piece of Savoy office correspondence.

Most of the other pieces deal with David Britton and the Lord Horror universe, and their appeal will probably depend on how interested the reader is in the books or, to a lesser degree, Nazism and the Holocaust. Some of these pieces meander a little too much - do we really need such a long explication of Hombre, book and film, in an essay on Lord Horror and genre? - and others seem to reinforce the idea of the Holocaust as a uniquely terrible event of the twentieth century, the work of a malign other, an idea to which I'd always thought the Lord Horror books opposed.

The tone will at times be a little too indulgent, too self-congratulatory, for some tastes, although if Savoy's output over the past few years isn't just cause for self-congratulation, I don't know what is. As for indulgence, as Meadley himself states towards the end:
the sense of everything spilling into everything else … [is] the Savoy way
The essays are fascinating throughout, and the whiff of elitism is probably to be encouraged in an era of aggressive mediocrity. This probably isn't the best place to start for the Savoy novice, but for those interested in the inner workings of this exceptional publishing house, it's indispensable. And any book featuring Ononoes - in both their original Tarzan and subsequent Lord Horror manifestations - gets my vote.

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