Gladys Gordon Trenery (Jan 1885 to Aug 1st 1938) was an Anglo-Cornish horror and film writer, pianist and piano teacher who wrote as G. G. Pendarves, which may have been her married name, and also as Marjory E. Lambe (derivation unknown).
Gordon was born in England in 1885. On all of her screenplays, she collaborated with fellow writer Ada Mc Quillan. Under her "G.G. Pendarves" name, she was one of the three most prolific women writers published in Weird Tales, with 27 of her stories appearing in that magazine, three posthumously. Gordon also wrote adventure fiction about the exploits of Westerners in North Africa; these were published in the pulp magazines Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine.
Gordon died in late 1938; in the December 1938 issue of Weird Tales, editor Farnsworth Wright published an obituary for her, revealing that "G. G. Pendarves" had been Gordon's pseudonym.
Aside from this, very little is known about her life.
A more complete list of her works can be found here
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Her weird tales include:
The first of her posthumously-published stories, this tells of a man who travels to Chaard Island in search of an legendary lost treasure, where he meets a mysterious monk who offers to lead him to that treasure — but he pays a terrible price for this!
Black tropes of nighted evil to be found in this tale include:
- Death by Materialism: Variant, in that those who seek to lay eyes upon the lost treasure of Chaard Island are stricken blind by the Black Monk, and thus can never achieve that end.
- Devil in Plain Sight: The supposed Brother Ignatius the protagonist meets is actually The Black Monk.
- Fate Worse than Death: The blindness with which the Black Monk curses his victims is treated as this. This is even more the case because of the way in which blindness was treated by society in the Interwar Era.
- Meaningful Name: "Chaard Island" is another way of saying "Black Island," as "char," "chern," "czern" etc. means "black in a number of Indo-European languages, as in the name of the Slavic god "Czernobog".
