Carnacki, The Ghost-Finder I: Introduction | review by Rafe McGregor

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

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

David Stuart Davies’ introduction to the Wordsworth Editions edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder contains several errors and insists on examining Hodgson as a contemporary of and counterpart to Conan Doyle so I shall replace it with my own here. As editor, Davies also presents the cases out of chronological order without any rationale and this rolling review will discuss each of the nine in the order in which they were originally published. William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an English author who was one of the pioneers of weird fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century and created one of the most famous occult detectives in literature, Thomas Carnacki. Hodgson was a prolific writer, who published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry and is probably best known for two of his supernatural horror novels, The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912). He wrote dozens of short stories, across several series that included the Sargasso Sea, Carnacki, and Captain Gault. Hodgson went to sea at the age of fourteen, as a cabin boy, and was a third mate when he left the Merchant Marine in 1899. He used his time as a sailor to become a skilled photographer and his experiences provided material for many of his narratives. Hodgson was also an early bodybuilder and personal trainer, opening the School of Physical Culture in Blackburn on his return to England. In 1913, he married Betty Farnworth (1877-1943), another author, and the couple moved to Sanary-sur-Mer, in France, where the cost of living was cheaper.

Hodgson’s first short story, ‘The Goddess of Death’, was published in The Royal Magazine in April 1904 and is something of a precursor to Carnacki in combining elements of both the horror and crime genres. His first novel, The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), is usually classified as horror, although there is no explicit supernatural element and it might just as accurately be described as a tale of survival at sea. Its significance to the speculative fiction canon was recognised when it was reprinted in 1971, as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. While Carnacki was not the first occult detective to appear in print, he was one of the most popular, following Arthur Machen’s (1863-1947) Mr Dyson and Algernon Blackwood’s (1869-1951) Dr John Silence when he first appeared in ‘The Gateway of the Monster’ in 1910. Hodgson’s motivation for Carnacki was apparently exclusively financial and his inspiration Blackwood’s Silence, but there is evidence of a philosophical worldview that is reminiscent of Hodgson’s novels and supports my claim that occult detective fiction is, or was initially, a subgenre of weird fiction. When war broke out, Hodgson and Betty, who, unusually for the time, had no children, returned to England. He was commissioned as second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery in 1915, but was seriously injured when he was thrown from a horse and medically discharged the next year. Hodgson volunteered for a second time in 1917, was re-commissioned, and served on the Western Front. He was killed in action at the Fourth Battle of Ypres in April 2018, aged forty. I think it is fair to say that although he was not a great writer, he was a writer with great ideas.

Hodgson published six Carnacki stories during his lifetime, the first five in The Idler from January to May 1910. The sixth, ‘The Thing Invisible’ was published in The New Magazine in January 1912 and collected with the others in the first edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, published by Eveleigh Nash in 1913. Despite Hodgson’s oeuvre being largely forgotten after his death, a seventh Carnacki story, ‘The Haunted Jarvee’ (a ship, not to be confused with ‘jarvey’, a coach), was published in The Premier Magazine in March 1929. There was a revival of interest in him in the nineteen thirties, when he was brought to H.P. Lovecraft’s (1890-1937) attention and praised by him in the second edition of ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (serialised in The Fantasy Fan from 1933 to 1935). Hodgson became a favourite of fans of weird fiction and an eighth Carnacki story, ‘The Hog’, was published in Weird Tales in January 1947, the same year that all nine of the stories, including the previously unpublished ‘The Find’, were collected in a second edition of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, edited by August Derleth and issued by Arkham House. Interestingly, Lovecraft was unimpressed with Carnacki, whose cases he regarded as Hodgson’s worst work. Like the rest of Hodgson’s fiction, Carnacki did not make the transition to other media well and there were only two adaptations of his cases for television, a single episode each in the Pepsi-Cola Playhouse in the US in 1954 and The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes in the UK in 1971.

There was, however, a revival of interest in Carnacki at the end of the century. Several continuations and pastiches were published, in a similar fashion to those of Sherlock Holmes, the most successful of which was No. 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki, the Untold Stories (1992) by A.F. Kidd and Rick Kennett. William Miekle is the most prolific contemporary Carnacki author and has published four collections to date, the first of which was Carnacki: Heaven and Hell (2010). There have also been two anthologies devoted to Carnacki, Carnacki: The New Adventures (2013) and Carnacki: The Lost Cases (2016), both edited by Sam Gafford, numerous crossovers (including encounters with William Gravel, Doctor Who, Wilhelmina Murray, Sherlock Holmes, and the Lovecraft Mythos), and at least three parodies. Of these later offerings, only Kidd and Kennett’s cases have received consistent praise, with reviewers noting their faithfulness to the original. Unfortunately, interest has declined again and this edition, which was first published in 2006 as part of the Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series, is now out of print, as is No. 472 Cheyne Walk. There are, in fact, no editions of the collected Carnacki from traditional publishers available in print, although several, including this one (and No. 472 Cheyne Walk), are available as ebooks.