Fellowship & Fairydust

Today marks 114 years since novelist William Lindsay Gresham was born in Baltimore.

Nightmare Alley has a strange place in Inklings scholarship discussions. Published in 1946, it was written by William Lindsay Gresham, the first husband of Joy Davidman.

Six months before the novel appeared, Gresham had a nervous breakdown and sent Davidman a phone call that he didn’t know when he’d be home (Glyer 11). Praying for God’s help, she had a spiritual experience that convinced her to give up atheism (ibid). Gresham returned home several days later, and said he was “interested in Christianity” when Davidman described her experience (ibid). They became practicing Presbyterians for a period. Not long after their conversions, friends introduced them to C.S. Lewis’ books.

As their spiritual lives took new directions, Nightmare Alley brought a new financial direction. The twisty-turvy noir thriller about a con artist using tricks learned at a carnival to pass himself off as a psychic sold very well. The book profits and a movie deal (the movie premiered in 1947 and is considered an underrated classic) allowed the Greshams to buy a house in Staatsburg, New York, where they moved with their two sons, David and Douglas.

Gresham had a diverse writing career. His short story output included at least two science fiction stories which Lewis likely read (they appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which Lewis read and contributed to). His best work (his novel Nightmare Alley, a nonfiction study of carnivals called Monster Midway, and a Houdini biography) orbited around carnivals, stage magic, and occult activity.

These interests led Gresham to intersect with the Inklings in a surprising way. In 1950, the year Davidman sent her first letter to Lewis, Gresham wrote the introduction for a new edition of The Greater Trumps—a supernatural thriller by Charles Williams featuring tarot cards.

By 1953, Gresham’s marriage to Davidman had ended in divorce. She moved to England with their sons that year, then entered a civil union with Lewis in 1956. This surprising romance—a civil union that made Davidman a British citizen, then an Anglican ceremony the next year when she was in hospital with cancer, then three happy years before cancer took her life—has been told in a TV movie, a stage play, and a theatrical film all titled Shadowlands.

Mythologizing the Inklings’ Lives: Gresham and Shadowlands

Gresham doesn’t appear in person in any version of Shadowlands, though he functions as the cad instigating the plot twists. The unhappily married woman visits a writer she admires in England. Her (already twice divorced) husband divorcing her to have another woman (her cousin, no less) ensures she has nothing to come home to, so she returns to England. The writer knows it’s time to admit his love when the woman becomes fatally ill. The prospect of her children going back to her violent, alcoholic ex-husband provides extra motivation.

Lewis: “Her affairs aren’t in order. What’s going to happen to Douglas?”

Harry Harrington: “I suppose his father?”

Lewis: “No. No, she wouldn’t want that. You see, he drinks.” — scene in the 1993 film Shadowlands

Like every biopic narrative, the Shadowlands portrait takes some liberties. Davidman was Gresham’s second wife, not third. He did leave Davidman for her cousin (Renee Rodriguez, whom he stayed married to until his death in 1962). Davidman biographers Lyle Dorsette and Abigail Santamaria both refer to an incident where Gresham admitted he had various affairs before becoming involved with Rodriguez (A Love Observed 74) (Joy 210).

Other details about his post-conversion behavior are harder to establish. Dorsett describes him as violent (including a famous anecdote about breaking a bottle over Douglas’ head) and resuming drinking (73-74). Douglas restates the bottle-breaking story in his memoir Lenten Lands (7). Santamaria describes Gresham as short-tempered but notes that Douglas has since questioned whether the bottle-breaking story is quoting his mother’s memories (Joy 250).

The alcoholism is more complex. Santamaria notes Gresham’s drinking escalated after Nightmare Alley appeared, but began attending Alcoholics Anonymous around 1949 and claimed to have stayed sober with occasional “slips” through 1953 (Joy 190, 254). However, she notes in Joy that by the time Gresham started abusing alcohol in 1953, he had already became addicted to sleeping pills (253). During the period he was avoiding alcohol, fresh stress came from the fact that Davidman drank regularly and kept hard alcohol in their home (221).

One element Shadowlands narrative does not delve into but seems universally agreed upon, is that Gresham and Davidman did not continue in the same spiritual direction. In 1950, they both become interested in Dianetics. By 1954, Davidman was skeptical of its claims, and had been studying Christianity consistently since 1946 (Joy 270). Gresham apparently stayed interested in Dianetics for a longer period. He later called 1950 (the year he also became interested in Zen Buddhism) the year he lost interest in Christianity (Joy 212). Dorsett refers to him dabbling in I Ching, tarot cards and yoga during that year (72), though these may be activities Gresham had indulged in years earlier (Joy 190).

Details from the children provide context, but not perhaps clear answers. David passed away in 2014 without making many comments about his parents, other than email correspondence with Santamaria where he stated he could not recall seeing his father drunk during the last five years of the marriage, and that his mother’s comments were not always accurate (“David Gresham (1944 – 2014)” 11-12). To make things more complicated, Douglas started in a 2020 interview that David had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as a child (Van Maren 1).

Douglas essentially follows the Shadowlands narrative in Lenten Lands, although he makes a telling comment that he believes Dianetics worsened his father’s mental health (7) and that his parents being two talented writers moving in different spiritual directions created problems (7-11). Santamaria affirms both ideas, suggesting that Dianetics worsened both Gresham and Davidman’s behavior (Joy 208-211).

Separating fact from fiction is messy. The facts do show Gresham was an unstable, and at least verbally volatile man. Still, the Shadowlands narrative has permeated how audiences perceive Gresham, and as good a story as it is, it is a biopic narrative. Every romance needs a cad, and this narrative presents Gresham as the cad solely responsible for his marriage ending.

Puzzled by Joy: The Other Side of the Gresham-Davidman Marriage

Several scholars pushed back against the Shadowlands narrative, wondering whether Davidman’s romantic interest in Lewis began before her divorce. She did become pen pals with Lewis in 1950. She wrote various love sonnets during this period—Santamaria details many poems she argues are inspired by Davidman’s feelings for Lewis (Joy 215-217). Davidman finally met Lewis in person in 1952, during a five-month trip to England.

According to some reports, Davidman’s trip was doctor-prescribed after family stress gave her jaundice (Glyer 12). Santamaria does not repeat this claim. Instead, she refers multiple times to the question that puzzles other scholars: why did Davidman spend five months away from home, leaving her children behind?

Santamaria refers to multiple family members and friends who believed that Davidman was already in love with Lewis, and that her trip to England had more illicit reasons than meeting a pen pal and getting a change of scenery. Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski note that after her death, Gresham told Lewis that Davidman was already in love with Lewis by the time she made her 1952 trip (403).

The truth of how Davidman and Gresham’s marriage disintegrated is likely more complicated than any of the options discussed. As countless divorced couples can testify, it’s not always easy to say what went wrong, or whether one partner can be held responsible for all the damage. It’s about as easy as determining when couples stop loving each other.

Lewis: “Do you love your husband?”

Davidman: “Bill’s very talented. He wants to do right by everyone. He’s a good man at heart. I guess I love him. (exhales). Bill is an alcoholic. He is compulsively unfaithful. He is sometimes violent. I guess I haven’t loved him for years.” — dialogue from the 1985 TV movie Shadowlands

New Movies and Old Books: A Case for Re-Exploring Gresham

Since much more has been written about Lewis and Davidman than about Gresham, it becomes difficult to get past the Shadowlands mythology. In January 2022, I co-led an Inkling Folk Fellowship Discussion about Nightmare Alley with John Stanifer and Brenton Dickieson. One participant in the discussion reported that Gresham readers argue back and forth about how much to follow the Shadowlands depiction of Gresham’s divorce. He also reported at least two attempts to write a biography about Gresham. One of these projects ran into an obstacle when the writer, Nick Tosches, died in 2019. Time will tell whether editors can finish his book based on Tosches’ notes or another biography appears first.

Regardless of whether we will see a Gresham biography soon, exploring his life presents great opportunities. His life presents an opportunity to explore not just an under-discussed author, but also some unexplored sides of the Inklings.

The present is a good time for having those discussions because his work is becoming accessible again. Guillermo del Toro announced in 2017 that he was adapting Nightmare Alley into a movie, which led to the book returning to print in 2020. Dunce Books released a new edition of Monster Midway in 2021. The same year, del Toro’s film premiered to good reviews, and Criterion released a high-definition version of the 1947 film.

So, with Nightmare Alley back in print, does it have any surprising common territory with the Inklings? In minor but interesting ways, yes.

Tarot Cards and Carnies: Gresham and Williams

Nightmare Alley is a well-crafted piece of 1940s crime fiction. It follows Stan Carlisle, a young carnival worker who travels with its eclectic community. There’s a fascinating chapter taking readers into the heads of various members. Bruno Hert, a German strongman too shy to ask a pretty coworker for a date. Kenneth Horsefield, a little person who does a sharpshooting act, struggles not to feel enraged at condescending onlookers. Mary “Molly” Margaret Cahill, a young woman who does an electricity act and may be too innocent for show business. Madame Zeena, a fortune teller who used to travel the world doing a two-person psychic act with her husband. Pete, her husband who perfected a code system for giving the blindfolded performer clues, now too drunk to do anything but basic magic acts. Then there’s “the geek,” an even more helpless alcoholic who pretends to be a feral man in a cage living on snakes and chickens. 

Stan interacts with most of these people, and when he learns about Pete’s code system, he begins plotting. Theft (and one “accidental” death) later, Stan is on the road with Molly as his performing partner. He rises from carnivals to nightclubs, then refashions himself as a spiritualist preacher who cons rich clients. But who’s to say this will work out?

Gresham shows a detailed knowledge of “spook shows”—his term for all magic tricks from palmistry to tarot card readings. He would take readers further into this world in Monster Midway (including stories of a few times he dabbled in mentalist stage acts or played a psychic as a favor at parties). Still later, he would explore one side of stage magic (escape artist acts) in his Houdini biography.

What the author or characters think about the supernatural’s genuine existence is left ambiguous. I have discussed elsewhere how Stan’s journey has some interesting parallels with Mark Studdock in Lewis’ 1945 novel That Hideous Strength, including how both stories become about male competition and magic (“The Nightmare Alley of That Hideous Strength”). The difference is that Nightmare Alley is all about stage magic.

At the same time, there’s a certain excitement to how Gresham describes the tricks, suggesting a yearning to believe it’s true. And, at least for certain periods, he believed there was more than the material world. Gresham’s search for something supernatural took shocking turns over the next few years. After his initial interest in Christianity and stint as a churchgoing Presbyterian, he had his aforementioned dabblings in Dianetics (dismissing it eventually as just another spook show) as well as experiments with I Ching, Zen Buddhism, and tarot cards (Glyer 12).

Gresham’s interest in tarot cards suggests an interesting resonance with one Inkling.

“Where did the Tarot designs come from, and what do the Greater Trumps mean? No one knows. But anyone who has studied them at length has felt their power of releasing unsuspected ideas from the subconscious. The cards seem to have an inner life of their own.”—Gresham’s introduction to The Greater Trumps

Williams was a practicing Anglo-Catholic who attended St. Silas’ Church in London for years. However, he also belonged for a time to a secret society called the Fellowship of The Rosy Cross. A.E. Waite (co-creator of the Rider-Wait tarot deck) started this organization in 1915, after the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn split into two factions and the offshoot Waite was leading dissolved (Roukema 52). Waite called the Rosy Cross a Christian mystical organization based on Rosicrucianism (58). Members discussed various occult ideas but were discouraged from practicing any rituals.

Grevel Lindop’s 2015 biography established that Williams wasn’t only involved in Waite’s group. In 1919, he began meeting biweekly with D.H.S Nicholson and A.H.E. Lee “to explore spiritual matters” (63). Both men had been involved in the Golden Dawn offshoots, and Lee was still involved in Stella Matutina—the offshoot that embraced using magic (Lindop 64-66). Whether Williams officially joined Stella Matutina or learned its rituals via friends is hard to say (Roukema 93). While Williams wasn’t a lifelong member of either organization, they informed his eclectic, often mystical approach to Christianity.

Given that Gresham and Williams were both interested in occult matters and wrote novels featuring tarot cards, it would be interesting to see how much their respective knowledge informed their books. Nightmare Alley opens each chapter with the title heading of a tarot card, and several readers have discussed whether the card meanings inform the chapters in unexpected ways (Laity 1).

However, if Nightmare Alley shows that Gresham shared Williams’ interest in some occult matters, it also sums up what differentiated their interests. Williams liked magic, but he sought it in insider groups with strict hierarchies. The Rosy Cross and Stella Matutina each had membership meetings, specialized rituals, and outlined plans for advancement. Even if Williams never officially belonged to the latter, he learned about it from an inner circle, a circle that had designated him as their sort of chap.

In other words, Williams’ occult experience was very English—organized by good old boys inviting their sort of person into carefully maintained inner circles and hierarchies. It was the kind of old boys club experience that an Englishman of Williams’ generation would find attractive. One might even pretend to belong to it for prestige; Sax Rohmer, whose novels inspired Williams to write fiction, claimed to have belonged to the Gold Dawn, though Phil Baker notes this is unlikely (Lord of Strange Deaths x). Like Rohmer (a working class Birmingham son of Irish immigrants), Williams was lower-class. Friends or acquaintances were mistaken when they said Williams had a Cockney accent, but he did come from a working-class family, spend most of his life in London, and finances meant he never completed a university degree.

Yes, Williams joined secret societies because he was fascinated by the mystical and strange. Unlike Rohmer, he was no “adept showman” increasing his public figure by purporting occult knowledge (Lord of Strange Deaths 81). Still, Williams gravitated to a brand of the occult providing what a working-class Edwardian Englishman couldn’t get many places: a chance to join an inner circle.

In contrast, Nightmare Alley and his other writings about magic show Gresham was attracted to a particular working-class, American brand of magic. Stan’s yearning to use magic to succeed, his roadtripping across the country as a nightclub entertainer—these scenes are permeated with an American lust for success and adventure. As Mark Osteen observes, Stan craves the American dream and tries to find it by a dark, duplicitous route. Even the people who have achieved success and a good reputation—a businessman that Stan plans to swindle for his last penny, a femme fatale psychoanalyst that helps him plan the con—prove to have secrets or methods that make them anything but proper upper-class citizens. Class and credentials be blasted.

What Will Crime Fiction Become: Williams and Sayers

Another interesting-if-minor way that Nightmare Alley shows Gresham intersecting with the Inklings is how the book fits in crime fiction’s evolution.

The Inklings weren’t known for writing mysteries. Lewis observed that he didn’t like detective stories (82). J.R.R. Tolkien quite enjoyed them—particularly Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers’ pre-Gaudy Night works (Ordway 260-261). Sayers was good friends with Lewis and Williams. Williams was a prolific reviewer of thrillers and mystery novels, and at least one of his thrillers, War in Heaven, intersects with the detective mystery genre.

However, Williams and Sayers both developed complex feelings about mysteries. Sørina Higgins has noted that one of Williams’s most insightful reviews of mystery novels, published June 18, 1934, predicted the detective fiction formula would soon be in trouble.

“It has for some time been clear that detective tales must either change or cease. A few good craftsmen may go on exquisitely reproducing the more austere and ancient plots, but murders must become greater or perish. There are signs that they are becoming greater, and that they will enter on a new career of real imagination” — The Detective Fiction Reviews of Charles Williams edited by Jared Lobdell, 112-3

Given Williams’ concern that the mystery genre must evolve or burst, it’s telling that his novels usually break genre standards. As Higgins observes in a 2011 Mythlore essay, War in Heaven starts as a murder mystery with a body found in a publishing office. However, it quickly breaks the standard rule (withholding who the murderer was). The story shifts from a whodunnit to a whydunit, which involves the murderer’s quest for a relic he can use in an occult ceremony. Eventually, things resolve the way things usually do in Williams’ novelist: something supernatural breaks in, setting things aright.

However, Williams also avoids supernatural thriller conventions. Other authors, such as Rohmer and Dennis Wheatley, wrote thrillers where something supernatural saves the day, yet the hero plays a part in the victory. Someone says a magic spell that reverses the past. Someone throws a crucifix at the Satanist, making them implode. You get the idea.

Williams doesn’t give that kind of heroic moment in War in Heaven or any of his other thrillers. He wasn’t interested in individuals looking heroic. He was more interested in what he called coinherence—that we all belong to spiritual communities where our actions form unexpected bonds. So, no particular person saves the day in War in Heaven: events and characters intersect in a way that brings about victory, showing all the characters how they are spiritually interconnected.

In other words, all Williams’ books can be considered crime fiction (between the supernatural thriller and detective novel subgenres), yet he never played by those labels’ rules. He may not have deconstructed genre with a postmodernist’s glee. Even so, his novels become implicit dialogues about what the genre is supposed to provide.

Furthermore, his endings provide counterintuitive solutions to the question about what the genre should provide. He believed the genre had to change, and he responded to that need by writing thrillers with atypical endings, pushing audiences to want something more than the usual.

Sayers wrote more conventional novels, but like Williams, decided to break crime fiction. Her 1935 novel Gaudy Night focuses more on the detective’s love interest than the detective and has no murder (Downing 19). Fans (including Tolkien) and colleagues (including Christie) criticized Sayers for going beyond the formula.

There were various reasons for this change. Crystal Downing argues that, like Christie, Sayers grew bored of her lead detective and had to make a choice (19). Rather than keeping her detective, Sir Peter Whimsey, static and alive for decades to preserve sales, Sayers broke the formula by marrying him off (ibid). Making Whimsey’s love interest central to Gaudy Night accomplished that goal, but also required making Whimsey more complex (20), which meant going beyond detective fiction formulas. Colin Duriez describes Gaudy Night as part of Sayers’ move to write detective novels that were also literary fiction (138-139). She found that her crime stories had to cease or change, and she changed.

Ultimately, most mystery authors didn’t take Williams’ mystical deconstruction approach. A few have taken Sayers’ route and wrote detective stories or thrillers that doubled as literary fiction. Others kept “reproducing the more austere and ancient plots,” creating the cozy mystery market. Still others (Higgins cites P.D. James as a good example) did what Williams predicted they would do: make the murders greater. One way or another, a shift happened.

In fact, if any American publishers had sent Williams review copies, he would have known that shift was already happening in the 1930s.

Down These Mean Streets: Gresham and American Noir

During the period that Sayers and Williams were experimenting with how to change crime fiction, colleagues in America were showing another path, one that ran directly to Nightmare Alley.

As noted earlier, Nightmare Alley is a noir novel. Noir is a much-debated genre. It may have started in 1940 with Cornell Woolrich’s novel The Bride Wore Black. Five years later, French publisher Marcel Duhamel started the Série Noire imprint for Gallimard, which released translations of American crime books by Woolrich and others. A year later, French film critic Nino Frank wrote an article on four American crime films (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Laura, and Murder, My Sweet) which he called film noir.

Critics still argue fiercely about what film noir is and what noir fiction is. Tayari Jones, the editor of the anthology Atlanta Noir, suggested that it is “more a question of tone than content” (13). While noir is an ambiguous genre, critics generally agree it spun off from hardboiled fiction.

During the same period that Sayers and Detection Club created the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, American writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett wrote hardboiled stories. These stories were tougher—private eyes, corrupt police, and shadowy streets. A different, much less genteel, kind of mystery story.

Chandler criticized Sayers and many other British mystery authors in his seminal essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” arguing that their artificial plots trivialized murder. The hardboiled school wasn’t hermetically sealed off from frivolity: Hammett produced the frothy The Thin Man as well as the shadowy Red Harvest. Still, after reading Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon or Chandler’s The Big Sleep, it’s hard to escape the sense that these hardboiled stories are much closer to real-world criminal investigation than Whimsey or Poirot’s escapades. Both branches generated detailed new mythological landscapes with various tropes and archetypes, but only one answers Williams’ challenge to evolve. The evolution involved making murder greater by presenting a very different landscape where the murders take place.

By the time Gresham published Nightmare Alley in 1946, hardboiled fiction had bled into something new. Many hard-boiled novels had been adapted into movies that critics called film noirs. A few writers (like Mickey Spillane) continued to produce hardboiled novels. However, Eddie Duggan describes the wave of writers in the 1940s (Woolrich, Jim Thompson, David Goodis) as a new wave: writers of noir (115).

What separate a hardboiled novel from a noir novel? Duggan argues the difference is that hardboiled fiction focuses on exterior issues—such as corrupt police and politicians—while noir fiction focuses on interior issues—such as paranoia making the protagonist suspect everyone (115).

Duggan’s argument fights nicely with the argument by John G. Cawelti and others that hardboiled fiction parallels westerns (53). Hardboiled and western stories both prefer ambiguous but generally moral heroes who must remove corruption from a place. The mythology of the old west shifted to downtown Los Angeles.

As argued elsewhere (“Nightmare Alley”), comparing hardboiled fiction to westerns establishes something crucial: hardboiled fiction told grittier mystery stories than anything Sayers and her friends in Detection Club produced, but maintained a strong moral outlook. Hammett may start The Maltese Falcon by comparing detective Sam Spade to “a blond satan” (3), but Spade doesn’t waver when he must turn the guilty over to the authorities. Chandler ends The Big Sleep with Philip Marlowe monologuing about his willingness to do the moral thing though it costs him dearly.

In fact, after spending most of “The Simple Art of Murder” criticizing the artificiality of Sayers, A.A. Milne, and others, Chandler concludes by arguing that even realistic detective stories must maintain their morals: “in everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption” (18). To have redemption in a detective story means the detective must, “to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor… He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world” (ibid).

Chandler believed the detective genre had to get better yet stay moral—something that Sayers and Williams would have agreed with, though neither adopted his style. The murders may have needed to get greater—something Chandler certainly accomplished. In some of his stories, the plots are so ambiguous even he didn’t know who the murderer was at the end. Still, on both sides of the Atlantic, the mythology of detective fiction was maintaining its moral heart.

Noir had altered things by the time Gresham came along with Nightmare Alley. The stories were still about crimes and solutions, but not necessarily following the detective. Stan is a criminal, the character that Spade or Marlowe would hunt. The cities and their overlords could still be mean, but they may be background—Stan cons a shady businessman, but the story increasingly becomes about Stan’s alcoholism endangering his ability to pull off the con. Internal struggles taking the foreground, indeed.

Even thought Nightmare Alley doesn’t end with the quality of redemption that Chandler favored, it does end with an Old Testament sense of justice served. Things don’t end as Stan hoped, and he ends where he least expected. Justice and penance are dealt to the appropriate parties. The ending contrasts sharply with the nihilistic ends that Thompson and Goodis embraced in their works. 

As Williams predicted, the murders had become greater. Hardboiled fiction and noir evolved to make them greater. But Sayers, Williams, and even Chandler were willing to deconstruct and reinvent genre yet maintain a certain morality. Many others (including, curiously, an American crime writer named Charles Williams) took another route. The murders became so great that goodness disappeared.

Gresham provides a dark, poetic midway in this discussion. Darker than anything Williams or Sayers would write. More inward-focused and skeptical of redemption than Chandler. Yet not so dark to reach the nihilism that noir would become known for.

More information about William Lindsay Gresham’s Life can be found in the Skeptical Inquirer profile “Blind Alley: The Sad and Geeky Life of William Lindsay Gresham” by Massimo Polidori.

Sources Cited:

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Cawelti, John G. “The Gunfighter and the Hard-Boiled Dick: Some Ruminations on American Fantasies of Heroism.” American Studies vol. 16, no. 2, 1975, 49–64. jstor.org/stable/40641141.

Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay” in The Simple Art of Murder. Vintage Books, 1998.

Dorsett, Lyle W. A Love Observed: Joy Davidman’s Life & Marriage to C.S. Lewis. Harold Shaw Publishers, 1998.

Downing, Crystal. Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers. Broadleaf Books, 2020.

Duggan, Eddie. “Writing in the Darkness: The World of Cornell Woolrich.” CrimeTime vol. 2, no. 6, 1999, 113-126.

Duriez, Colin. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography: Date, Dante, and Lord Peter Whimsey. Lion Hudson, 2021.

“Fate, Hope, and the Dark Side of Enchantment: The Complicated History of Nightmare Alley.” Presented by Brenton Dickieson, G. Connor Salter, and John Stanifer. Inkling Folk Fellowship. January 7, 2022. facebook.com/events/3016278281945732/.

Fowler, Christopher. “The Little I Knew About Sax Rohmer….” Lord of Strange Deaths, 79-82.

Glyer, Diana Pavlac. “Joy Davidman Lewis: Author, Editor and Collabor or and Collaborator.” Mythlore, vol. 22, no. 2, Article 3; 10-17, 46. dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol22/iss2/3.

Gresham, Douglas. Lenten Lands. Macmillan Publishing Company, 1988.

Gresham, William Lindsay. “Introduction.” The Greater Trumps by Charles Williams. Faded Page Canada. fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20140876.

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. Vintage Crime, Black Lizard, 1992.

Higgins, Sørina. “You Mean He Was Actually Human? Summary of ‘Detective Fiction Reviews.’” The Oddest Inkling, August 19, 2018. theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/detective-fiction-reviews/.

Jones, Tayari. “Introduction.” Atlanta Noir edited by Tayari Jones. Akashic Books, 2017, 11-14.

“Joy Davidman, Poet.” Presented by Don W. King. Inkling Folk Fellowship, July 16, 2021. facebook.com/events/956029881638441/.

Laity, K.A. “Tarot in Gresham’s Nightmare Alley.” December 19, 2021. kalaity.com/2021/12/19/tarot-in-greshams-nightmare-alley/.

Lindop, Grevel. Charles Williams: The Third Inkling. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Ordway, Holly. Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages. Word on Fire, 2021.

Roukema, Aren. Esotericism and Narrative: The Occult Fiction of Charles Williams. Brill, 2018.

Salter, G. Connor. “Charles Williams & Dennis Wheatley: Writing of Dark Forces Part 2.” The Oddest Inkling, March 30, 2022. theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/2022/03/30/charles-williams-dennis-wheatley-writing-of-dark-forces-part-2/.

—. “The Nightmare Alley of That Hideous Strength: A Look at C.S. Lewis and William Gresham.” A Pilgrim in Narnia, December 28, 2021. apilgriminnarnia.com/2021/12/28/gresham-lewis-connor/.

Santamaria, Abigail. “David Gresham (1944 – 2014).” VII, vol. 32, 2015, 11-13. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/48600470. 

—. Joy: Poet, Seeking, and the Woman Who Captivated C.S. Lewis. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015.

Shadowlands. Directed by Richard Attenborough. United International Pictures, 1993.

Shadowlands. Directed by Norman Stone. BBC, 1985.

Van Maren, Jonathon. “C.S. Lewis and His Stepsons.” First Things, August 3, 2020. firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/09/c-s-lewis-and-his-stepsons.

Zaleski, Carol and Zaleski, Philip. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015.

Cover Photo by Devon Rogers on Unsplash