The Sherlock Holmes of the Occult World

Algernon Blackwood’s supernatural investigator John Silence comes straight out of
the Sherlock Holmes playbook. Blackwood, almost exactly ten years older than
Arthur Conan Doyle, was hardly the only author of his generation to imitate the
Holmes stories. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, around 800 weekly
periodicals were published in Britain—and 240 of them regularly featured detective
fiction! But Blackwood had a different twist from these others: his protagonist John
Silence wasn’t just an investigator but a mystic and clairvoyant, an adept in esoteric
arts, and master of obscure lore.

Blackwood was reflecting another turn-of-the-century
obsession here. Supernaturalism was a topic of constant
discussion and debate in Victorian England. (One of its
most credulous advocates was Doyle himself; but he kept
his wilder beliefs out of his Holmes stories.) Controversy
raged over the reality of clairvoyance, communication with
the dead, séances, hypnotism and other related phenomena.
When Blackwood published his first John Silence stories, he
drew on these elements, mixing them in with the formulas
of the Holmes-oriented detective story, and created a new
hybrid genre, comprised in almost equal doses of horror,
sci-fi and mystery.

John Silence, a man of independent means, is a medical
doctor. But he is also much more. In his early life, he
"submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once
physical, mental, and spiritual. What precisely this training
had been, or where undergone, no one seemed to know,—for he never spoke of it." But,
we are told, "it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years." Here
we have left the familiar terrain of the detective story far behind, and are now more in
the metaphysical landscapes of Aleister Crowley, Helena Blavatsky, G. I. Gurdjieff
and Carlos Castaneda.

Solving the mystery at hand is only the least of Dr. Silence’s achievements; along the
way, he just might release the entrapped spirit of a mummy, cure a werewolf, or
counter the ominous side effects of consuming too much cannabis indica. Silence
can anticipate the contents of a letter by holding it up to his forehead and feeling its
emanations. He can feel the presence of human beings, or disembodied beings for
that matter, without seeing them—merely through a kind of sixth sense. Sometimes
he can even predict the future.

Blackwood eventually published six John Silence stories.
The psychic doctor first appeared in the collection John
Silence—Physician Extraordinary (1908). An additional
story, "A Victim of Higher Space," wasn’t published until
1917, but it now typically included with the other tales.
Most of these approach novella length, clocking in at
roughly twice the word count of a typical Sherlock
Holmes short story.

And here we encounter the chief problem with the John
Silence stories. They feel padded, almost as if the author
needed more words to justify the publication of a book-
length collection. The repetition and laborious elaboration
of inconsequential details starts as a minor annoyance,
but eventually become burdensome to the reader. Even
the baroque prose of H.P. Lovecraft seems taut and focused
by comparison.

The reader gets a taste of Blackwood’s logorrhea in the
opening story, "A Psychical Invasion." Here our author
devotes almost a thousand words to describing John Silence’s dog and cat. In the
longest story, "The Camp of the Dog," a group of vacationers encounter a menacing
beast, half dog and half wolf, while on a sojourn on a remote island; and here the
description of the solitude of the locale goes on for pages. Indeed, Arthur Conan
Doyle or Edgar Allan Poe could tell a whole story in the space Blackwood requires
to 'set the scene'.

As these two examples might suggest, Blackwood has a fixation with household
pets. Another story, “Ancient Sorceries,” involves a visit to a strange city where the
inhabitants turn into cats in order to practice a peculiarly feline type of witchcraft.
While reading it, I couldn’t help wondering whether Haruki Murakami didn’t draw
inspiration from it for his “Town of Cats” interlude in 1Q84. Murakami is an author
who will tell a story at some leisure, but his ‘magical cat’ narrative, a peculiar
digression in a novel that spans almost one thousand pages, seems fast-paced by
comparison with Blackwood’s slow-motion prose.

Other structural problems mar these stories. In a third of the tales, the character of
John Silence is grafted on to the plot in a clumsy manner. He is not essential to the
narrative, merely a gratuitous add-on—perhaps, once again, to give Blackwood
enough material to fill up a book of John Silence tales. The worst of these stories,
"Secret Worship," involves a silk dealer named Harris who decides to visit his old
school in Germany. Here he encounters some ghastly devil worshippers who want
to turn him into a sacrificial victim. Not only does Blackwood rely on the most clichéd
ending in the history of suspense fiction—a variant on the he-woke-up-and-found-it-
was-all-a-dream—but does so in such a clumsy way that the reader sees it coming
long before the protagonist does. John Silence shows up merely to play the part of
the person who awakens Harris at the climactic moment in the tale.

Yet the most striking shortcoming in these stories comes via the hero himself, who
sadly lives up to the promise of his name. John Silence is, in almost every situation,
taciturn. Unlike Sherlock Holmes who, sooner or later, explains how he solves each
crime, thus allowing the reader to share in the process of analysis and detection,
Silence never explains his techniques. He simply knows the solution to each problem
because of his extraordinary powers of intuition and his personal initiation into
paranormal techniques. The reader may walk away from these stories impressed
with the Psychic Doctor’s abilities, but not with those of author Algernon Blackwood,
who lavishes sentence after sentence on the scenery or pets, but nothing at all on
the process by which his mysteries are solved.

These stories are not without their merits. A Freudian literary critic would find
much to deconstruct in Blackwood’s narratives. “The Camp of the Dog” could be
called a Freudian werewolf story, and the resolution of the plot is ingenious. With
some judicious editing, it might have been a classic. Alas, as it stands, the work is
weighted down by its constant repetitions. The final story, "A Victim of Higher Space,"
starts out with great promise, and Blackwood even introduces a promising minor
character—a meddling butler with psychic intuition—and (for the only time in this
volume) shows that he can write taut dialogue. But the author seems to lose interest
in his plot after a few pages, and mars what could have been a first-rate story with
rushed, clumsy ending.

We cannot deny Blackwood his historical importance. His combination of horror
with elements of mythology and science helped set the stage for the work of H.P.
Lovecraft—a far, far greater talent. And in a few seminal stories not include in the
John Silence collection (notably "The Wendigo" and "The Willows"), he earns our
respect as an influential pioneer of genre fiction. But if you are looking for a heroic
doctor investigator of supernatural phenomenon, put this book aside, and turn
instead to Dr. Van Helsing in Bram Stoker's Dracula or even Dr. Louis Creed in
Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. Dr. John Silence may be a skilled physician, or even
a great clairvoyant, but—alas!—he is also an insufferable bore.

Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from
Basic Books.

Publication Date: September 12, 2016

This is my year of horrible reading.
I am reading the classics of horror fiction
during the course of 2016, and each week will
write about a significant work in the genre.
You are invited to join me in my annus
horribilis. During the course of the year—if
we survive—we will have tackled zombies,
serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and
monsters of all denominations. Check back
each week for a new title...but remember to
bring along garlic, silver bullets and a
protective amulet. Ted Gioia

My Year of Horrible Reading

Week 1:
Dracula
By Bram Stoker

Week 2:
T he Haunting of Hill House
By Shirley Jackson

Week 3:
T ales of Mystery & Imagination
By Edgar Allan Poe

Week 4:
Carrie
By Stephen King

Week 5:
The Passion According to G.H.
By Clarice Lispector

Week 6:
T ales
By H.P. Lovecraft

Week 7:
T he Exorcist
By William Peter Blatty

Week 8:
The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill

Week 9:
N ausea
By Jean-Paul Sartre

Week 10:
I Am Legend
By Richard Matheson

Week 11:
G host Stories of Henry James
By Henry James

Week 12:
Interview with the Vampire
By Anne Rice

Week 13:
A merican Psycho
By Bret Easton Ellis

Week 14:
L ast Stories and Other Stories
By William T. Vollmann

Week 15:
G host Stories of an Antiquary
By M.R. James

Week 16:
R osemary's Baby
By Ira Levin

Week 17:
T he King in Yellow
By Robert W. Chambers

Week 18:
Rebecca
By Daphne Du Maurier

Week 19
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kōbō Abe

Week 20
The Dark Eidolon
by Clark Ashton Smith

Week 21
O ff Season
by Jack Ketchum

Week 22
B ooks of Blood, Vols. 1-3
by Clive Barker

Week 23
The Silence of the Lambs
by Thomas Harris

Week 24
T he Orange Eats Creeps
by Grace Krilanovich

Week 25
S trange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Week 26
P sycho
by Robert Bloch

Week 27
F ledgling
by Octavia E. Butler

Week 28
D emons by Daylight
by Ramsey Campbell

Week 29
T he Complete Short Stories
by Ambrose Bierce

Week 30
P et Sematary
by Stephen King

Week 31
O ur Lady of Darkness
by Fritz Leiber

Week 32
G rendel
by John Gardner

Week 33
W hite is for Witching
by Helen Oyeyemi

Week 34
T he Wasp Factory
by Iain Banks

Week 35
K ing Kong
by Edgar Wallace

Week 36
T he Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole

Week 37
The J ohn Silence Stories
by Algernon Blackwood