FFB: The Listener - Algernon Blackwood

Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay beneath the moon, almost unknown to human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows.

The Listener (1907) is the second collection of short stories from one of the most innovative of British supernatural fiction writers, Algernon Blackwood. The nine stories, two of them of novella length, present a variety of unusual approaches to the traditional ghost tale, as well as one story of crime, all incorporating Blackwood's interest in the power of the imagination and the psychological triggers that make his characters susceptible to other worldly encounters. In many of his tales the narrators and protagonists inadvertently summon the creatures and ghosts by simply thinking about the possibilities of the strange and eerie circumstances they find themselves in. From a petulant writer who demands quiet and no disturbances while he taps out his meager newspaper features to an adventurous camper canoeing the wild waters of the Danube each character finds himself not only at the mercy of his raving imagination but under the influence of powers he cannot nor could not ever fathom. The first three stories in the collection were of most interest to me.

"The Listener" is exemplary of Blackwood's recurring themes and motifs. The unnamed narrator is struggling writer who ekes out his living contributing features to magazines and newspapers. In the first paragraph we learn he has discovered a room in a boarding house at the astonishingly cheap rate of £25 a year. He's an irritable fellow, demanding and a bit patronizing to everyone over the course of the story. His major pet peeve is disturbing outside noises that interfere with his concentration preventing him from completing his work. It all begins with a little boy dragging a toy cart with a missing wheel across the cobblestoned courtyard. The clattering grates on his nerves so much he shouts at the boy to stop, complains to the landlady and anyone else who will listen to get the boy to take the broken toy somewhere else. He's also irritated by frequent visitors to the house and interruptions from the servants. But when the noises turn to a voice in his room whispering at first, then crying out in anguish "Give me your skin!" he begins to understand why he got the room so cheaply. He starts having luridly vivid nightmares, thinks he is going mad, and finally comes to a terrifying realization. The final sentence in the book delivers a sucker punch making all that previously happened even more chilling.

BLACKWOOD MOMENT: ...I find myself suddenly dealing in thoughts and ideas that are not my own! New, strange conceptions, wholly foreign to my temperament, are for ever cropping up in my head. [...] Sometimes they are so strong that I almost feel as if some one were in the room beside me, thinking aloud.

Algernon Blackwood, circa 1907
at the age of 38

In the second story we meet another reporter who has been assigned to cover the upcoming trial of "Max Hensig - Bacteriologist and Murderer". This is a remarkable story for its stunning foreshadowing of a popular subgenre in crime fiction. In addition to Blackwood's fascination of master criminal behavior and abnormal psychology all the rage in popular fiction at this time, this story shares many features with the modern day serial killer novel. Max Hensig may very well be the template character that led to the creation of Hannibal Lecter seventy years later. He is a German doctor on trial for the arsenic poisoning of his wife. He claims innocence of course, dismissing the method employed as one beneath him. in his interviews with Williams, the protagonist reporter, Hensig brags that he has an entirely undetectable means of murder. He would use bacteria and germs to kill his victims and would never be on trial had he truly committed murder. Death of his victims would be ascertained as natural causes, succumbing to a fatal virus or a malingering infection. Hensig even predicts that he will be acquitted of the crime, that Williams will help that verdict come true in his news stories. Much to everyone's shock the prediction comes true. But that is not the end of Williams' relationship with Hensig.

Williams is appalled yet morbidly attracted to Hensig. His journalist colleague known only as "the Senator" warns him to keep the interviews to a minimum. He would avoid Hensig altogether if he were Williams. Throughout the story Hensig is referred to as evil, without morals, a man "to be shunned", and "a monster". The mix of repulsion/attraction Williams has for Hensig is amazingly similar to feelings Clarice Starling has for Lecter as well as many other similar adversarial duos in crime fiction. That Hensig cannot leave Williams alone, that the two have become inextricably linked in a mad battle of wills and for survival, is also strikingly resonant with all serial killer fiction. I strongly recommend this story to anyone interested in the origins of that popular subgenre. The story is rife with fictional and structural motifs that are clearly precursors to the modern serial killer novel.

BLACKWOOD MOMENTS: The Senator and Williams are in a bar in Chinatown. They see a pathetic drunken barfly in a shadowy corner of the room, a woman who has degraded herself so much she no longer resembles a woman. The Senator says, "There's not much to choose between Hensig and that" pointing to the woman. But Williams counters with: "All the difference in the world. She's been decent once, and may be again some day, but the damned doctor has never been anything but what he is -- a soulless, intellectual devil. He doesn't belong to humanity at all."

So gradual sometimes are the approaches of fear that the processes by which it takes possession of a man's soul are often too insidious to be recognized, much less to be dealt with, until their object has been finally accomplished and the victim has lost the power to act.

illustration by Sidney Stanley from
The Willows & Other Queer Tales (Collins, 1923)

The stand out of the collection and one of Blackwood's most often anthologized stories is "The Willows." Here we have all of his trademarks -- a narrator with a wild imagination who witnesses other worldly phenomena, a strong interest in the natural world and its power to terrify and intimidate humans in its awesomeness, and ancient elemental forces that want nothing to do with human interference in their domain no matter how innocuous or unintended. It may very well be the first story that uses the idea of communing with nature and the danger inherent in outdoor adventure to convey horror and fear rather than celebrate tranquility and the beauty of the natural world. Imagine if The Blair Witch Project or Deliverance took place at the Austria-Hungary border and add in some of the most originally conceived weird beings and you might begin to get an idea of what awaits you in "The Willows".

The writing shows Blackwood at his most evocative. In "The Willows" he begins to develop fully his ideas of unearthly creatures that live in an alternate dimension unbeknownst to humans. Forces of nature become terrifying. The beings that relentlessly hunt down the two campers in "The Willows" are invisible most of the time, when they take shape it is difficult for either man to describe them or put into words what they are seeing, hearing and feeling. They are elemental forces, shapeless things that leave odd funnel shaped holes in the sand as the travel or emerge from where they lay in wait.

If all this sounds familiar it should. The ideas expressed in "The Willows" serve as the foundation for the work of H.P. Lovecraft and all his acolytes from the 1920s to the present. At one point the Swedish man who at first is the most intellectual of the two, later the most terrified, refers to the things on the island as "the old ones". As the two men confront their fears and witness literally awesome powers at work it is hard not to think of the horde of creatures that make up Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

BLACKWOOD MOMENTS: Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt. With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different, I felt.

I seemed to be gazing at the personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world's history.

Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a "beyond region," of another scheme of life, another evolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we should be drawn across the frontier into their world.

THINGS I LEARNED: A horse's collar is a cocktail made with bourbon, ginger ale, and a long curling orange rind extending outside the glass. It's apparently still somewhat popular and can be found in modern bartending books though the name has been changed to horse's neck.

In the early twentieth century US news reporters covering the firehouse and arson beat would be issued "a conspicuous brass badge" called a fire badge. As Blackwood tells us in "Max Hensig..." this badge "gave them the right to pass within the police cordon in pursuit of information, and at their own risk."

EASY TO FIND? While the original Eveleigh Nash 1907 collection is a rarity in the book collecting world and will cost you a chunk of change should you want to own a genuine first edition the stories are easily found in modern collections of Blackwood's tales as well as countless supernatural fiction anthologies. I guarantee it will be easy to find most of these stories, especially "The Willows", both in book format and for free at various online fiction websites.

Entire Contents of The Listener
"The Listener"
"Max Hensig -- Bacteriologist and Murderer"
"The Willows"
"The Insanity of Jones"
"The Dance of Death"
"The Old Man of Vision"
"May Day Eve"
"Miss Slumbubble--and Claustrophobia"
"The Woman's Ghost Story"

FFB: The Hound of Death - Agatha Christie

Odhams Press (1933), True 1st edition

Agatha Christie shows a completely different side of her writing talents in a little discussed collection of short stories called The Hound of Death (1933). Perhaps the reason The Hound of Death is so little known and never saw multiple reprints was due to the simple fact that it is not a collection of crime stories, but mostly tales of supernatural and fantasy. Can Agatha chill the bone as well as she does with bamboozling the mind in her well known whodunits? I think she does very well in some instances.

The book had an unusual publishing history in that it was originally offered with a handful of other books (including The Venner Crime by John Rhode) by independent publisher Odhams Press as part of a subscription series. The books were available only by purchase using coupons (plus seven shillings) that were collected from their magazine The Passing Show as a promotion for the revival of that journal. The book was later reissued by Collins Crime Club in 1936. The stories from The Hound of Death appear in three separate collections in the US. The bulk of them are split between The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories and The Golden Ball and Other Stories. One single story, "The Last Séance", appears in Double Sin and Other Stories. All three story collections are currently in print -- as are all of Christie's books -- in trade paperback and eBook editions from William Morrow in the US.

My intuition told me that many of the stories in The Hound of Death were written in her very early career. Further research proved my assumptions to be correct. Though the book was published in 1933 all of the stories were written much earlier with about half of them having first appeared in magazines throughout the 1920s. The earliest (and, in my opinion, one of the most effective) is "The Call of Wings." Written prior to World War I it shows a novice writer's love of symbolism, allegory and ironic endings. It's her most original story of a supernatural type in the entire book, perhaps her entire career.

Silas Hamer is typical of Christie's protagonists in these supernatural shorts.  He proclaims, "I don't believe in anything I can't see, hear and touch."  This is usually a sign that the character will encounter some life altering event that will challenge his rigid world view. And no sooner has Silas uttered those words then he meets up with a mysterious legless cripple playing enchanting music on  "a strange instrument whose notes were much higher and clearer than those of a flute."  The music is bewitching, transcendent and literally uplifting.  Silas finds himself floating and hovering above the ground.  It terrifies him and he finds himself clutching at a stone buttress in a nearby wall to keep himself from flying away. Later he attempts to explain what happens to him each time he hears the haunting melody:

"--the music carries me there--not direct, but a succession of waves, each reaching higher than the last, until the highest point where one can go no further. I stay there until I'm dragged back. It isn't a place, it's more a state. [...] [T]here were sensations of light..then of sound...then of colour...All very vague and unformulated. It was more the knowledge of things than seeing or hearing them."

"The Call of Wings" reminded me of a weird short story by Lovecraft -- "The Music of Erich Zann." Like Lovecraft and Manly Wade Wellman Christie's supernatural tales find her characters drawn to mysterious forces in the past, ancient unknown powers that somehow find their way into the hands of men and women of the 1920s.  In "The Gipsy" we find Mrs. Haworth who has a gift of psychic powers and the ability to recognize those powers in others.  Sister Marie Angelique, the nun thought to be mad in "The Hound of Death," somehow manages to harness an ancient power and summon a spectral being of horrible force to help defeat an attack on her convent by German soldiers. Even the sinister "half English/half Oriental" Lady Carmichael consults an old book among the dusty tomes in her husband's library to bring about the wicked transformation of her stepson. Occasionally, subtle allusions are made that intimate ancient creatures are present. It is hinted that the legless cripple in "The Call of Wings" is an incarnation of Pan who, tired of his goat legs, amputated them himself.

I found several influences and signs that Christie perhaps was familiar with the work of Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson and perhaps even Margery Lawrence. She follows a formula for many of these stories that those three writers all share in their treatment of the occult detective tale. A narrator listens to a story of an other worldly encounter from a friend. The narrator then does some investigative work to learn the truth behind the seemingly implausible or impossible events his friend related. In many instances during the course of that investigation the narrator also experiences some sort of supernatural event that explains the mysterious events. This is the formula used in nearly all of the stories. In one story –"The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael" – the model of a John Silence or Dr. Miles Pennoyer tale is imitated in full. Dr. Carstairs, a psychiatrist who could easily have become a series character, travels to Arthur Carmichael's estate in the hopes of treating the man's mental disturbance but instead winds up investigating a haunting and encounters genuine supernatural events that are at the root of Carmichael's personality transformation.

Psychic ability and mediums, however, are Christie's favorite other-worldly topic to explore. We find them in one form or another in "The Red Signal", "S.O.S", and "The Gipsy." Ghosts and haunted houses are the runner-up and occur in "The Lamp", "Wireless" (retitled "Where There's A Will" in the US editions), and "The Mystery of the Blue Jar."  Oddly enough I found her ghost stories to be the weakest of the lot, especially "The Lamp" a slight and simple tale of a lonely child ghost with the most predictable outcome of the lot. She works best when she is writing a crime tale that adds a tinge of the supernatural as in "Accident" or "The Red Signal," a nicely done story that shows a talent for the type of misdirection she will come to master in her later novels.

The Hound of Death and Other Stories
"The Hound of Death"
"The Red Signal"
"The Fourth Man"
"The Gypsy"
"The Lamp"
"Wireless"
"The Witness for the Prosecution"
"The Mystery of the Blue Jar"
"The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael"
"The Call of Wings"
"The Last Seance"
"S.O.S."

Number Seven Queer Street - Margery Lawrence

Robert Hale, 1st UK edition

Why is it that the majority of the occult detective are always physicians? Or psychiatrists? Or therapists of some sort? Granted there is a strong influence of John Silence hiding in the shadows whether or not the writer is courteous enough to acknowledge Algernon Blackwood's "grandfather of occult detectives." In a straight detective story the private eye or other investigator is merely seeking the solution to a mysterious crime. Nab the killer or thief and the problem is over. All is set right. In an occult mystery the culprit, more often than not, is rarely human and the problem has left deep emotional scars on the victim - if he is lucky to be still alive. Several writers have chosen physicians as their occult detectives to become caretakers of the soul. It is not only a crime or mysterious occurrence that must be put right, there is healing of the psyche that must take place.

Take Margery Lawrence's creation Dr. Miles Pennoyer. He owes much to John Silence. (In fact, Lawrence credits both Blackwood and Dion Fortune's Dr. Taverner as being major influences in her writing these stories). Here is a near perfect clone of Blackwood's physician of the extraordinary. Pennoyer first appears in  Number Seven Queer Street in which he battles a Chinese demon, the ghost of a suicidal architect, a sinister sorcerer, a snakelike apparition, and many other strange and weird entities. Like Silence, Pennoyer traveled in the Far East and underwent vigorous training in the mystic arts. Like Silence he takes clients who are troubled by matters that are beyond the understanding of medical science and beyond the scope of the law.

He says to his chronicler Jerome Latimer:

"I have been trained not to disregard phrases, however apparently trivial, that come into mind. They are indicative‚ descriptive perhaps, is a better word‚ of impressions; and though words may not be important, impressions most certainly are."

Here is the key to Pennoyer's approach to solving or even diagnosing his client's problem. Unlike many of the rational detectives of mystery and crime fiction these occult or psychic detectives rely heavily on intuition. And truly there is something to be said of the "gut instinct" even if some of the occult detectives also claim to have extrasensory perception. In Miles Pennoyer's case his special vegetarian diet is key to maintaining his special skills. Having a body unpolluted by meat or alcohol helps heighten his senses and aids in communication with psychic forces. Is this Margery speaking to us here? Perhaps she, too, was an avid vegetarian teetotaler. It certainly is mentioned often enough to seem like proselytizing.

For the most part, Pennoyer (and one assumes Lawrence) is interested in matters of the heart. Of the seven very long tales in Number Seven Queer Street nearly all of them deal with some aspect of love relationships. Pennoyer spends most of the story trying to figure out what psychic connection must be fixed before two troubled parties can finally be at peace. Often one of the parties is human and the other is not.  Always some element of the supernatural or occult is at play. There is the demon lover who haunts the man in "The Case of the Bronze Door;" the strong bond between a Scottish maid and a stray dog that leads Pennoyer to believe the dog is a reincarnated human soul in "The Case of the Ella MacLeod;" and the curious whip-like mark on George Kynaston's arm that has some link to a ghostly manifestation in "The Case of the Young Man with the Scar." Perhaps the best example of this psychic connection problem occurs in "The Case of the White Snake."

Margery Lawrence, circa 1919

In this weird tale an orphanage is haunted by nightly visits from a spectral snake. It seems to be fixated on one particular charge, Colette, a four year-old girl rescued from a bombed village in France. Pennoyer stays up late as a guardian and notes the snake is in fact an emanation that takes the form of a cord or cable that runs the length of the courtyard outside the girl's bedroom window and ends at the window of a guest house. Lawrence's point in seen quite clearly here:

"Anything from the Other Side is apt to look sinister to people who don't understand it and its reason for appearing ....what does emerge is that there is a strong psychic link... If you had psychic insight you would see that husbands and wives, lovers, sisters and brothers, parents and children who truly love each other are linked by a sort of psychic umbilical cord."

In "The White Snake" that cord literally takes shape to connect the child to a loved one who happens to be staying on the grounds of the orphanage. Pennoyer elaborates further when Latimer scoffs at the psychic link claim.

"But even if there's no link of this life between them...that does not mean there is no connection between their souls, their older selves. There may be a very strong connection there that dates from some previous life. A connection that is still so strong that in sleep it reaches out blindly, gropingly, hungering to renew the link that once existed unbroken between them."

By this third tale in the collection the reader sees that Lawrence intends her stories to transcend the horror element in favor of human emotion and sentiment. She uses motifs of ghost stories and weird tales to introduce unusual "psychic relationships" that have gone awry. Pennoyer enters the picture to "heal" those relationships in a sort of occult therapy session. He even has a bag of tricks — the so-called bogey bag — to help him out when straight intuition and human intervention will not alone solve the problems. Latimer describes the bag as "containing all sorts of oils and unguents, queer-looking metal contraptions, robes and headgear, various documents and a book or two, packets of herbs, odd-looking amulets, all manner of things that might be needed by my colleague in his frequent battles with the Forces of the Outer Dark." That's some kind of suitcase!

Another recurring theme in Lawrence's collection is that of redemption best illustrated in the second tale "The Case of the Haunted Cathedral." This is an intricately layered story that starts out as a straightforward haunting story but soon becomes a story of a hidden crime. Pennoyer visits the cathedral and witnesses not one but two separate manifestations. It appears that the cathedral may be haunted but the ghost is haunted by another ghost! The answer lies in a hidden diary and the solution calls for an elaborate exorcism. The plot is convoluted and asks the reader to swallow a bit too much all at once.

Arkham House, 1st U.S. edition

"The Case of the Moonchild" is very much like a Sax Rohmer thriller with its baroque depiction of the occultist Father Aloysius. He has an affected manner and dress similar to the villains in Fire-Tongue and The Brood of the Witch Queen. He is even accompanied by a bodyguard who seems to have escaped from the extras cast of a Fu Manchu story. There is Svengali-like mesmerism, a jeweled cross with inscribed symbols of an ancient cult, and the discovery of a pillow stuffed with the leaves of a Greek plant called the Diktamnos. This story, unlike the others, is focused on an occult plot and reaches its climax in a richly detailed, eerie ritual performed on the moonlit grounds of a girls' academy. Also, Jerome Latimer narrates this story from his own point of view and for once takes an active part in the storyline. Probably because it abandons the love relationship motif (although the psychic link element is still present) I found this story to be one of the better tales as far as an entertaining thriller.

Critic Everett Bleiler, however, prefers the final story "The Case of the Leannabh Sidhe" as the best example of Lawrence's handling of the supernatural. In it we are treated to yet another child with a problem that is beyond normal comprehension and regular doctors and priests have been unable to explain. Ev is not too kind with Margery. His entry for Lawrence's book in The Guide to Supernatural Fiction says she has a nice touch with creating stories but that they are often "drowning in words." I will agree with him on that point. She has an unnecessary habit of veering off on tangents that do nothing but annoy the reader and distract from the main point. But here in "Leannabh Sidhe" the tale is fairly uncluttered and is probably even better as a genuine detective story than any of the others.

The plot is a weird spin on the "Bad Seed/Devil Child" subgenre. Patrick Flaherty, the bad child, is not exactly a murderer but he seems responsible for unfortunate accidents that befall anyone who crosses him. Some of those accidents prove fatal. He used to be a happy-go-lucky boy, but a strange transformation overcame shortly after his father died in a car accident back in Ireland. Now Patrick grows irritable and angry at the mention of his former homeland. He spends most of his time playing with animals (except dogs; they shun him everywhere) and intimidating nearly every adult he encounters. Only his aunt and a servant have the courage to face up to him and his antics. Patrick's mother has been reduced to a timid yes-woman, completely in her son's power She has turned to her sister, Miss Cargill, for advice on how to return Patrick to his normal boyhood instead of the "strange otherness, this thing not quite human," he has become. Enter Dr. Miles Pennoyer who will play the part of Patrick's new tutor in order to observe his behavior and interaction up close.

Of all the tales in the volume, "Leannabh Sidhe" is the best constructed mystery story. True there is a strong supernatural element, however, the story overall is written in a manner to tease the reader, to get him asking questions just as a lover of whodunits would: What exactly happened to Patrick? Why does everyone refer to him as a "thing" and not a boy? What is in that sketchbook he keeps secret from everyone? Why does he continually make fun of his own name and claim to have a different one? There are many more questions an astute and curious reader will ask throughout this well written, suspenseful tale. All those questions will be answered. A clever reader who has a knowledge of Celtic legends and mythology will be able to outguess Pennoyer before he announces to Miss Cargill his final diagnosis and cure for Patrick.

"Leannabh Sidhe" is a strong story, but I still prefer the lurid nature of "The Moonchild" over this drawn out affair that is bogged down with multiple third hand narratives by characters who have overheard conversations, a popular motif in detective stories and novels. Pennoyer must travel all the way to Ireland and hunt down a seemingly insignificant maid to get a first hand account (finally!) and receive the final piece to the puzzle of Patrick's transformation. By that time, all the clues have been presented and the reader is fairly certain what and who is responsible for the bizarre personality change. The climax — rather Lovecraftian in its descriptions — in which Pennoyer must perform an ancient ritual armed with occult tools from his bogey bag and ending in a face-off with Patrick's true father is well worth the wait.

The Miles Pennoyer stories were published in two collections.

Number Seven Queer Street (Robert Hale, 1945)
Master of Shadows (Robert Hale, 1959)

There was also a U.S. edition of Number Seven Queer Street published by Arkaham House. Unfortunately, for copyright purposes two stories were excluded in that edition. The U.K. edition has all seven tales, the US version only five.

[NOTE: I wrote this in 2001 for "The Weird Review" - an e-zine devoted to the discussion of classic and vintage supernatural and weird fiction. I heartily recommend it for anyone interested in broadening their choice of reading material in supernatural fiction - especially the Victorian and Edwaradian era ghost stories of so many incomparable writers.]