If you check that Haggard list, Baylor, note the period of about ten years that includes
King Solomon's Mines as the start and
The People of the Mist at the end. My understanding is that Haggard thought of this era, more or less, as his best period. At about the end of it -- I think -- he stopped writing his novels and took to dictating them.
Here's my impression of the novels he dictated that I have read (and I'm guessing that this observation would be true for ones I haven't read -- not necessarily all of them, but many of them): When the narrator is Allan Quatermain, the novels are usually at least fun to read, but when the narrator is a third person omniscient teller, Haggard may bog down in patches of dialogue; they seem to have been easy for him to spin out but sometimes to have marked time when he was waiting to get to the next interesting episode. Take this with a grain of salt.
To test my idea, one might read one of the novels from the best ten years, and then read
When the World Shook. The latter, with its theme of survivors from Atlantis, might seem very promising, but, in fact, as I recall it was a bit dull, sort of second-rate pulp. I've read all of the books from that ten-year period except Mr.
Meeson's Will,
Col. Quaritch, and
Beatrice (although I suspect the edition of
Cleopatra that I read was an abridgement). (Incidentally I think Mullen means that
Nada the Lily was from 1892, not 1912.) These were all at least reasonably entertaining, and several of them were enjoyable to reread.
Of the books I've read from after the ten-year high point, I'd say, offhand, that the best were the Allan Quatermain - Zulu trilogy books (
Marie, Child of Storm, Finished). Eventually I found even some Allan Quatermain books didn't hold my interest:
The Ancient Allan and
Allan and the Ice Gods.
Morton Cohen's biography of Rider Haggard is good, by the way. C. S. Lewis's review of it contains some remarks I have found helpful not only for grasping the chief merit of Haggard but that of Lovecraft too. The Lewis essay is "The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard," which may be found in the collection
On Stories. I wish more people who enjoy fantasy and weird fiction would read it and a couple of other essays by Lewis, and also his excellent little book
Experiment in Criticism, written towards the end of a lifetime of good reading.
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