‘The second time he was sent down, he wasn’t done for faking his qualifications but for obtaining credit under false pretences. Over twenty people pressed charges. Other domestic stuff was added to the charges too, non-payment of rent, bills, the usual Hazzard routine. And he’d concealed that he was bankrupt when going into business too.
‘He went down for three months the second time and finished the stories in his first book in prison. So M. L. Hazzard was actually born in Her Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. He was published modestly over the next couple of years, and he used to harass people like Colin Wilson and Arthur Koestler for help. They even mentioned him in some interviews.’
Seb’s thoughts spun, but the revelations brought some relief. ‘I’ve only read two stories. I remember them being creepy, but the writing wasn’t quite there.’
‘No, he was no Algernon Blackwood, but there’s an authentic strangeness in them that I lapped up.’
‘But from prison to the SPR in Devon? That’s a big leap.’
‘It was. But he must have been encouraged enough to take the therapy angle to the next level, which was the SPR. From what I can work out, he picked up some tips from the woman who became Sister Katherine of The Temple of the Last Days. This was from his time in Mayfair. They once knew each other, years before she went to France. Hazzard adored women too, the glamorous, older, aunty types. That’s crucial to his whole make-up. You can tell from his stories. But what I think he really wanted was to become a woman. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a person so desperate to escape who they were. I don’t think Hazzard was ever comfortable inside his own skin. You could even say that he dedicated his life to escaping it, and literally. I think that might be why he embraced psychedelics as genuine gateways, doors to perception and all that.
‘But the SPR was set up mainly for his own enrichment. When he was in prison he’d re-established contact with some of his old clients. A couple of his patients in Mayfair were still smitten with him, and he corresponded with them while doing his time. Maybe they thought his treatments were effective. One very gullible woman was called Prudence Carey. She’d lost her husband in the war on a submarine. But Prudence was loaded. Old money. She owned Hunter’s Tor Hall, in Devon, and that’s where Hazzard went after he came out of Belmarsh. And, as far as I know, he lived there until he died.’
‘Dear God.’
‘Oh, it gets much better. Prudence became a kind of patron, so that Hazzard could write his masterpieces and develop his treatments and ideas. She’d had out-of-body experiences all her life, which he must have helped her develop in Mayfair. The disassociation of the consciousness and projection of the astral body towards Summerland, as they called it in the SPR, was central to the Mayfair operation. This is all in the court records. And that’s how he must have reeled Prudence in. She wasn’t alone, either. Hazzard became a kind of a guru.’
‘A cross-dressing guru of the afterlife. And people fell for this shit.’
‘I think he was basically promising people an assurance of life after death, yes. Or his version of the afterlife for a tenner a session in Mayfair, but at a much higher price when ensconced in Devon, and in very prestigious surroundings. Apparently, there were peacocks wandering the grounds. They also had a chef at one point.’
‘Good God.’
‘Of course, his residencies were sold as a cure-all for the earthly troubles and illnesses and to some very malleable and naive people. All operated on word of mouth amongst the wealthy. And with Hazzard as the gatekeeper of paradise, everything else in life often became irrelevant to his followers.’
‘To the desperate. And he actually got away with it?’
‘For a good long while. Nice earner too. But when my contact, Liza, was there in the early seventies, it was all going to hell. That’s when the second Hazzard book came out. It’s bloody dark too. I reckon he was writing the second book as things turned against him at the Tor, and he must have tried to cash in on the horror boom. His stuff was always too plotless, though, for any but a tiny number of readers.’
‘But this projection, and the astral body stuff, he started that in Mayfair?’
‘No, he’d been at it for years. He had his first out-of-body experience in the army, in the war. He was suffering from dysentery and claimed to have detached from his body in an infirmary. This is described in his story, “Looking at Myself from Nothing”. He claimed that while he stood beside his bed, he’d watched a medical officer inject his body with saline. And he had another episode in a dentist’s chair after the war. An even more powerful one too, after a motorcycle accident in London in the fifties. That’s all in his first collection. You know he always claimed the stories were true and not fictitious.’