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.
