Literature / The Harry Stubbs Adventures

Things man was not meant to know.

The Harry Stubbs Adventures is a series of Occult Detective Cthulhu Mythos novellas by David Hambling set in 1920s Great Britain after the First World War.

Harry Stubbs is an ex-boxer and Working-Class Hero who is always struggling to stay above water when he ends up taking a job that results in him uncovering the secret nature of the universe. Unfortunately, once you are aware of the supernatural, it becomes harder and harder to avoid it in the future.

Unlike the majority of Cthulhu Mythos novels, the Harry Stubbs series is focused more on the occultism surrounding the stories rather than the actual monsters. Harry often deals with cultists, lunatics, and weird science but rarely anything resembling the undeniably supernatural.

The series contains the following stories:

• The Elder Ice (Novella)
• Broken Meats (Novella)
• Alien Stars (Novella)
• Master of Chaos (Novella)
• The Book of Insects (Tales of the Al-Azif, Novellette)
• The Ghost Door (Tales of Yog-Sothoth, Novelette)
• The Snake in the Garden (The Book of Yig, Novellete)

David Hambling's The Dulwich Horror and War of the God Queen series are set in the same universe.

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The Harry Stubbs Adventures contains the following tropes:

Series

• As the Good Book Says...: The Harry Stubbs stories often have quotes to period appropriate literature.
• Boxing Battler: Harry Stubbs uses his skills as a boxer to deal with various thugs, cultists, and problems.
• Face Like A Thug: Harry Stubbs struggles to get legitimate work because he looks like a heavyweight boxer and prefers more intellectual work.
• Friend in the Black Market: Arthur Renville is Harry Stubbs, helping get what he needs to get and finding employment.
• Friendly Neighborhood Gangster: Arthur Renville is Harry Stubb's frequent employer and a man with his finger in many pies, not all of them legal.
• Genius Bruiser: Harry is quite informed about current events, British history, and philosophy despite a lack of a formal higher education.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Averted by Harry while many other people around him are not. Harry's incurious nature combined with the fact he knows not keep poking things that should not be results in him keeping his sanity intact.
• Hero of Another Story: Captain Cross is a swashbuckling rogue and book dealer every bit as skilled as Harry Stubbs.
• Loan Shark: Harry Stubbs makes a lot of his money in-between books as a debt collector for these, even though he'd rather not.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It is often questionable whether the Cthulhu Mythos is actually involved or just people believing in it. But by the end of the Elder Ice, it's clear it is all very-very real.
• Occult Detective: Despite not being a PI or police officer, Harry Stubbs is frequently drawn into investigations of the occult and supernatural.
• Only in It for the Money: Harry is uncaring about cosmic truths and eldritch mysteries. He's strictly in it for the paycheck.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: A very-very Downplayed Trope example, especially for the time period, but Harry has odd beliefs like Welsh eating seaweed.
• Pragmatic Hero: Harry Stubbs does not have any hesitation to use whatever methods necessary to win a fight or run away when matters turn against him.
• Roaring Twenties: The books are set during the Twenties of Great Britain after World War One and have a very different attitude toward the period, showing a London that is economically depressed and traumatized.
• Skewed Priorities: Harry Stubbs rarely is interested in the mind-blowing, sanity-blasting revelations of the occult he encounters. Instead, his interest is almost always laser-focused on his next paycheck.
• White-Collar Crime: Arthur Renville makes his money through insurance fraud.
• Working-Class Hero:
  • Harry Stubbs is a former boxer and does odd jobs in hopes of making ends meet.
  • Sir Ernest Shackleton's humble origins are something that Harry admires about him.

The Elder Ice

• Adventurer Archaeologist: Sir Ernest Shackleton was not interested in scientific discoveries but wanted to find wealth.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Mrs. Crawford wants to enlighten humanity by harnessing the knowledge of the Elder Things but Mr. Harcourt plans to Take Over the World.
• All for Nothing: Harry ends up destroying the Shackleton artifact and the AI inside it.
• Artistic License – Biology: An interesting case of it as the book speculates the Elder Things might be similar to Tardigrades in order to explain their long hibernation and seeming immortality in the most inhospitable of conditions.
• Big Bad: Harcourt is responsible for the attempts to rob Harry of Shackleton's find.
• Bold Explorer: Sir Ernest was a great antarctic explorer who died after his last expedition.
• Bullying a Dragon: Four Irish thugs attempt to pick a thug with Harry despite the fact he's a former professional boxer.
• Clarke's Third Law: The Elder Thing's super science is associated with Aladdin's magic lamp.
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: Mrs. Crawford, the secretary at Latham and Rowe, is the person who has been employing Harry to investigate the Shackleton Expedition.
• A Father to His Men: Sir Ernest brought back every one of his men on two polar expeditions.
• Lost City: Sir Ernest believed that an ancient civilization of tardigrade-like beings was in Antarctica. Cthulhu Mythos fans know he's right.
• Macguffin: What Sir Ernest was able to find in his Antarctic expedition.
• The Münchausen: Sir Ernest had this reputation, talking about lost cities and sea elephants. He may or may not have been telling the truth.
• Mundane Made Awesome: The magnificent object that Shackleton recovered from the Antarctic is the Elder Thing equivalent of a cellphone. Since it's the 1920s (and still functional), it is a fantastic find beyond measure.
• The Quisling: Harcourt has the ambition of allying with the Elder Things to Take Over the World. He believes by pledging allegiance to them, they will make the British Empire the most powerful race in the world.
• Ragnarök Proofing: The items of the Elder Things are still functional millions of years later.
• Take Over the World: Mr. Harcourt believes the British Empire is destined to fail, as it did in history, so they should ally with the Elder Things against the rest of humanity.
• Time Abyss: The Elder Things so are so old that 50,000 years is only a nap to them.
• Precursors: The Elder Things are frequently alluded to as Sir Ernest wanted to find their lost civilization

Broken Meats

• Action Prologue: Collins walks in the door after claiming he's shot Billy McCann.
• Ambiguously Evil: Mister Yang may or may not be evil as his motives remain unclear throughout. Even Harry can't decide at the end.
• Big Bad: Roslyn D'Onston is the master behind all the troubles the Theosoph Society and Chinese community is suffering.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Mister Yang believes good and evil to be two sides of the same coin, which he relates to Taoism but even Harry knows is completely unlike said philosophy.
• Chandler's Law: The first scene of the book is Harry Stubbs in a pub when a man walks in claiming to have shot someone who was already dead.
• Cult: The Theosophists Society is treated as one of these by Harry Stubbs, though he acknowledges they're rich cultists.
• Dashingly Dapper Derby: Harry and Yang both sport one of these while conducting their tour of London.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Harry's associates believe the East End's Asian population is riddled with gangsters and human traffickers. They also make racist comments about his eating habits. Harry, himself, imagines they're just like everybody else.
• Doing In the Wizard: Harry assumes that Yang hypnotized the hotel clerk that tried to keep him out. Mr. Yang simply said he was a petty bureaucrat he stared down.
• Historical Domain Character: The book includes references to a large number of period authors and occultists.
• Pet the Dog: Harry carries Mr. Yang's luggage to make sure it isn't poorly treated by racist porters.
• Magic Versus Science: Yang says that the Boxer Rebellion failed because they trusted in magic over guns. This despite the fact he's a wizard himself.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Whether the Theosophs have any power beyond D'Onston and Howard Phillip's paligenesis or are just frauds.
• Native Guide: A humorous inversion and the trope is name dropped (since it's the 1920s). Harry Stubbs is hired as one of these for a man named Yang while he is in London.
• Triads and Tongs: Arthur believes that Yang belongs to one of these. He actually belongs to something much worse.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Si-Fan is referenced as an organization that Yang is a part of, which is a reference to Fu Manchu. Subverted as it is revealed the author used the fictional Si-Fan in place of the actual organization that he didn't want to bring down the wrath of by naming its name.
  • The story is later revealed to be a Whole-Plot Reference to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward with D'Onston taking over the body of Howard Phillips.
  • Willie Whateley is the English cousin of the Dunwich Whateleys from The Dunwich Horror.
• Wham Line: "The other important point to bear in mind was that Billy McCann was already dead."

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