Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder X: The Find: review by Rafe McGregor

The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson

Wordsworth Editions, paperback, £4.99, July 2006, ISBN 9781840225297

Where ‘The Hog’ is the longest Carnacki case by far, ‘The Find’ is significantly shorter than the rest and, in my opinion, the most underrated. Much of the commentary I’ve read begins by saying that this is the only case where there is no hint of the supernatural. I don’t think that’s true. There is no haunting, but the mystery – the appearance of a second copy of a unique book, Dumpley’s Acrostics, which was presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1573 – may have either a natural or supernatural solution, just like all of Carnacki’s other cases. The story appears to have begun life as ‘The Dumpley Acrostics: An Incident in the Career of Sackwell Dank, Mental Analyst’. The peculiarly named Sackwell Dank was another investigator and we will never know whether he was occult or ordinary in orientation as he never reappeared in Hodgson’s oeuvre. When he was unsuccessful in selling the story, Hodgson rewrote it as a Carnacki investigation, which also failed to interest any editors. It seems that neither Betty nor Derleth thought it worth resubmitting posthumously, though Derleth decided to include it in his edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder. Carnacki himself calls it a “very simple case” and I wasn’t sure whether or not it met the criteria for an armchair mystery, a category of crime fiction of which I’m very fond and which is also very difficult to write in an engaging way. While Carnacki does conduct an investigation that takes him out of his chair and out of 472 Cheyne Walk, he reaches his solution by means of rigorous thinking rather than the discovery of clues, much in the manner of the armchair specialist. The story is in fact a little logical puzzle, clever and pleasing in its own right if distinct from Carnacki’s other cases. Personally, I found it a fitting conclusion to the series and urge readers who are interested in occult detection to read it with an open mind.