My dear readers will already know that, as a writer in these harsh and competitive times, I have a number of ethical rules which guide my literary career:
- Hide or lie about my sources, especially if I’ve stolen heavily from them,
- Keep my ideas to myself until the money’s in, and
- Never point out that all my plots have been better handled by someone else.
These rules have been invaluable to me, and account for why I’m a penniless agoraphobic who relies on discount artisan ale to get him through even the shortest blog entries. Note the artisan bit, though. I have very high standards of moral and physical bankruptcy.
As a lover of the weird and wild, on the other hand, I like sharing everything and to hell with it. So I’m letting the longdogs loose. Instead, I want to mention two authors you may not yet have come across (or across whom you may not yet have come, if you prefer), Henry S Whitehead and E G Swain. The first I discovered only a couple of years ago, but my little Bone to His Bone collection by Swain has been a prized possession for over twenty years.
I would have described both their recurring protagonists as occult or psychic investigators in their own ways. Sadly, one of them, Swain’s Mr Batchel, has already been kicked out of the club by the writer Tim Prasil, who produced the excellent A Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives (you don’t come across that phrase very often) on his website. Do look him up, and check out his stories, because I always get the hyperlinks wrong.
So this blog entry will introduce the argument for Henry S Whitehead’s occult investigator, Gerald Canevin, a man of leisure living in the Virgin Islands in the first quarter of last century.
Just for the trivia-lovers, Whitehead (1882–1932) was a minister of the American Episcopal Church and a friend of H P Lovercraft. He had, at times, church responsibilities in the Virgin Islands, and obviously picked up a lot of local lore. His stories are, for the most part, set in the Caribbean, and a large number include Gerald Canevin’s exposure to curses, entities and events which stem from West African beliefs:
“At last it came, the clue; in a childish, piping treble; the clear-cut word, Jumbee. I had it now. The screaming woman believed, and the crowd about her believed, that some evil witchery was afoot. Some enemy had enlisted the services of the dreaded witch-doctor – the papaloi…”
(Black Terror)
Jumbees are usually malevolent, possessing spirits, and papaloi is one name for a male voodoo priest. As opposed to the mamaloi. Don’t make me explain it. Whitehead drew heavily on the fact that before a chunk of the Virgin Islands was bought by the US, it was actually the Danish West Indies, with a history of plantations, slavery and mixed race populations, creole etc. I have to confess that I didn’t even know that there was a Danish West Indies, so that was a discovery in itself.
The argument which others will raise is that Canevin isn’t enough of an investigator. He does get involved and he does seek out answers, but an awful lot of scary things happen whether or not he does anything. Still, an interesting read. My caveat to interested parties is that very occasionally Whitehead seems to become obsessed with lost Atlantis and ancient Mayan races living under the earth. These (thankfully) few excursions don’t work half as well as some of his creepy, atmospheric stories of the West Indies people and their beliefs.
I was going to end there, but thinking about voodoo, related systems of belief and their African sources reminded me of an even more tenuous claim. Sanders of the River. Edgar Wallace was, I guess, a man of his time *cough*. His Sanders stories can be very dubious, but every so often they’re leavened with a peculiar respect for African people and spiritual systems. And I can now remember at least three which involved ghosts/psychic events which he could not disprove.
Sanders, Occult Colonial Administrator – a new series coming soon.
Next time, in Part Two – Nice People: Mr Batchel and a bit of M R James. Maybe.
