The occult detective tradition has encompassed characters as famous as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Van Helsing. But the most influential fictional detective to take on the profession of full-time ghost-chasing was a creation of Englishman, Algernon Blackwood. That first famous ghost-breaker was John Silence.
Blackwood created his investigator more by accident than intention when he approached his publisher in 1908 about a collection of stories about “psychic” phenomenon. The bookseller, Evelyn Nash, suggested that the book might do better if it were tied together by a central character. Blackwood explains in his 1942 author’s note to the second edition:
How these stories came into being may possibly be of interest to a reader. They were originally separate imaginative studies of various “psychic” themes, and it was on the suggestion of Mr. Nash, who had already published two books for me, that I grouped them under the common leadership of a single man, Dr. John Silence. The title was due to a chance question he put to his intelligent and gifted “reader”, Maude ffoulkes, as we sat at dinner one night discussing the stories and searching for a good title: “Wasn’t there somebody or other in your family,” he asked, “with the name of Silence?”
And so John Silence was born. Hubbard, Silence’s largely anonymous Watson and secretary, tells us about John Silence:
By his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was rich by accident, and by choice — a doctor. That a man of independent means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help themselves, puzzled them. After that, it irritated them, and, greatly to his own satisfaction, they left him to his own devices.
Dr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither consulting-room, book-keeper, nor professional manner. He took no fees, being at heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time did no harm to his fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted non-paying cases, and cases that interested him for some very special reason.
Like Sherlock Holmes, Silence is that rare breed who need not work for a living and only pursues that which fascinates him, having studied widely in areas largely unrecognized by others. And yet, like Watson, he is a man of medicine.
But there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the “Psychic Doctor”. In order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had 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, as indeed, he betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan, — but the fact that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the genuineness of his attainments.
Here Silence begins to diverge from the Holmesian model, taking after Van Helsing. Though Holmes also sought the unusual (to be explained logically and rationally: “… life is infinitely stranger than any thing which the mind of man could invent.”) Sherlock had no use for the supernatural, theorizing if the answer lie in the Hereafter, then the matter was beyond even his ability to explain. Upon the subject of vampires he cried: “The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.” While Silence might share Holmes’ disbelief in the walking undead, the doctor knows about many outre things which do in fact exist, though often mistaken by the layman. This was an attitude shared by Silence’s creator.
THE GHOST MAN
Born in 1869, Algernon Blackwood grew up in Crayford, Kent, in a strict evangelical family. He was schooled at Wellington College, Edinburgh University and in Germany. Once into adulthood he traveled widely and earned a living as a newspaper reporter in America. With the publication of John Silence, Blackwood’s third book, he turned to writing fiction professionally.
Blackwood was the perfect turn-of-the-century ghost story writer. Unlike most modern horror writers, Blackwood believed in the psychic world, even had a membership in the Golden Dawn Society, with compatriots of other-worldliness such as Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, Oupensky and Yeats. Known as the Ghost-Man in later years, he read many of his works over BBC radio and television.
The Silence stories were so successful, that like Doyle, the author received invitations to investigate similar situations. Some of these Blackwood did accept. Others were referred to friends. One such case involved a ghost that first appeared as a pair of boots, but slowly grow up from there. The spirit was a Franciscan monk who had come to a widow’s home to find spiritual ease. The widow helped him as well as others, even animal spirits.
THE CASES OF JOHN SILENCE
The opening story of John Silence is “A Psychical Invasion” which serves as an excellent introduction to Silence and his methods. The tale revolves around a humor writer named Pender who has experimented with hashish and contacted some evil force in his home. The “invasion” of the title refers to how this presence controls his thoughts and ruins his work, producing only startling black pieces which his wife burns (shades of Robert Louis Stevenson).
Silence attacks the problem by researching the background of the house. He also uses a cat and dog to detect the invader. The first time the entity appears, Smoke the cat, becomes euphoric, while Flame the dog, growls and barks. Silence watches with fascination as Smoke rubs its neck on an invisible leg.
The next encounter proves more dangerous: “There was a rushing, sweeping noise against the window-panes, and simultaneously a sound of something brushing against the door … it was just then he divined suddenly from the cat’s behavior and attitude that it was not only a single companion it had ushered into the room, but several … ” The evil entity is so powerful that it commands other spirits within the area. The controller attempts to possess the doctor, making him see phantom cats.
Silence defeats the spirit, who we find out in the denouement “to have been a woman of singularly atrocious life and character who finally suffered death by hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the whole of England …” The murderess had lived in a larger house built on the same spot as the Pender home. “He began to breathe deeply and regularly, and at the same time absorb into himself the forces opposed to him, and to turn them to his own account.” This is one of the mysterious secrets Silence has at his disposal.
“Ancient Sorceries”, Blackwood tells us in the Author’s Note, was derived from a visit to Laon. “The picturesque little town, perched on its hill, had an extraordinary atmosphere, and though I dare not pretend that the inhabitants turned into cats, they certainly betrayed all the feline characteristics I have tried to describe …” And describe he does, at length. There is no better example of this than the feline sense of strangeness of the matronly Innkeeper:
“… She was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed to swim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged, so to speak. But she had great dark, vivacious eyes that countered the bulk of her body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair against he sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch occurred to him.
The plot concerns an English traveler man named Arthur Vezin. Traveling by train through France, the little man disembarks on a spurious whim, stranding himself in the small village. The inhabitants watch him covertly every second of the day, which ends early for him, with sundown. Vezin suspects some mystery but he can not discover it.
The short visit grows longer and Vezin begins to find himself suffering from : “… a distressing sensation. A numbness had crept over his will till it had become almost incapable of decision.” It is while he is trying to steel his will that he meets the Innkeeper’s daughter, Ilse, a lithe, beautiful supple creature that fires a new passion within his middle-aged heart. A courtship begins until Ilse gives this terrifying revelation:
“The real life I speak of … is the old, old life within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged, and to which you still belong …You came here with the purpose of seeking it, and the people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide … It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you feel they watch you .. Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you … But I …I possess the spell to conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love … I mean to have you, for you love me, and are utterly at my mercy.”
The spell is strong on Vezin, an uncontrollable desire to run on all fours and dance with the girl and her mother, the princess and the queen, but the little Englishman fights it, rushing to escape. Night has fallen and before him he sees what has wanted to know, the inhabitants of the village gathering, changing their forms from human to large cats, as they gather for their sabbath. Vezin flees, is lured once more by Ilse, but stumbles on a stone and escapes at the last second. Down in the valley below the Englishman, the cat-folk dance and worship the Evil One.
John Silence’s role in “Ancient Sorceries” is small, to wrap up the explanation of Vezin’s narrative which was given to the doctor. Silence, explains latter to Hubbard that Vezin’s family had originally come from Laon:
“‘The whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact with the living forces still intense enough to hang about the place, and, by a most singular chance too, with the very souls who had taken part with him in the events of that particular life. For the mother and daughter who impressed him so strangely must have been leading actors, with himself, in the scenes and practices of witchcraft which at that period dominated the imaginations of the whole country.'”
What had seemed five days to Vezin was only two, taking place largely in his mind or some other reality, as Silence visit to Laon finds a very different place and people. Blackwood would use this same dream-reality ploy in “Secret Worship”.
“The Nemesis of Fire” is the longest of the Silence stories, making a solid center piece to the book. Blackwood uses a consciously Holmesian framework. Silence and Hubbard are invited out to the Manor House of Colonel Horace Wragge, a man of action who is sorely tested by the strange occurrences that have effected his family for decades. The Colonel’s sister is an invalid, a victim of the mysterious fire-starting spirit. Hubbard, who in the best Watsonian tradition has no idea what the truth is, gets little from Silence (who like Holmes) merely suggests that the solution lies with “‘Egypt,’ he whispered, ‘Egypt.'”
Silence investigates, in particular The Twelve Acre Wood, a plantation of swamp trees next to the Manor where the strange creature originally killed Wragge’s brother, the grounds-keeper and injured the sister. After a splendidly written chase through the wood, Silence discovers the nature of the monster, a fire elemental, harnessed eons ago by an ancient spell.
Silence, Hubbard and Wragge conduct a secret ceremony at night in the Gothic-looking laundry shed. The ritual conjures up the elemental and weakens it. The participants meet the force behind the invasion, a strange figure who speaks of Egypt through the medium of Wragge’s possessed body: “I have seen my divine Father Osiris .. I have scattered the gloom of the night. I have burst through the earth, and am one with the starry Deities!”(P. 219)
After the encounter, Silence is willing to reveal most things: that the laundry sits on one end of a tunnel that leads to the Twelve Acre Wood where Wragge’s brother buried a mummy he had stolen from Egypt. The brother had concealed the corpse in a failed attempt to stop the guardian elemental, which could not be confined to the wood by a spell of fire. The three investigators dig at the point of the burnt spots, gain the tunnel and find the mummy smelling of bitumen and nitre underneath a wooden platform:
It is difficult to say exactly why the sight should have stirred in me so prodigious an emotion of wonder and veneration, for I have had not a little to do with mummies, have unwound scores of them, and even experimented magically with not a few. But there was something in the sight of that grey and silent figure, lying in its modern box of lead and wood at the bottom of this sandy grave, swathed in the bandages of centuries and wrapped in the perfumed linen that the priests of Egypt had prayed over with their mighty enchantments thousands of years before …
John Silence examines the body, finding the odd equipment of a mummy: hieroglyphic plates, “four jars with the heads of the hawk, the jackal, the cynocephalus and man, the jars in which were placed the hair, the nail parings, the heart, and other special portions of the body”, only the sacred scarabaeus is missing.
At finding this out, Wragge becomes upset, for his sister has the jewel, explaining the frequent attacks on her by the fire-elemental. The soldier cries, “I knew nothing.” Dr. Silence announces that the jewel must be returned when something ghastly enters the tunnel and proceeds toward the diggers:
A distant shuffling noise became distinctly audible coming from a point about half-way down the tunnel we had so laboriously penetrated … The Colonel and myself stood on either side of the opening. I still held my candle and was ashamed of the way it shook, dripping the grease all over me… For five minutes, that seemed fifty, we stood waiting, looking from each other’s faces to the mummy, and from the mummy to the hole, and all the time the shuffling sound, soft and stealthy, came gradually nearer. The tension … was very near the breaking point when at last the cause of the disturbance reached the edge … The next second, uttering a cry of curious quality, it came into view … And it was far more distressingly horrible than anything I had anticipated. For the sight of Egyptian monster, some god of the tombs, or even of some demon of fire, I think I was already half prepared; but when, instead, I saw the white visage of Miss Wragge … followed by her body crawling on all-fours, her eyes bulging and reflecting the yellow glare of the candles …
As Miss Wragge approaches the corpse, scarabeaus jewel held in extended hands, the mummy rises to claim its prize. Hubbard watches with locked fascination, but sand flies about creating a screen, behind which no one can see. After it falls, the men find the woman lying on the inert mummy, her face “Scorched and blasted.” The story ends there.
“In Secret Worship” an Englishman silk merchant named Harris returns after thirty years to a secluded Germany village where he lived for two years as a student. The trip begins with nostalgic beauty, but goes oddly wrong after he mentions his old school at the inn where he meets another Englishman with “rather wonderful eyes”. When Harris speaks of the school, the local people disassociate themselves from him without explanation.
But Harris thinks nothing of it and walks to the old school, where he is welcomed warmly. After sharing cigars and coffee the merchant realizes the brotherhood have a startling resemblance to the same men who had taught him so long ago. It is only once he wants to leave that Harris begins to perceive the truth: “And then suddenly he had a flash of keener perception, and realized with a creeping of his flesh that he had all along misinterpreted — grossly misinterpreted all they had been saying.”
Bruder Kalkmann, the leader of the priests, congratulates Harris for “this last visit of his”. The merchant panics as the brothers begin their midnight ceremony to Asmodelius. He even finds his actions no longer his own as he says “I came here as a willing Opfer … and I am quite ready.” The priests chant, conjuring up an amorpheus grey entity. “… there rose into view far up against the night sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. A kind of grey glory enveloped it so that it resembled a steel-cased statue, immense, imposing, horrific in its distant splendour …”
Surrounding the intended sacrifice are the ghosts and spirits of past victims. “… he saw float past him in the air, an array of white and piteous countenances that seemed to beckon and gibber at him as though he were already one of themselves.” . And finally, the executioner comes with the chord for strangling the voluntary victim.
But Harris is spared his fate, as the Englishman with “rather wonderful eyes” appears. The kind face gives Harris the strength to fight, calling out. The words cause the priests to shriek “A Man of power is among us! A man of God!” and dissipate along with Asmodelius. Harris wakes to find himself sitting in a ruin, talking to the Englishman, much in the same way Arthur Vezin escaped the witches in “Ancient Sorceries”. The man explains everything as the two walk back to the inn.
“That school building has long been in ruins … it was burnt down by order of the Elders of the community at least ten years ago … The village has been uninhabited ever since. But the simulacra of certain ghastly events that took place under that roof in past days still continue. And the ‘shells’ of the chief participants still enact there the dreadful deeds that led to its final destruction, and to the destruction of the whole settlement. They were devil-worshippers!”
The denouement of the tale concerns the following day, when Harris wonders about the other tourist who followed him to the ruin and saved his life, for he knows not his name. He checks the hotel register and reads: “John Silence, London.”
Like much of Blackwood’s writing, an autobiographical germ lies in “Secret Worship”. He recalls the school of his youth: “This Moravian settlement had actually almost a saintly atmosphere, the schoolmasters being honest, upstanding Christians, yet some mysterious law of compensation apparently operated in me, so that I pitched my story into the heart of medieval Satan-Worship.”
Again in “The Camp of the Dog”, basing the story on an actual event, Blackwood turns a summer’s camping on a remote Swedish island into a tale of lycanthropy. “Having hired the ten-acre island from the Swedish Government for £1 a week, our party of six, equipped with tents and tinned food, procured boats in Stockholm and made our way north to the wild island where we spent two months holiday. Though none of our six was a ‘vampyre,’ the story came to me as we sat talking round our camp-fire.”
The plot of the story concerns a group of tourists who are haunted by a dog which leaves evidence but seems to have no form. After several visits to the tent of Joan Maloney, Hubbard witnesses a strange sight:
Then I saw that it was not Sangree at all. It was an animal … it was about the size of a large dog, but at the same time it was utterly unlike any animal that I had ever seen … It seemed to leap forward between me and Sangree — in fact to leap upon Sangree, for its dark body hid him momentarily from view … The creature seemed somehow to melt away into him, almost as though it belonged to him and were a part of himself …
John Silence comes to investigates at his secretary’s request, and in his usual manner, soon has the answer: Sangree, the Canadian, has a psychic body which detaches from his physical body once outside the confining surroundings of the city. The man has a burning desire for the daughter of the minister, but will not approach her about his feelings because of his weak nature. The “Fluid Body” which detaches itself during deep sleep offers a fascinating theory for the existence of Lycanthropy.
Silence’s cure is simple: Sangree and Joan are meant for each other and should acknowledge their love. Only then will the Double disappear. Silence warns against harming the lycanthropic double, for any harm that befalls it will kill its host. The minister disregards Silence’s advice, even as Joan, the daughter admits her love for Sangree, shooting the “dog” in the face. Fortunately the wound is not severe though the Canadian will always bear the scars of the bullet on his cheek.
One Silence story, “A Victim of Higher Space” appeared outside the volume bearing his name. It was written in 1914 and shows Blackwood re-creating his famous character. While the John Silence stories take place largely out of doors or in remote places, “A Victim of Higher Space” takes place in Silence’s home. We get a detailed portrait of the man and his working space from an omniscient narrator, rather than Hubbard:
First we meet Barker, Silence’s serving man:
“…he was pleased that the slight signs of psychic intuition which had induced him to engage Barker had not entirely failed at the first trial. Dr. Silence sought for this qualification in all his assistants, from secretary to serving man, and if it surrounded him with a somewhat singular crew, the drawbacks were more than compensated for on the whole by their occasional flashes of insight.
Next we get a tour of Silence’s special facility for dealing with outre patients:
There were two different reception-rooms in Dr. Silence’s house. One (intended for persons who imagined they needed spiritual assistance when really they were only candidates for the asylum) had padded walls, and was well supplied with various concealed contrivances by means of which sudden violence could be instantly met and overcome. It was, however, rarely used. The other, intended for the reception of genuine cases of spiritual distress and out-of-the-way afflictions of a psychic nature, was entirely draped and furnished in a soothing deep green, calculated to induce calmness and repose of the mind.
Inside this room:
…the armchair in which the patient was always directed to sit, was nailed to the floor, since immovability tended to impart this same excellent characteristic to the occupant. Patients invariably grew excited when talking about themselves, and their excitement tended to confuse their thoughts and to exaggerate their language. The inflexibility of the chair helped to counter-act this. After repeated endeavors to drag it forward, or push it back, they ended by resigning themselves to sitting quietly. And with the futility of fidgeting there followed a calmer state of mind.
Also at hand:
Upon the floor, and at intervals in the wall immediately behind, were certain tiny green buttons, practically unnoticeable, which on being pressed permitted a soothing and persuasive narcotic to rise invisibly about the occupant of the chair. The effect upon the excitable patient was rapid, admirable and harmless.
Before Silence meets his patients he likes to view them.
…The green study was further provided with a secret spy-hole; for John Silence liked when possible to observe his patient’s face before it had assumed that mask the features of the human countenance invariably wear in the presence of another person…this is the expression of the man himself.
The man Silence views in this case is very surprising. Mr. Racine Mudge, not only knows that Silence is watching him, but also disappears and reappears. Mudge proves the victim of certain mathematical explorations, in fact, he passes in and out of the fourth dimension. Silence attempts to help ” …For I have made similar experiments myself, and only stopped just in time…”
Silence’s own experiences are needed. “…he crossed the room and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red cover. It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and proceeded to open the covers…”
Before Dr. Silence can help Mudge a marching band outside his home stops him from “blocking the entrances” and the client disappears. We d hear later that Silence’s expertise saves the man. The entire story proves only a tour of his home, a discussion of the higher realities.
The John Silence canon ends with this story. Algernon Blackwood would go on writing for decades but he never picked up Silence’s adventures after “The Victim of Higher Space”. This final story shows a much better thought out Silence. (It has to be remembered that the original character was a prop suggested by his publisher. Blackwood re-wrote several of the stories in John Silence to create a series. This is most obvious in the story, “Ancient Sorceries” where Silence is only a minor character.) But Blackwood grows tired of his doctor-detective after this last romp and we hear no more of his fantastic adventures.
CAREER OPPORTUNITY: GHOST-BREAKING
Blackwood’s publication of John Silence began a long line of imitators who were part Sherlock Holmes, part Dr. Van Helsing, all professional men who knew things their ordinary clients did not. Working a ghostly 9-to-5, the sub-genre of occult detective was finally set, having begun with Le Fanu thirty-six years earlier, passing from Doyle and Stoker to Blackwood. The names of those who followed Silence stretch across nine decades, including Carnacki, John Thunstone, Moris Klaw and even modern television characters like Karl Kolchak and Britain’s Dr. Who.
