A Most Curiouser and Curiouser Find in an Old Poe Book

A Most Curiouser and Curiouser Find in an Old Poe Book
Do I Hear the Gods Laughing?

November 14, 2025
Birch Bay, Washington

The worn cover of the century-old Poe volume — a book that has clearly lived many lives

Every so often, something surfaces in my investigations that feels less like evidence and more like a wink from the universe. This week it arrived in the form of an email, a photo showing a well-worn, century-old volume of The Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe, illustrated by Edmund Dulac.

A reader named  X had purchased the book. When he opened it, he discovered a handwritten inscription spread across two pages — emotional, poetic, and unmistakably early‑1920s in tone. He reached out to ask if the inscriber, “George Hill Hodel,” might be my father.

 This rare volume may well contain an early George Hill Hodel inscription.
I began reading.
And the story grew curiouser and curiouser.

The Inscription

And then came the real surprise: the inscription.

Two full pages written in flowing script, addressed to a woman named Milicent. Romantic, ornate, dramatic — exactly the sort of private performance young George often indulged in during the 1920s.

Before going deeper into the rabbit hole, let’s revisit what drama critic Ted Le Berthon wrote about young George and his self‑published magazine, Fantasia, in a 1925 Los Angeles Evening Herald article. (Le Berthon changed the name of the magazine to Whirlpools and young George’s name to George Morel.)

Los Angeles Evening Herald — December 9, 1925

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

By TED LE BERTHON

The Clouded Past of a Poet

GEORGE MOREL is tall, olive-skinned with wavy black hair and a strong bold nose. His eyes are large, brown, somnolent. A romantic, hawklike fellow, a pianist, a poet, and editor of Whirlpools, a bizarre, darkly poetical quarterly.

“George is a nice boy but—”
How often did one hear that!

What his friends hinted was that George, being young, was inclined to write of melancholy things.

Of course, George could have pointed to Keats, Rupert Brooke or Stephen Crane for precedent, but—“It’s not George’s gloom, his preference for Huysmanns, De Gourmont, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Hecht that pains us,” these “friends” would parry, “but his stilted elegance, his meticulous speech!”

George drowned himself at times in an ocean of deep dreams. Only part of him seemed present.

He would muse standing before one in a black, flowered dressing gown lined with scarlet silk, oblivious to one’s presence.

Suddenly, though, his eyes would flare up like signal lights and he would say, “The formless fastidiousness of perfumes in a seventeenth‑century boudoir is comparable to my mind in the presence of twilight.”

One might have answered “What of it?”—but one just didn’t.

As one of George’s “friends” put it: “He’s young. He’ll get over it. What he needs is contact with harsh realities. At present his writing is tenuous, dreamy, monotonous — and he is like his writing.”

A Future Realistic Novelist

I hadn’t seen George for about a year —

And last night, strolling up Spring Street in a sort of Morelian reverie myself, I was startled by hearing a familiar voice. The next moment I saw a tall young fellow in a taxi driver’s uniform seize a burly, argumentative man by the coat lapels and growl menacingly:

“Come across with that taxi fare or I’ll smack you in the nose, right here and now!”

The speaker was GEORGE MOREL.

Back into the Rabbit Hole — and an early major thoughtprint. This appears to be an early George Hill Hodel inscription hidden inside the Poe volume.

The first half of the inscription — poetic and emotional.

A closer view of the dedication line: “From George Hill Hodel.”

The inscription continues across the facing page, ending with a date.

Full Transcription of the Inscription

From George Hill Hodel

To my Lady of Holy and
Precious Silences —
To my limited marvels
of improbabilities —
In poetry —

To the rare and
cryptic love of
Millicent

Given in return for the
bronzed shadow that
was Milicent and
the glistening form
that was his and
the silver radiance
that is to be.

This day, the Fourth of June

Romantic? Yes.
Overwritten? Certainly.
But entirely of its time — and entirely in character for George Hill Hodel as described in Ted Le Berthon’s 1925 article. This George Hill Hodel inscription provides a revealing early thoughtprint. This George Hill Hodel inscription is an early psychological and stylistic thoughtprint.

In his emails, X went on to inform me that several of the illustrations had been cut and repasted elsewhere in the book. Several plates had been moved, removed, or cleanly reattached.  X wrote that “whoever handled them did so carefully — very skillfully.” A curious detail, and one rarely seen in surviving copies.

The Dulac Illustration

• 
  

  One of Edmund Dulac’s dreamlike illustrations — ethereal figures suspended between sleep and enchantment.

Those familiar with my writings will immediately note what I saw: the transferred Dulac illustration closely reflects George Hodel’s lifelong obsession with women posed in what the surrealists call “The Minotaur position” — eyes closed, hands above the head.

In George’s later 1940s photography we see him posing women exactly this way. And of course again in 1947, with the careful posing of Elizabeth Short’s body on the vacant lot in Leimert Park — on the street he believed to be Degnan (a taunt to his prior murder of little Suzanne Degnan in January 1945).

Cue the Gods Laughing

X mentioned that he had only recently discovered my books and was just beginning to read and background himself on the subject matter.

He wrote, coincidentally, that he lived near the Black Dahlia crime scene in Leimert Park.

I thanked X for taking the time to contact me and for sending high-resolution photographs of his rare book — and for allowing me to share this “early thoughtprint” with my readers.

In gratitude, I asked him to send me his home address so I could mail him a copy of the newly published (October 21, 2025) updated edition of Black Dahlia Avenger — Case Closed.

He emailed me back with his address, and as I read it, I paused.

X…, —- Degnan Blvd., Los Angeles 90008.

X lives just two minutes away from the Black Dahlia crime scene — and on the very street my father intended as his clew (his intentionally archaic spelling): his “catch me if you can” taunt to the press and police.

How’s that for coming FULL CIRCLE.