Mesmer Milann

Bertram Atkey is known for his stories featuring lovable rogue Smiler Bunn, time-wandering hero Hobart Honey, and upper-class detective Prosper Fair, characters which he wrote about in a light, comic style. But he also wrote a series of dark tales about a mysterious psychic known as Mesmer Milann. Mike Ashley has collected these seven stories—some exceedingly rare—that present the case history of Mesmer Milann, Mediator of the Occult. Here are stories of threats and emanations from the astral realm including a haunted valley guarded by two malignant spirits … a moonlight muse with an earthly mission … a Druid’s Stone that holds a deadly secret … enter the weird world of Mesmer Milann!

Bertram Atkey was born December 25, 1879 in Downton, Wiltshire, in England. He attended the Collegiate School in Salisbury where he excelled in music and sports, especially cricket. He began writing for the magazines in the early 1900s and created a variety of fictional characters including Smiler Bunn, Hobart Honey, Nelson Chiddenham, Prosper Fair and Winnie O’Wynn. He generally wrote crime fiction but also produced science fiction and supernatural stories, and mostly with a comic edge to it, full of rascals and rogues. Atkey’s Mesmer Milann stories represent the author’s more serious side. He spent his final days in a nursing home in Sway, Hampshire, and died there on June 12, 1952 at age 72.