The Casebook Of Carnacki The Ghost-Finder by William Hope Hodgson (1910-1912)

I picked up this copy of the great William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder a few years ago in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop in Galway. I'm only just getting around to it now.


Considering Hodgson’s status as one of THE finest weird tales writers (his weird sea stories are second to none, with ‘The Voice In The Night’ and ‘The Derelict’ being among my all-time faves, and ‘The House On The Borderland ‘being a genre classic, if one I find a bit of a stiff read myself) I found Carnacki somewhat disappointing.

This edition has been clogging up the shelves here at the Explorer's Club for quite a while. I did listen to a few Carnacki stories, thanks to the always-wonderful Hypnogoria podcast, many many years ago, while waiting in an Italian airport, returning from a strange summer working in the Dolomites, dreaming of a return to Canada (something I worked towards but never was able to pull off: a tale for another time, that). Anyway, I'm finally settling down with a glass of Writer's Tears whisky leftover from Christmas, to finally read the stories.

Hunter Of The Outer Monstrosities

The basic pattern of the stories is a fun riff on Sherlock Holmes, with each story in the ‘casebook’ having four friends visit the Edwardian psychic detective Carnacki for dinner at his flat on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, (his version of 221B Baker Street) after which he smokes a pipe and regales them with his latest ghost-hunting adventures. When the tale ends, he rather rudely shoves them back out into the London streets with a charming ‘out you go!’

Positives:

Though somewhat half-baked, the bones of a mythos can be spotted poking out here. Carnacki’s supernatural foes are not truly ghosts, but ‘Outer Monstrosities,’ manifestations of psychic energy that inhabit a band of ether at the extremities of Earth’s atmosphere. There are shades of Lovecraft here - though the Old Gent wrote admiringly of Hodgson, he apparently only discovered his work fairly late in his own career. Nevertheless, this touch of cosmic horror gives the Carnacki stories an edge, and the Monstrosities themselves are pleasingly creative and varied.

'And so it seems to me we have the conception of a huge psychic world, bred out of the physical, lying far outside of this world and completely encompassing it, except for the doorways about which I hope to tell you some other evening. This enormous psychic world of the Outer Circle "breeds'- if I may use the term, its own psychic forces and intelligences, monstrous and otherwise, just as this world produces its own physical forces and intelligences - beings, animals, insects, etc., monstrous and otherwise.'

There is also a certain amount of effective occult world-building in the fictional grimoires and medieval rituals Carnacki references and uses. He also utilises quasi-scientific (and faintly daft) equipment such as the ‘electric pentacle.’ These techniques result in some fairly tense psychic stakeouts within the pentacle, something that was picked up on and improved upon by Dennis Wheatley in the 1930s, particularly in his magnum opus ‘The Devil Rides Out.’ Wheatley’s ‘Sussamma Ritual’ is also clearly a descendant of Hodgson’s ‘Saaamaaa Ritual.’ Wheatley magnanimously included an edition of the Carnacki stories in his 'Library Of The Occult' collect, a kind of 'Dennis Wheatley presents' . Carnacki also alludes to unwritten cases as Sherlock Holmes does, but overdoes this sometimes, on occasion dropping two or even three onto a single page.

Here's an edition I wish I had

Negatives:

The lack of any characterisation is unfortunate, Carnacki himself remaining something of a cipher. What personality he does possess only shows when he is being condescending to his friends, constantly chiding them with variations of 'Do you understand?!' While the mystery must come first in any detective story, the lack of an interesting protagonist hurts these stories. And the many haunted houses Carnacki visits are interchangeable, as virtually no description is given of any of them. A couple of cases take place in Galway, yet despite the fact that Hodgson actually lived there, he is categorically unable to create place names that sound even remotely Irish.

Finally, there is a kind of first-draft roughness to all the stories that prevents them from being truly great. Each has the germ of a great idea, but needs a spot of polish. The format is rigid in its framing device, yet other details are strangely inconsistent. Some stories end abruptly with Carnacki only guessing at an explanation, others conclude with extended addendums of psychic world-building. There’s even one story with no supernatural element whatsoever (and I'm not talking about the ones that have Scooby-Doo endings!). Given that the ‘psychic detective’ genre had been given a full workout at least ten years earlier with the Flaxman Low stories in 1898, it’s a shame that a brilliant, creative writer such as Hodgson didn’t truly manage to raise the bar from those earlier, fun but silly, stories (it’s worth noting that neither series is truly scary apart from brief effective moments).

Overall, a missed opportunity to push the genre forward, and probably only one for completists or scholars of the genre.

Well, out you go!