Welcome, dear listeners, to our celebration of the works of William Hope Hodgson. A whole month of dark murmurings, meanderings and morbid musings, brought to you by a range of authors and enthusiasts. And me, but you can skip those parts if you want.
It must be over forty years, dear listener, since I, the celebrated author and longdog wrangler J Linseed Grant, became an avid fan of William Hope Hodgson. How time flies when your bones are crumbling! And how did this come about, you ask?
It was Carnacki what done it, as you might have guessed. Of course, I did move on to Hodgson’s other short stories and his novels not long after, and with great enthusiasm, but I always came back to the Ghost Finder. And that’s why I’ve chosen to begin with the occult detective himself.
In this introductory post I’ll say a little about why Carnacki inspired me, and the erudite Tim Prasil will set the literary context for Hodgson’s renowned occult detective. But let us address first the monstrous slime-encrusted elephant in the room…
The Carnacki short stories are not Hodgson’s most accomplished works. There, I’ve said it. There are nine of them, and they contain neither his finest writing nor his finest characterisation. H P Lovecraft was quite fulsom in his praise of Hodgson, yet found these stories inferior to his other work.
“We here find a more or less conventional stock figure of the “infallible detective” type – the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence.” Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927, revised up to 1935)
Heresy must out. Dear HPL was mistaken, not in his general views but in his assessment of the character himself. I loved Carnacki because he wasn’t Holmes or Silence, and that is his strength.
Thomas Carnacki, as an occult detective, was not one who claimed mastery in psychological and parapsychological disciplines, or in his procedural skills. He hadn’t been tutored in the mystic east, nor was he overly ‘sensitive’ in ways which were ascribed to others of the time. He was a moderately intelligent man who had read a lot of fragments and monographs, slogged it out in the field, and constructed a working theory (and some working equipment) on that basis. He put his time in, rarely made claims to superiority and got quite spooked by it all.
Compare these two extracts to see what I mean. The first is Dr John Silence, sitting in a haunted room in A Psychical Invasion by Algernon Blackwood (1908):
For this spiritual alchemy he had learned. He understood that force ultimately is everywhere one and the same; it is the motive behind that makes it good or evil; and his motive was entirely unselfish. He knew—provided he was not first robbed of self-control—how vicariously to absorb these evil radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good purposes. And, since his motive was pure and his soul fearless, they could not work him harm.
Measured and self-confident, eh? Now Thomas Carnacki, also sitting in a haunted room in The Gateway of the Monster by WHH (1910):
“I knelt again in the centre of the pentacles, watching myself with more fear, almost, than the monster; for I knew now that, unless I guarded myself from every sudden impulse that came to me, I might simply work my own destruction. Do you see how horrible it all was?
“I spent the rest of the night in a haze of sick fright, and so tense that I could not make a single movement naturally. I was in such fear that any desire for action that came to me might be prompted by the Influence that I knew was at work on me.”
This is an entirely different kettle of spaniels. Carnacki isn’t pure or fearless, he’s close to needing a clean pair of pants. Gateway again:
“I was on my knees, and I jerked back, falling on to my left hand and hip, in a wild endeavour to get back from the advancing thing. With my right hand I was grabbing madly for my revolver, which I had let slip… I believe I yelled.”
That’s the kind of occult detective that I can get my head round. A human being, not a psychological or intellectual genius. When asked what the hell is going on, he doesn’t make up guff about having worked it all out halfway through the case. He admits puzzlement and doubt. He tells his friends how scared he was, and how much he wanted to get out of there. He runs away, when prudence demands it. Yes, he could be a little pompous occasionally, as in the ritualistic way he summoned and dismissed his friends (an aspect I explore in my uncirculated story Grey Dog), but on the whole he is more human than most of his contemporary occult detectives.
Another strong-point is the way in which Carnacki embraces new technology. The battery powered pentacle is entirely his own invention; the camera and the revolver were his other main armaments. He set up phonographic recording devices, tell-tale wires and measured everything for inconsistencies, often without useful result.
This workaday approach is part of his attraction. Carnacki never sweeps into a room wielding his intellect and says “As I deduced. The ghost is under the third armchair, you have obviously spent some time in New Guinea recently and your sister-in-law is having an affair with the coalman.” He photographs the furniture over a number of nights, asks where people have been, and then sets traps in case the coalman really is involved somehow…
I argue, therefore, that Carnacki the man deserves a place in our hearts. You can follow and enjoy his organised investigations, or you can revel in the variety and imagery of what he encounters. And some of the imagery, such as in The Whistling Room and The Hog, is pretty damn scary. Even Lovecraft gave grudging praise occasionally:
“A few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power.” (Supernatural Horror in Literature again)
More of Lovecraft’s views on Hodgson later in the month, but I get the last word on the Carnacki stories for this segment.
They’re damned good fun, with some serious thrills.
On to a different aspect of the Carnacki stories. I recently heard from a friend who had picked them up without foreknowledge. He had been surprised to find that you could never be sure at the start of a Ghost Finder tale – was it really supernatural, or would it turn out to have a mundane explanation? This is another pleasure of first reading the stories, so we turn to Tim Prasil.
Tim is a man who spends a frightening amount of time tracking down and dissecting period occult detectives. Which should be worth a piece of fiction in its own right. The flayed skin of Flaxman Low would make a nice hearth-rug, for example. Tim explores the blending of supernatural and mystery in the fiction of the era, and puts Carnacki in his ‘place’ far more eloquently than I. Enjoy.
Tim Prasil on Carnacki
As I look at the historical position of William Hope Hodgson’s character Thomas Carnacki in my Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives, what springs to my mind is a debate that was growing in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was growing among writers of mystery fiction and addressed whether or not supernatural elements should be brought into their work.
Now, back in the 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe himself had his founding detective C. Auguste Dupin take a stand against turning to supernatural explanations in The Murders of the Rue Morgue, and the stance is echoed in its sequel The Mystery of Marie Rogêt. However, as my Bibliography suggests, there were plenty of authors eager to explore the possibilities of crossing the mystery genre with supernatural fiction. Sometimes, a regretful or wronged spirit returns to seek restitution from someone still living, and that someone must do a good deal of detective work to set things right. Sometimes, the detective figure must battle a criminal who turns out to have powers beyond the limits of science and nature. Sometimes, the detective is the one with special powers—usually, some form of divination—upon which to build a case in apprehending a villain.
Authors had tinkered with and twisted the possibilities of a mystery/supernatural cross-genre for almost a century before 1910, the year Thomas Carnacki debuted in a London-based magazine called The Idler. (That same year, H.M. Egbert’s occult detective Dr. Ivan Brodski appeared in a newspaper series across the U.S., and C. Ashton Smith introduced yet another supernatural sleuth in The Ghost of Mohammed Din, first printed in Overland Monthly, a magazine published in San Francisco.) Of course, skeptical detective characters like Sherlock “No ghosts need apply” Holmes routinely found perfectly natural solutions to crimes—even those that appeared to involve, say, ancient hellhounds going around and killing perfectly pleasant members of the Baskerville family. Mundane detectives certainly overshadowed their occult cousins throughout the history of the mystery.
Nonetheless, the success of Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, Physician Extraordinary in 1908, followed quickly by Hodgson’s contribution to the cross-genre, seems to have worried some who wanted to keep mystery fiction a neat and narrow affair. In 1907, Julian Hawthorne introduced the six-volume Library of the World’s Best Detective and Mystery Stories by saying that resorting to the supernatural to explain a mystery is a cheat. Otherworldly elements are permissible if a mystery writer announces them upfront, but even so, Hawthorne “would as lief have ghosts left out altogether; their stories make a very good library in themselves, and have no need to tag themselves on to what is really another department of fiction.”
A decade later, prolific mystery writer Carolyn Wells would insist, “I have no patience with the occult, the psychic, the spiritualistic in detective stories.” Segregating the supernatural from crime detection was next formalized into rules. In 1928, S.S. Van Dine wrote Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Fiction. Number 8 makes the matter clear: “The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic séances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo.”. A year later, the Right Reverend Monsignor Ronald Knox pared the rules down to only ten commandments for writing a mystery. One need only go to the second rule to read: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.”
Interestingly, many would say that these same decades were the heyday of the occult detective. Semi Dual, Moris Klaw, Aylmer Vance, Simon Iff, Shiela Crerar, and many more were solving mysteries that either involved the violation of criminal laws—or the violation of natural laws—in imaginative realities that extended to the supernatural. One such character, Dr. Payson Alden, even appeared in a 1916 movie serial.
Of course, Carnacki takes on both kinds of mystery, often confronting the supernatural but occasionally happening onto the merely mundane. This presents an interesting compromise in the debate over how far mystery fiction should reach. While some writers wanted the genre to confine itself to the physical—and others wanted to stretch beyond that point—Hodgson took a unique position with his Carnacki tales. In essence, he submits that, indeed, our world of mysteries does not end with the physical.
And yet that doesn’t mean that one should demand supernatural solutions all the time.
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Tim Prasil’s own occult detective, Vera Van Slyke, flourished within the time frame that he discusses above. Help for the Haunted: A Decade of Vera Van Slyke Ghostly Mysteries (1899-1909) is available in paperback or Kindle editions at Amazon. To learn more about the true history behind these mysteries, visit Prasil’s Vera Van Slyke – Ghostly Mysteries site. His author’s blog is called Tim Prasil – Inventor of Persons.
In the next post, I say something about why Carnacki caused Tales of the Last Edwardian to come about (the link on the right will take you to the series so far). A few days after that, we will have our second major section, The Voice of Horror, featuring the Narrator Supreme, Wayne June, and discussing the range and role of audio horror. With some audio clips from William Hope Hodgson’s and others’ work, if I ever figure out how to embed them here. You may just have to hum along to yourselves…