World of the Weird, Part III

(This is the third and final post in Rafe McGregor’s series. Part I can be found here, while Part II is here.)

I was pleased to receive an advance copy of the sequel to Dave Zeltserman’s Bad Thoughts, entitled Bad Karma (Five Star, 2009), while I was still writing my review of the former. Bad Karma is set five years on and finds protagonist Bill Shannon living on his police disability pension in Boulder, Colorado. He has been happily reunited with his ex-wife, Susan, and--after her--his main interest in life is studying meditation and doing dream work therapy. He is a licensed private investigator, but rarely takes cases, and then only minor ones … until now. This novel is a fascinating and competent read, and it worked on three levels for me: part clever murder mystery, part personal spiritual journey as Shannon tries to heal his psychological scars, and an informed and impartial commentary on the New Age Movement, presenting both the positive and negative aspects of that subculture. Like so much of Zeltserman’s fiction, Bad Karma is ingenious and original, but what really interested me was the way he dealt with the supernatural element: the exact opposite of his treatment in Bad Thoughts.

In Bad Karma we are told from the outset that Shannon inhabits a world where out-of-body experiences and astral projection are possible. The prospect is handled in a summary of the events from the preceding book, which basically does exactly what Orson Scott Card suggests for speculative-fiction writers: Zeltserman establishes the parameters of Shannon’s universe, and sets out the rules for his particular version of the game of detection. This not only gives Bad Karma an interesting New Age theme--and sets up Shannon as a counterpart to the traditional “occult detective”--but it’s also essential to the solution of the mystery.

I suspect that Zeltserman’s change of direction was because Bad Karma is a sequel, so anyone who had read Bad Thoughts would already know Shannon’s universe; and anyone who hadn’t, needed to be brought up to speed on his back-story, which is impossible to relate without reference to the supernatural. Even more interesting from a writer’s perspective, however, is that both of these approaches work well. In fact, if handled with skill, the revelation of a supernatural plot can be successful at all three potential places: the beginning, middle, and end of a tale. Weird crime films provide popular examples with Fallen (1998), The Ninth Gate (a 1999 adaptation of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s much-lauded 1993 novel, The Dumas Club), and Angel Heart.

I’ve already discussed Angel Heart, which keeps the supernatural denouement until the very end. Fallen makes it fairly obvious from the beginning--not to mention the advertising--that Denzel Washington’s character will be hunting a demon rather than a serial killer. Pérez-Reverte’s novel was actually a post-modern thriller celebrating Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, rather than a weird crime story. Director Roman Polanski increased the original occult theme in The Ninth Tale to the point where the supernatural element dominated the film, and the adaptation provides a fresh take on an excellent book. The realization that otherworldly forces are at play comes in the middle of the film, when Johnny Depp’s protagonist sees Emmanuelle Seigner’s enigmatic character perform some impossible acrobatics. I was going to make the point that what I’ve called “supernatural crime fiction” has been served better on the big screen than in print, but my recent reading of S.T. Joshi’s The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft (1990, University of Texas Press) caused me to reconsider.

My own introduction to H.P. Lovecraft was through The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (first published in Weird Tales in 1941). That novella isn’t one of his more popular stories, but I was instantly hooked. Only after reading Joshi did I realize why: “This novel is, quite simply, a detective story; it may be the greatest supernatural detective story ever written.” Joshi points out that Lovecraft follows the conventions of the Golden Age mystery, and presents the story as a puzzle, with the rigorous placement of clues for the reader. I think he’s quite correct, and the tale unfolds in a similar fashion to William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel (1978), with the supernatural twist being unexpected, unless readers have deciphered the clues accurately. Joshi’s interpretation of Charles Dexter Ward shouldn’t really have come as a surprise to me, as several of Lovecraft’s stories unfold as mysteries, and The Horror at Red Hook (Weird Tales, 1927) is pure supernatural crime, and even has a police detective as the protagonist. I’d also argue that “The Haunter of the Dark” (Weird Tales, 1936), my favorite Lovecraft short story, is as much crime fiction as it is horror fiction.

All of which proves that while supernatural crime, like occult detective fiction, is a tiny field compared to other subgenres of the crime, mystery, and thriller market, it is very much worth visiting.

World of the Weird, Part II

(The opening post in this series can be found here.) I first came to Dave Zeltserman’s self-styled “dark crime fiction” through Small Crimes, his 2008 breakthrough novel. I initially thought that the “dark” was a reference to the kind of noir crime fiction associated with Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, and many others. But Zeltserman has a penchant for going beyond conventional crime fiction and introducing supernatural elements (of varying degrees) into much of his writing. Bad Thoughts (Five Star, 2007) is perhaps the most dramatic example thus far of Zeltserman’s technique. I was quite disappointed when I initially read the novel, which is a slicker, more stylish version of his earlier Fast Lane (Point Blank, 2004). Like Fast Lane, Bad Thoughts uses the device of the detective as a potentially unwitting killer--hunting himself, in effect--a fascinating concept that dates back to Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd (1840), and perhaps beyond. Zeltserman uses his protagonist’s blackouts to create plausibility, but there is a supernatural component in the denouement and I felt that he had “cheated,” though I couldn’t justify my reason. Then, earlier this year I was trying to improve my understanding of the speculative-fiction genre, and I read Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (Writer’s Digest, 2008). Card pointed out that it is essential for any writer in either genre to establish the rules and possibilities of his or her fictional universe as quickly as possible. I realized that this was exactly what had bothered me about Bad Thoughts. Putting the crime-horror crossover in perspective, however, I remembered William Hjortsberg’s classic--and incredibly underrated--Falling Angel (first published in 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, filmed in 1987 as Angel Heart, and currently out of print). It’s very difficult to write about Hjortsberg’s book without giving away the ending, so please skip the next paragraph if you haven’t read Falling Angel yet, or at least seen the film ... Stephen King once said of the novel: “Terrific ... One of a kind ... I’ve never read anything remotely like it.” Falling Angel is a hard-boiled detective story set in New York City in 1959, and the plot follows private eye Harry Angel’s attempt to track down a missing wartime crooner named Johnny Favorite for a rather creepy gentleman called Louis Cyphre. There is an eerie and unsettling atmosphere as Angel learns that Favorite wasn’t a very nice chap at all, even if he was a very successful singer. Angel’s investigation soon degenerates into a series of murders, with everyone he interviews ending up dead. As a reader, one forms the impression that Hjortsberg is pushing himself into a corner and that there’s no way he’s going to be able to explain everything without stretching our suspension of disbelief. He does: we learn that Favorite attempted to renege on a deal with the devil, and the conclusion reveals that it is actually the devil (in the form of Cyphre) who has hired Angel to find Favorite. There is a further twist which I won’t give away here in case you’ve read this paragraph by accident ... So, basically, Falling Angel begins (and arguably even ends) as a mystery; the supernatural elements don’t alter the fact that it is a hard-boiled detective story in the vein of Hammett and Chandler. When I reconsidered its structure and why it worked so well, I thought that maybe Card’s comments weren’t applicable to crime stories with supernatural themes or elements, and returned to Bad Thoughts. The second time around, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book, which I can recommend to anyone who delights in exploring that murky literary ground where horror and crime meet. Zeltserman’s sequel to Bad Thoughts, entitled Bad Karma, is due for publication in November, and I’ll be looking at the contrast between the two novels next time. (To be continued)

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)