Brother 12 and a half?

There’s a Tumblr account I follow that mostly posts vintage paperback cover art in an occult vein of some sort, and today it offered something that really struck me for some reason:

Canada’s False Prophet by Herbert Emmerson Wilson, dated 1967. So who was this notorious Brother XII? Well, Wiki answers that; he appears to have been an English-born mariner called Edward Arthur Wilson who, later in life, appears to have fancied himself as the next Aleister Crowley or something… he claimed to have had some sort of vision in the south of France in 1924 which inspired him to set up his own cult; wonder if the “vision” came from hearing about Crowley’s ill-fated Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, which had just been shut down the previous year. (This piece suggests he then “channelled” the text of his book The Three Truths, which story certainly has a whiff of Liber AL to it.) Whether or not that was indeed the case, Wilson’s Aquarian Foundation seems to have gone tits up even faster than Crowley’s Abbey, from which he appears to have learned nothing about how not to screw this sort of thing up…

So what about the author of the book? Herbert Emmerson Wilson… ooh, same name as the notorious brother 12? Maybe an actual brother? Well, evidently not, per the Dictionary of Canadian Biography:

“…the fraudulent work Canada’s false prophet; the notorious Brother Twelve (Richmond Hill, Ont. [1967]), which was written by Herbert Emmerson Wilson, a convicted criminal who falsely claimed to be Edward Arthur’s brother.”

Oh.

There wasn’t much to be found online about Herbert Emmerson Wilson, but if you subtract one “m” from his middle name, you get this:

H. E. Wilson, former ordained clergyman, war veteran, bank robber, mail bandit, safe-cracker, jail breaker, convicted and sentenced murderer of his “stool-ing” partner, is without question the outstanding criminal character of the world and of the twentieth century.

Now, that comes from the website of a publisher devoted to republishing the works of one Thomas P. Kelley, a Canadian pulp writer who, among his many other works, helped Wilson write his autobiography in the 1950s. So obviously. I’m sure that description was written to hype Wilson up a bit and make him sound interesting to prospective buyers, but, remarkably enough, as far as I can see it’s actually true.

So Herbert Em(m)erson Wilson would appear to have been at least as interesting as his subject. Makes me wonder why he wrote this book about the other Wilson, then, while posing as his brother. (I am, obviously, assuming this book’s author is in fact our murderous safe-cracking ex-clergyman and the differently spelled name on the cover is the publisher’s mistake rather than being someone else with a bizarrely similar name.) Or was he? There’s a biography of Edward Wilson by John Oliphant which I haven’t read because, obviously, I only heard of him for the first time today, so I don’t know what evidence it offers, but one of the pieces I linked above indicates that his early biography is kind of sketchy and that Wilson himself claimed he was born to royalty in India.

So he was, by the look of it, not above bullshitting people. So could that English background have been part of his bullshit too and maybe him and Herbert were indeed related? At any rate, we do know he wasn’t the only Edward Arthur Wilson around at that time… maybe John Oliphant found another one? I don’t know, and somehow I suspect not, I just find the speculating interesting; after all, his reported death in Switzerland in 1934 is apparently widely considered to have been faked, maybe his birth was too. Or maybe not.

In any case, there was one more detail that amazed me as I researched this: whatever the truth of Edward Arthur Wilson, Herbert Emerson Wilson had a fan in none other than STANLEY KUBRICK, who had read Wilson’s autobiography and thought it was a great idea for a film; at the time he was working with Kirk Douglas, with whom he’d just made Paths of Glory, and offered the latter a script he called God-Fearing Man, but for whatever reason it became one of Kubrick’s many unmade projects. Until about 10 years ago when there was talk of it being made for TV by some European mob; nothing came of that but then they seem to have started talking about it again in 2019 with a view to filming it in 2020. Except we all know how that year turned out; I’m guessing this was one of the many casualties of Anno Covid… still, maybe it could yet happen?