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William Hope Hodgson: For the Love of God, Montresor!

October 19, 2015 greydogtales Leave a comment

Welcome back to the strange, misguided world of our tribute to William Hope Hodgson. Where, oh where, dear Lord, are the fun-filled days of leaping longdogs and writerly wittering? Will this horror never end? Today I am appalled to offer, amongst other nuggets:

an exclusive new Carnacki story by author J Patrick Allen
twenty more covers up in the gallery under October Horror
details of the re-launch of web-site The Night Land
a rare French graphic novel mention of Carnacki
details of a German language audio version of Hodgson’s The Voice in the Night

I still have more WHH-related items than I can cram into a month, and have one tiny request. If you have enjoyed any of this so far, do please leave a comment. It would be nice to hear from you. Are you having a good time? Or was this festival a Thing which should never have been birthed?

But let us bite the bullet, and… Martha? What’s in these damned cartridges…

Our first feature is, as mentioned above, a brand new Carnacki story written especially for greydogtales! And we are, of course delighted.

J Patrick Allen is a Fantasy and Weird Western author out of St. Louis, Missouri. His first novel, West of Pale, arrives Spring 2016 from 18th Wall Productions and his first short story will be coming out this month in The Dragon Lord’s Library.

You can catch a free story every week on his website www.jpatrickallen.com, or you can follow him on Twitter @jpatrickauthor where he blurts out the first thing that comes to mind. Click on the link below the image to read, or tell me and I’ll slam an .rtf version up pronto:

The Drowning Puddle

We’ve also heard from another writer Brandon Barrows. I obviously need to crush these pups quickly before my life-support fails (I suspect arming Willie Meikle is the answer).

The first book to be released under the new Dunham’s Manor hardcover series, The Castle-Town Tragedy features three brand-new tales in which Carnacki the Ghost-Finder faces tortured spirits, powerful other-worldly entities and things that go bump in the night. But, armed with an array of scientific instruments, a vast knowledge of the occult, and fueled by a drive to dispel the mysteries and horrors of the world, Carnacki welcomes the challenge as our world’s best defense against the malevolent denizens of the Outer Circle!

Castle_20Town_20Tragedy_20color_20with_20Sinatra_20font_20low_20res_20final_original The Castle-Town Tragedy

Oh well, maybe they’ll take up chartered accountancy instead. Brandon can be found at the link below:

Brandon Barrows web-site

####

We move on to good news from Kate Coady, the new The Night Land web-hierarch (she said ‘web-master’, but our alpha female Chilli will have no truck with such terms):

In 1906, William Hope Hodgson published a long, terribly strange book called The Night Land. In 2001 Andy Robertson started a website about it. The front page read:

Argument: That the Night Land, Though Grotesque and Flawed, is one of the World’s Greatest Works of Fantasy.

The site’s content comprised criticism and essays based on The Night Land, and works of art influenced by it: visual arts, multimedia, and stories written by professionals and talented amateurs. These works form the substance of the Argument: The Night Land is great in itself, and great as a source of inspiration.

Later, Mr. Robertson would publish two anthologies of these stories (Night Lands Volume 1 and Volume 2). He planned to published more in book form. But his health began to fail, and in 2014, he died.

The Night Land website didn’t. Brett Davidson (who might be described as Mr. Robertson’s partner in Night Land literary creation) and I are keeping the site going, as previously arranged. The old domain was thenightland.co.uk. We are now at:

$teng-violet-fractal-logo$ The Night Land web-site

I’ve recently redesigned the site to make it mobile-friendly and easier to navigate, while trying to keep the spirit of Mr. Robertson’s original atmospheric design.

We now have a journal on-site; I’ll be updating it much more often than the old site log. I’ll be posting news and essays concerning Mr. Hodgson and his writing, and some other weird fiction and science fiction. Feel free to email me and tell me about new Hodgson-related works. (nightland -at- starsofwinter.com)

Thanks Kate.

####

Meanwhile, I’m still tripping over cover art for various editions of WHH’s books and stories, so have a look and get in touch if you have any rarities I haven’t included yet. We would be pleased to add them and credit the source. If I get a moment, I might improve the display and put them in some sort of order – chronological, by title, by language or just by the number of tablets I took.

I have one here that is only for the real completists – the extremely appealing La Brigade Chimerique.

I should warn you, Carnacki has only a passing involvement in this graphic novel, but I loved the art and the concept so much I had to include it. Georges Dodds, who has a far better grasp of French than I do, helped enormously with this, and provided me with his translation of the review in Le Figaro, November 2012. This extract is from the review by Laurent Suply:

La Brigade Chimérique harbours the solution to its own mystery: can Europe and France generate anew some superheroes, some modern myths? The answer is yes. A French interpretation of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it draws from it the idea of reusing historical or literary individuals. The Chimeric Brigade is a game of mirrors, sometimes demanding for the reader, between Lehman’s obsessions, a rereading of European history, and the pure adventure of comics.

The narration is very solid, planting clues throughout the sequence of episodes for the stunning revelations to come. Gess’ layouts are admirably coloured by Céline Bessonneau. This complete/unabridged edition finally fills the work’s only void: a tendency towards name-dropping, which becomes almost pedantic at times. The bonus materials here instead bring light on the work’s genesis and the many literary and historical references throughout.

A cult graphic novel for a small number of the initiated since it’s appearance in 2009, it has been adapted as a role playing game and more recently, a somewhat anecdotal sequel has appeared by way of the graphic novel “Masqué,” also by Serge Lehman. This complete collection is a perfect Christmas present for any graphic novel, SF or contemporary history buff – basically, lots of people.

La Brigade Chimérique , Editions L’Atalante. By Serge Lehman, with Fabrice Colin. Illustrated by Gess (Carmen McCallum). I think you may have to hunt this one down on eBay.

As we are in France (or French Canada, as I suspect in Georges’ case), I was pleased to find a 2014 French language audiobook of The Ghost Pirates, entitled unsurprisingly Les Pirates Fantomes. I translated that bit myself, I’ll have you know.

Les Pirates Fantomes

And then lo and behold, a German audio version of The Voice in the Night turned up, which sounds rather good, narrated by Marc Gruppe. How would you ever clog your brain cells up like this without me?

gruselkabinett_69 Stimme in der Nacht

That’s it for today. If anyone out there is still alive, yet to come in our blog-fest: features and interviews with author John C Wright, editor James Bojaciuk and WHH scholar Sam Gafford, plus more literary, musical and audio links.

No, Martha, no, I won’t leave the attic yet, I won’t…

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William Hope Hodgson: The Inheritors

October 16, 2015 greydogtales Leave a comment

For our longdog and lurcher friends, hurrah, only two weeks to go before the end of October Horror! And for our horror friends, hurrah, two more weeks of October Horror yet to come…

or The Writer on the Borderland 3

So, my dear ones, what difference did William Hope Hodgson make to the world of weird fiction? Does he actually have a legacy?

We don’t have the space here to cover all those writers peripherally influenced by WHH. It’s a long list, and could include a few surprising bedfellows – China Mieville, Dennis Wheatley and Clark Ashton Smith, for example. Hodgson’s originality meant that he had a surprising impact on many fertile imaginations.

Instead, we start with a range of contemporary authors who have been directly influenced by Hodgson, or who explore his characters and key themes in their own work. Our first feature author is William Meikle.

What can we say about Willie? A proud Scot, a fellow beard owner and a master of the rollicking, scary adventure. We salute him here because of his Carnacki stories and the Hodgsonian elements in some of his other work, but he has, of course, written reams of strange and terrifying tales. The natural choice for successor to Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs, when he’s not off ploughing another furrow with his own brand of original horror stories.

His influence is terrifying, as well. I rarely write Carnacki stories myself because I don’t know if Scotland versus Yorkshire is a winnable match, and his Sweary Puffin is a mean beast. I waited until Carnacki was dead, just to be sure, before I started the main run of Tales of the Last Edwardian. Safer that way.

But he’s a fine and prolific fellow. He takes Carnacki and goes that bit further, with new equipment and new challenges. Faraday Cage, anyone? Willie has talked about his writing with a number of interviewers in the past, but has kindly focussed down on Hodgson for greydogtales:

greydog: Hello and welcome, Willie. Let’s get to the meat straight away. Of all the period characters you’ve revived so successfully, you still return to Carnacki. Is there something about the character and setting that particularly appeal to you?

Meikle: For me it’s all about the struggle of the dark against the light. The time and place, and the way it plays out is in some ways secondary to that. And when you’re dealing with archetypes, there’s only so many to go around, and it’s not surprising that the same concepts of death and betrayal, love and loss, turn up wherever, and whenever, the story is placed.

The ghost story is no different in utilising the archetype of the return of the lost from the great beyond, but a good one needs verisimilitude.

If the reader doesn’t believe wholeheartedly in the supernatural element, even if only for the duration of the story, then they’ll be looking for the Scooby-Doo escape, the man in the mask that means everything before was just smoke and mirrors. Hodgson wasn’t above using the man in the mask escape himself of course, but those ones never appealed to me much. It’s my belief that to pull off a good ghost story, you need to get past that, and engage the reader at an emotional level with their fears.

Carnacki’s meetings with the supernatural resonated with me at that emotional level on my very first reading many years ago. On top of that, several of the stories have a Lovecraftian viewpoint, with cosmic entities that have no regard for the doings of mankind. The background Hodgson proposes fits with some of my own viewpoint on the ways the Universe might function, and the slightly formal Edwardian language seems to be a “voice” I fall into naturally.

Long story short, I write them because of love, pure and simple.

You may notice while reading that Carnacki likes a drink and a smoke, and a hearty meal with his friends gathered round. This dovetails perfectly with my own idea of a good time. And although I no longer smoke, witing about characters who do allows me a small vicarious reminder of my own younger days. I wish I had Carnacki’s library, his toys, but most of all, I envy him his regular visits from his tight group of friends, all more than willing to listen to his tales of adventure into the weird places of the world while drinking his Scotch and smoking his cigarettes.

greydog: A nice Laphroaig in your case, we assume. Speaking of his unusual equipment and inventions, his toys, you’ve recently written a story about the contemporary discovery of Carnacki’s electric pentacle. Do you plan to extend and explore Carnacki’s technological innovations any further, or was this just fun?

Meikle: My new novella, Pentacle (from DarkFuse) was mostly just fun. I was exploring part of a mythos I’m building of goings on in a certain kind of strange house. I wondered what old Carnacki would have made of it, and suddenly my character found the Pentacle in the basement. It just kind of happened 🙂

That said, I do have a couple of ideas bubbling under to do with his colour theory so I’ll no doubt get round to them at some point. I’m a long way away from being finished with Carnacki’s toys.

greydog: We’re glad to hear it – we love stories bending Edwardian technology to new and strange uses. And what of Hodgson’s other fiction? Did his sea stories influence some of your works, or did you write them independently of reading those?

Meikle: A lot of my own work is based at sea or in seaside towns – I live on the coast, and have done for twenty out of the past twenty five years. I was born and raised within 10 miles of the Firth of Clyde, so it was something that came to me naturally anyway. Many of my own favorite books are also sea based, with The Ghost Pirates, Dan Simmons’ The Terror. Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides and John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes all influencing me along the way.

So adding Captain Gault in to three of the stories in the new collection also felt natural. I thought it was about time the two of them met, and I had so much fun with those that I’m pretty sure the old chaps will be meeting again in the near future.

greydog: Would you ever consider exploring The Nightland in your stories, or do you think it too out-dated now?

Meikle: It has appeared in passing in several of my Carnacki stories – there’s a big black pyramid in The Dark Island novella in the first collection, and it appears again in The Parliament of Owls story in the deluxe edition of the new one. And there’s more than a passing reference in Pentacle too. The far future aspect of it, and the sense of cosmic scale is the appeal to me. The archaic language is something I would never attempt, and I’m not really interested in the many creatures – although I do have an unpublished story about the origin of the Swine Things in Nightland that might get an airing some day…

greydog: Thank you, Willie Meikle.

Willie has two Carnacki collections currently available:

Carnacki: Heaven and Hell at Dark Regions Press

(Hardcover sold out; a nice trade paperback edition still available, complete with Wayne Miller illustrations, and an ebook.)

Carnacki: The Watcher at the Gate at Dark Renaissance

(Limited edition hardcover, with color illos again by Wayne Miller. There will be a paperback and ebook along in due course.)

Several stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines, so check out his website: William Meikle

Carnacki’s newest story The Keys of the Door, will be in The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper Tales, edited by Maxim Jacobowski. (November 2015). We also plan to have a feature interview and showcase session with Wayne Miller, the artist mentioned above, in November.

####

But now come back in time with greydogtales. Before Meikle there was… Kidd and Kennett.

Chico Kidd, as A F Kidd, and Rick Kennett shared their mutual interest to produce the first Carnacki rebirth, the result being No. 472 Cheyne Walk. Published by the Ghost Story Society in 1992, this volume containing four stories, described as pastiches.

A decade later, Ash Tree press published No. 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki, the Untold Stories with a further eight new tales. Thus Carnacki lived again, and readers were also delighted that Kidd and Kennett went ‘Giant Rat of Sumatra’ on them and wrote up some of the cases mentioned but not described in the Hodgson stories.

No472 No-472 Cheyne Walk (e-book)

I was in touch with Chico as part of the WHH blog-fest, and although she has no more Carnackis planned, she is still scribing.

The Captain da Silva stories are her current project, particularly fitting to mention here because da Silva’s first appearance was in No. 472 Cheyne Walk, and Hodgson did love a sea story. Chico described them to me thusly:

“Early 20th century funny-ish noir-ish urban fantasy mashups as the Cap’n and his Scooby gang take on every supernatural nasty you can imagine, and some you can’t. Numerous short stories in anthologies. First 2 novels available on Amazon, ‘Demon Weather’ and ‘The Werewolf of Lisbon’. Coming soon book 3, ‘Resurrection’.”

You can discover more, including other great ghostly stories, at Chico’s web-site here: Chico Kidd

####

I have known David Langford for a scarily long time, and careened off him at many a drunken SF convention. While he has written a number of excellent books, I fear that I’ve gained the most pleasure from his parodies. The Dragonhiker’s Guide to Battlefield Covenant at Dune’s Edge: Odyssey Two began it, and all of Dave’s parodies were eventually collected in the bemusingly-titled He Do the Time Police in Different Voices (2003).

His Dagon Smythe stories are, essentially, contemporary piss-takes of Carnacki. True to British tradition, they commence with a gathering in the pub, not the parlour, where the inner circle hears Smythe’s dubious stories of his latest case, whether they want to or not. And they usually don’t. They also have to buy the drinks.

‘Among our circle that evening was the well-known psychic investigator Dagon Smythe, who preserved his silence but now shuddered theatrically. I recognised the symptoms and took rapid action, crying: “Beastly weather this week, chaps! Would you call it seasonal for the time of year?”

‘But it was too late. Before the razor-sharp wits around the table could pounce upon this always fruitful topic, Smythe interrupted in his peculiarly penetrating tones. “Speaking of prediction… I once dabbled a little in the divinatory arts.”

‘“And you have a tale to tell,” said old Hyphen-Jones with a trace of resignation.’

‘Not Ours to See’, David Langford

There were four initial Dagon Smythe stories, and a number of wicked parodies of Lovecraft, Poe and Conan Doyle (amongst others), plus an extra Dagon in the ebook. It’s good stuff.

timepol He Do the Time Police in Different Voices

There we have it. Progressions, pastiches and parodies. And it gets even better in the next fortnight!

Coming up we have an exclusive brand-new Carnacki story by author J Patrick Allen, more young turks, an in-depth interview with John C Wright of Night Land fame, some surprising articles by James Bojaciuk and lots of extra fun. You’ve come this far, you might as well carry on…

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The Writer on the Borderland 2: The Voice of Horror

October 9, 2015 greydogtales 4 Comments

An absolutely packed post this time, with many wonders of the airwaves for you to try out. Yes, your minds will reel, your ears will bleed, as we look at William Hope Hodgson and audio horror, plus even some pieces of weird Hodgson-inspired music as well…

(Note to consumers: greydogtales.com accepts no legal responsibility for sanguinary orifices or other side-effects of engaging with this blog. Your blood pressure may go up or down.)

I’m always looking out for tracks and readings which bring a shiver to the spine. I collect, in a haphazard manner, audio horror. To be more precise, I collect audio unease. It doesn’t have to be that horrifying, but it has to make the back of your neck feel suddenly cold. Some of the links below certainly do that.

The Voice of Horror has many delights. We’re missing Wayne June this week, sadly, which we hope is only temporary, but we are delighted to have been joined by Morgan Scorpion, who has narrated a whole host of WHH and H P Lovecraft stories, amongst other pieces. Read her interview later in this article. And so to that question which people ask me constantly:

“Mr Linseed Grant, sir,” they ask, “You must tell us, you must. Will your legendary and terrifying tale Sandra’s First Pony ever be released as an audiobook?”

“No,” I answer, a sad catch in my voice. “The Office of the Public Prosecutor has forbidden it. However, I do have loads of William Hope Hodgson sounds which you can enjoy instead.”

You should be able to access all of the following, in various states of commerciality and interpretation. If I’m wrong on any of the details or links, then I wouldn’t be at all surprised. I’m a writer, damn it Jim, not an archivist!

Ghost Pirates (novel)
The House on the Borderland (novel)
Boats of the Glen Carrig (novel)
The Night Land (novel)
Carnacki the Ghostfinder (collection)
The Voice in the Night (short)
A Tropical Horror (short)
The Derelict (short)
The Stone Ship (short)
The Thing in the Weeds (short)
Captain Dan Danblasten (short)
Inhabitants of the Middle Islet (short)

And for you alone, dear listener, dozens of greydogtales staff have worked night and day to provide you with more details and direct links. Don’t forget that if you want to know when our next WHH blog articles are out, you can always subscribe! We’re just an e-mail address away (that’s not a threat, honest)…

Librivox, the free audio provider for public-domain works, is a good source, as Librivox provides the first seven in the list above straight away, and for nothing. Some Carnacki stories have also been recorded separately.

Hope Hodgson on Librivox

Of the non-Librivox recordings, The House on the Borderland is the choice pick. The incomparable Wayne June has produced an excellent version, which we recommend highly:

The House on the Borderland

Wayne, of course, has narrated some fantastic Lovecraft tales as well, and his The Dark Worlds of H P Lovecraft readings are superb. You are, quite simply, missing out if you’ve not heard them.

I also thoroughly enjoyed Jim Norton‘s four part version of HoB, available on Youtube:

Or if you want a real marathon, you could check out the 18 hour (!) full audiobook of The Night Land from Dreamscape, read by Drew Ariana:

The Night Land

The Voice in the Night short story is also available in a number of versions. This is the Paul Wright version on Youtube:

And here’s another version from Pseudopod podcasts:

The Voice in the Night

It’s a shame that more Hodgson short stories haven’t been recorded yet. A Tropical Horror has been adapted by Julia Hoverson to provide a spiffing dramatised version which can be found here:

A Tropical Horror

The Derelict, a great story, is available as an audio performance by experienced narrator William Dufris and Mind’s Eye Productions:

The Derelict

And The Stone Ship was produced in 1980 as part of Nightfall, that wonderful old radio series (it’s worth trying other Nightfall episodes, too):

The Stone Ship

The Thing in the Weeds is available via The Classic Tales podcast from Audio Boom. Another short, creepy one:

The Thing in the Weeds

Captain Dan Danblasten, not horror, is a Tales from the Potts House podcast (also has a podcast of The Voice in the Night):

Captain Dan Danblasten

And the last short, Inhabitants of the Middle Islet… OK, I cheated here. There is an audio version of this story, but it’s in French. I quite enjoyed it, but then I only understood about half of it. French speakers may be able to report back to greydogtales.

Inhabitants of the Middle Islet

In the process of checking sources, I also came across a great podcast site which was new to me, Tales to Terrify.

Not only do they have all sorts of audio goodies, but they have a double podcast perfect for our WHH month – The Horse of the Invisible paired with Willie Meikle‘s Treason and Plot. Willie is, of course, featured in an interview in next weeks Hodgson – The Inheritors, so this is a great link. The host is the late Larry Santoro, who gives a detailed introduction to Hodgson (before you ask, the WHH death details given are corrected on the site) and the narration is by Robert Neufeld:

Horse of the Invisible/Treason & Plot

I think you’ll enjoy both of those.

####

This Hodgson blog-fest is a collaborative venture, and so our interview this week is with Morgan Scorpion, a stalwart of Librivox but more importantly for our purposes, also a lover of the weird. Morgan has narrated at least fifteen Lovecraft stories, for example, and covered many other examples of ghostly and strange fiction. Rather than rattle on, I’ll let Morgan have her say:

greydog: Welcome, Morgan, and many thanks for contributing to this week’s section. I understand that you began narrating stories for Librivox because you were already a fan of their free audio?

Morgan: That’s true, I love audiobooks and couldn’t resist free ones. After listening to about 70 free audiobooks I began to feel I owed them something in return, so I decided to record a few chapters until I felt I had repaid them, only I discovered I enjoyed doing them. It’s good to feel useful.

greydog: I have to ask, given this month’s theme – what do you think about William Hope Hodgson’s writings on a personal level, as a reader? Or are they relatively new to you?

Morgan: I have enjoyed WHH’s stories since I was about eleven, on a personal level, I find them deliciously horrible, especially when fungi are involved. He has a great sense of the grotesque.

greydog: Yes, the grotesque and the unknowable. Which links nicely for us, as you’ve also recorded a heck of a lot of H P Lovecraft for Librivox. Can you tell us which piece of his stands out for you?

Morgan: With Lovecraft, almost all of it stands out. My love for his writing is pretty much hero worship, and I couldn’t chose a favourite of his without pointing out that a different tale would be my favourite next week. So it would be a choice between The Music of Erich Zann, The Dunwich Horror, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Rats in the Walls, or maybe…

greydog: I suppose the end result is more important to most greydogtales readers than the process, but I always ask recording artists this – do you mull over the piece first for a while and make notes to yourself, or do you throw yourself straight into the recording?

Morgan: I rarely record a story without having read it first, often several times. So although when it comes to recording, I just pick it up and read it without any notes or mental preparation. I make lots of mistakes while recording, and edit them out afterwards, I’d be terrible if I had to read out loud to an audience. Reading a story out loud is a very different experience from reading it silently to yourself, so no matter how many notes I made in advance, I doubt they’d be much use to me when it came to vocalising it.

greydog: So who is your own favourite narrator in this field?

Morgan: Vincent Price! He recorded lots of Poe, alas no Lovecraft, and you may find some online if you look. Roddy McDowall has also done a couple of horror tales by Lovecraft, and who could top Christopher Lee! I wish they had been able to do more. Of course there’s Jeffrey Combs, whose recording of Herbert West, Reanimator is wonderful. I also wish John Lithgow would record some horror tales. In a different genre, I love the audiobooks of Elizabeth Klett, so far she has done no horror that I know of, but she has recorded Edith Wharton, and done it perfectly.

greydog: Ah, the wonderful Vincent – great choice! And is there anything in the weird/occult domain that you’ve not narrated yet but which you really want to have a crack at?

Morgan: So many! In time I want to do more Lovecraft, more Poe, more E F Benson and more M R James. And there are so many that are in are in the public domain that I have been unable to get permission for, namely J B Priestley’s The Grey Ones, Anthony Boucher’s They Bite, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived at the Castle, oh and quite a few things by Thomas Ligotti or Ramsey Campbell. I’d also love to record Agatha Christie’s The Seance. Quite the nastiest short story imaginable, but I have no hope of being allowed to do that!

greydog: We should surround the Agatha Christie Estate with villagers and burning torches, demanding it. But to finish for now, a deliberately unfair question – what’s your favourite horror story of all time?

Morgan: I’d have to refer you to answer number three for that, but must also name Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, M R James’ An Evening’s Entertainment, T E D Klein’s The Events at Poroth Farm, Michael Shea’s The Autopsy and R Chetwynd Hayes The Day Father Brought Something Home.

greydog: Thank you, Morgan Scorpion, and we look forward to your next recording! In the meantime you can hear Morgan in action across a number of genres by following either of these links:

Morgan Scorpion on YouTube

Morgan’s Librivox Page

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As we near the end of this week’s offerings, here’s a couple of extras, to show how much I care about my listeners. Hodgson and Lovecraft have inspired a number of musicians, so let’s check out two entirely different pieces of work.

The first, which I must admit I loved, is Jon Brook‘s Cafe Kaput album Music for Thomas Carnacki.

“Utilising banks of oscillators, tape edits and analogue delays, Brooks created themes, cues and abstracts to depict the dark Edwardian setting of the story”.

Do call in and have a listen – it’s very atmospheric:

Music for Thomas Carnacki

If that’s not to your taste, then you might prefer The Boats of the Glen Carrig by ‘funeral doom’ metal group Ahab, who take inspiration from a number of maritime sources in their albums. I’m not up on Ahab, so you’ll have to find out for yourself. I’m a Metallica fan, but not sure what ‘funeral doom’ heavy metal is, so don’t ask me. The link takes you to a review and samples from the album.

Ahab-The-Boats-of-the-Glen-Carrig — William Hope Hodgson does metal!

Ahab: Boats of the Glen Carrig

And that’s almost as much ear-bending as anyone can take in one post. As Morgan mentioned Vincent Price, who could charm the birds from the trees (or just knock them off their perches), I had to add one last recent find, nothing to do with WHH but new to me:

Vincent Price: A Hornbook for Witches – Stories and Poems for Halloween. This a recording from the 1976 Caedmon LP:

Love that voice.

Please join us in a few days for some audiovisual treats, and then Hodgson -The Inheritors, in which we present a two part look at those who have grasped the torch and lifted it high again, commencing with an interview with the prolific and excellent Willie Meikle. Asbestos gloves will be available at the door…

Don’t forget, by the way, we’re heading into the last day of the October Frights blog-hop. And here’s the list for the last time. Have a browse while you can…

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At Last – CSI: Edinburgh

September 11, 2015 greydogtales Leave a comment

OK, who can tell me what connects Silence of the Lambs with Edinburgh Old Town in the 1830s? Yes, the girl at the back, with the green hair and the switch-blade. No, sorry, it’s nothing to do with butchers this time. Not directly, anyway.

It’s the actor Brian Cox, of course.

So, that’s the end of another blog, and next time, we’ll…

What? You want to know why I asked? Oh, alright.

You see, I love Inspector McLevy. I think anyone who likes crime and detective stories, or police procedurals, would enjoy McLevy. He isn’t occult, psychic or any of those weird things you’ve come to expect from me. He’s a tough cop in a tough city. Rebus without a Saab.

And he was a real person, whose history I came across a while ago when I was looking for Victorian period detail. You know, like what brands of mobile phones they had in 1850, that sort of thing. I’m a meticulous writer.

James McLevy (1796-1875) was, by many accounts, the first proper police detective in Edinburgh, in the cheery old days of hanging and transportation.

Magistrate: Why did you steal that loaf of bread, you little vermin?
Street Urchin: ‘Cos I wanted to be a-feedin’ of them kangi-roos dahn under, guv’nor.
Magistrate: Oh God, just string him up anyway.

After time as a nightwatchman with the Edinburgh police, McLevy was given the rank of detective in 1833, and had a successful career which spanned thirty years and a reported 2,220 cases.

This might all have ended up as a minor historical note, except for two things:

1) McLevy wrote up his cases in a number of books from 1860 onwards, around his retirement. How much of what he recounts is true, we can’t tell, but they are not wildly exaggerated tales. They cover the ups and downs of policing Edinburgh Old Town, with its slums and theatres, cobblers and cut-throats. Dickens without the silly names, so to speak.

2) Actor/writer David Ashton decided to create a series of radio plays about McLevy’s fictionalised exploits. These are quite superbly done, terrific fun, and occasionally rather moving. There are TEN series of McLevy now, most of which can be tracked down via the wonderful web (Ashton has written four novels in the same vein, as well).

The real McLevy was a hard worker. He had an insight into criminology, employing stings and forensic techniques. He seems to have had a certain sympathy for the miscreants in his parish, and was not without mercy at times. Eventually he became well enough known to be consulted by parliament and social reformers on the subject of how to deal with criminality.

Some claim that because he consulted the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle later studied, he might have influenced Conan Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes. Pushing it a bit, maybe, but McLevy was better known back then. Conan Doyle might at least have considered some of the cases when constructing his own stories.

On the radio, Brian Cox gives what I believe is one of his best performances yet as Jamie McLevy, thief-taker in the Parish of Leith. He brings humour and humanity into what can be quite brutal tales, covering such diverse subjects as:

Revenge tragedies;
The horrors of the Crimean war;
Women’s rights;
Deadly rivalry between brothels, and
Victorian pornography.

Ashton’s McLevy is instantly accessible. Don’t think “Oh no, boring historical detective with archaic foibles.” He’s dedicated to his job, cranky and occasionally eccentric. He needs his coffee. He has a dry wit, and he eats too many sugary sweets.

The good Inspector (not as high a rank as it is now) has a love-hate relationship with Jean Brash (played by Siobhan Redmond), the owner of a body house, or brothel, called the Happy Land. I’m guessing that there is intended irony from Ashton here, as the real Happy Land was a tenement/slum area in Victorian Edinburgh.

If I wanted to sound really mock-academic, I could point out that it’s also referenced in an 1838 hymn:

There is a happy land, far, far away,
Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day

‘The Happy Land’ was therefore sometimes mentioned by spiritualists as where the souls of the departed would end up – if they were lucky.

Curiously, while James McLevy was an Irishman who came to Scotland as an immigrant in his teens, Brian Cox is himself a descendant of Irish immigrants to Scotland. A match born in… well, somewhere up there. David Ashton, for fun, plays Lieutenant Roach, McLevy’s superior.

The other notable character on the radio is Constable Mulholland, McLevy’s assistant, who spends his time getting exasperated with his Inspector, fishing, keeping bees and hitting people with a big stick. And he likes the ladies, but is not the luckiest of fellows. Mulholland is supposed to have been a real contemporary of McLevy’s, but I can’t prove that bit.

I’m always mithering on about occult detectives and period crime, so I look out for spooky references in everything I read or listen to. The radio series does have a subtle, unsettling element sometimes – odd presentiments, a sense of the violence and death which follows McLevy, and a prophetic vision or two from the locals – but the original James McLevy gives little shrift to spookiness. The best you get is the ending of The Cobbler’s Knife:

“This is the only dream-case in my book; and I’m not sorry for it, otherwise I might have glided into the supernatural, as others have done who have had more education than I, and are better able to separate the world of dreams from the stern world of realities.”

And to finish, you’ll have guessed the connections by now. If not…

The brilliant Brian Cox plays Inspector McLevy, but he also played Hannibal Lecter in the original 1986 movie Manhunter, the film adaptation of the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, who wrote Silence of the Lambs. In Manhunter, the lead FBI agent/profiler hunting Hannibal was played by William Petersen, who, of course, was Gil Grissom in CSI.

And none of the above are actually from Edinburgh.

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