World of the Weird, Part I

I’ve recently developed an interest in crime stories that contain one or more elements of the traditional weird tale. The idea of crossovers in these genres should come as no surprise: Edgar Allan Poe, who invented the modern detective story in English with The Murders in the Rue Morgue (first published in 1841), is best known for his tales of gothic horror. There is, of course, a subgenre of crime writing called “occult detective fiction,” although that isn’t quite what I mean. For the occult detective, however, there is no better resource than Mark Valentine’s The Black Veil & Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths (Wordsworth Editions, 2008), which--in addition to being comprehensive--is also a great value for the money at £2.99 (or $4.92 for American readers). Valentine looks at the early beginnings of the occult in detective fiction and identifies the birth of a new genre in 1898, with the Flaxman Low stories by E. and H. Heron (aka Kate and Hesketh Prichard).

Algernon Blackwood, Sax Rohmer, Aleister Crowley, and Dennis Wheatley were all to produce their own variants on this theme, but the most famous occult detective of the early 20th century was William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder. His career was regrettably cut short when Hodgson was killed on the Western Front in 1917. The Black Veil actually takes its title from a Carnacki pastiche, written some 75 years later and reproduced in the collection. The Carnacki stories are very much in the shadow of Sherlock Holmes, but offer an original element: some of the cases he investigates involve the occult, while others are fraudulent or have mundane explanations. Often, the real cause isn’t revealed until the very end, which adds to the suspense.

More recently, Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins novels, featuring an Anglican exorcist from Herefordshire, have been a huge success; the 10th entry in that series, To Dream of the Dead, was published in 2008. Another exorcist, Felix Castor, has also become a series character, and Mike Carey’s fifth Castor novel, The Naming of the Beasts, is due for release in the UK this September.

Although I enjoy occult detective tales, I think they’re always going to occupy something of a niche market, and my real preference is for supernatural crime stories: specifically, crime fiction which has a large or small element of the supernatural introduced into what remains a mystery. Where occult detective stories tend to follow a mystical sleuth--usually an exorcist or a paranormal investigator--the supernatural crime story does not. It masquerades (or perhaps even is) a “straight” crime or mystery tale, using the conventions of the genre, but with a supernatural thread. This sounds a little obscure, so I was very pleased to read an article not long ago, written by Peter Guttridge (author of the Nick Madrid series), in which he selected three inimitable crime novels: Trent’s Last Case, by E.C. Bentley (1913); Falling Angel, by William Hjortsberg (1978); and Tokyo, by Mo Hayder (2002).

Falling Angel is one of the finest examples of supernatural crime fiction: it begins as a hard-boiled detective story (and arguably ends as one as well), yet could equally be considered horror (or perhaps dark fantasy--I’ve never been sure where the border line is drawn). Tokyo is a mirror-image: while it is written in the style of horror fiction, it is essentially a crime story. (Trent’s Last Case has nothing to do with horror fiction, but is worth mentioning as the first novel in which the detective gets it wrong--twice, if I recall correctly). Another example of supernatural crime fiction is Bad Thoughts (2007), by Dave Zeltserman.

Next time I make an appearance in The Rap Sheet I intend to look at Bad Thoughts and Falling Angel together.

(To be continued)