The word “Gothic” is open to much misinterpretation these days. Most people associate it with a certain lifestyle that requires black clothing and white make-up. While it certainly means that now, it has had several other meanings previously. In its original context it meant the tribes who invaded the Roman Empire in the Third and Fourth Centuries AD. The Goths were Germanic barbarians who captured Rome and sacked it. The Vandals did this as well but the word “Vandalism” has become associated with wanton destruction and “Gothic” with an uncivilized person. Doesn’t really seem fair, does it?
The second meaning of the word “Gothic” comes into usage much later than Rome. The Goths and the Romans are both gone by the time the word becomes associated with architecture. “Gothic” architecture is the Medieval form from between 1200 and 1500 AD. This form of building is considered less elegant than the Classical styles that replaced it during the Renaissance. In essence, a “big ugly building”.
“Gothic Literature” gains its name from an Italian engraver named Giovanni Piranesi (1720-1778) who was inspired by the ruins of Gothic and Roman buildings. His engravings, in turn, inspired Horace Walpole to write The Castle of Otranto in 1764, the first of the Gothic school of stories. Piranesi’s drawings of giant helmets and armor have a direct relation to this tale. Walpole’s clunky novel had an immense influence on all that would follow, and can still be felt in our own time in the cartoon character of Snidley Whiplash, the cinema melodrama character who derives his origins all the way back to Walpole’s Manfred.
You might ask what does all this have to do with those men and women who dress like Tom Cruise in Interview With a Vampire? Quite simply, the Gothic movement was the beginnings of horror literature in English. The Gothics of Walpole, Radcliffe and others had a vital influence on Poe, Mary Shelley, and of course, Bram Stoker. All the creepy castles and 17th century wardrobe, all of it begins with The Castle of Otranto, a conscious borrowing from the past to create a feel of dark and gloomy “frisson”. And what better way can you describe a Goth of today than a person who chooses to dress and act in such a manner?
To understand the appeal of the Gothics one needs to know a little about the mid 18th Century. The intellectual bigwigs of “The Age of Reason” were all about “ideas”. This is the age of Fielding, Smollett, Voltaire and Johnson. Rational thought dominated novels with philosophical under-pinnings. Most books weren’t “fun” but “instructional”. Walpole was a Romantic in an age without Romanticism. He pined for a past that never really existed. His Otranto wasn’t about teaching someone to be a good person. It was about thrills, chills and surprises. The Gothics were the guilty pleasure of an age that felt it had out-grown such things.
The reading of Gothics today is another thing altogether. It requires a willingness to suspend much of your innate criticism. These stories may seem clunky, silly or even outright insane to a modern reader. The fun isn’t in their logic; it is the lengths to which the writer can stretch our believability with outlandish turns. Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist, compared them to “Christmas fruit cake”, filled with tasty chunks but not something one would wish to sustain themselves on.
Whatever you think of the old Gothic novels, they left us with a pile of tropes both in the Horror and the Mystery genres. The creepy house, the long-hidden murder, the revenant that wails for justice, the solution of the detective and many more came from these three-decker novels (or older in the case of the ghost that rattles its chains). The ghostbreaker story uses more of these than any of the children of the Gothic: Romance, Horror, Mystery, Fantasy, Historical Fiction and Science Fiction. The reason for this is because the ghostbreaker sits on the line between two genres, using the trope from both.
To really see this we need only look at the first Mystery story ever written, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. In this story, Poe sets all the rules for a Mystery tale plus most of the rules for a ghostbreaker tale, because the solution appears supernatural before it is explained. As a ghostbreaker writer, Poe need only decide which way he wanted the chips to fall. His C. Auguste Dupin is all about “Ratiocination” so he ends up on the Sherlockian side with a logical and natural explanation. No ghosts need apply!
But for the ghostbreaker writer there is another thread that joins with the Gothic. That is the line of Spiritualism. While Gothic novels were the rage in England, there was a sensation in London known as “The Cock Lane Ghost”. This was a fraud perpetrated in 1762, only two years before Horace Walpole would publish The Castle of Otranto. Writers like Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins had public and private opinions on whether the ghost was true or not. In America, the growing belief in ghostly visitors and seances was spurred on by the Fox Sisters in 1849.The Spiritualist movement came of these spectacular frauds.
Long story short, the belief in Spiritualism grew as ghost stories and other forms of Horror fiction grew. Writers like Arthur Conan Doyle turned to the belief, making the movement more popular. Doyle, like Poe, also offered us a ghostbreaker who always sided with logic in Sherlock Holmes. The model of that investigator was passed on to others who wrote of detectives who believed as Spiritualists believed. The idea of an amateur detective and a Spiritualist developed together from the Gothic novels and fantastic newspaper stories.
Whether we are talking about Dr. Martin Hesselius, Flaxman Low, John Silence, Carnacki, Moris Klaw, Jules de Grandin or any of dozens of others, the Gothic remains a key part in the tale of the ghostbreaker. The solution can prove to earthly or unearthly. That doesn’t matter as much as the Gothic elements:
1. The detective is hired to solve a case. This can be a doctor-style arrangement or a visit to a strange location. The Gothic novels didn’t feature doctors and investigators in the professional sense but the heroines of these books often acted as unofficial detectives. They were perpetually trapped in creepy castles, pursued by horny barons. To escape this fate, they must reveal the mystery that haunts their prison. This could be a wife locked up in the west wing or a haunting ghost who lives in a painting. Jane Austen parodied this element strongly in her book, Northanger Abbey, where Catherine Morland wonders if she is such a prisoner/detective.
2. The supernatural seeming death is central to ghostbreaker tales. Death was everywhere in Victorian times as with all times. The woman who dies of consumption or the child run over by horse carriages. Terrible but ordinary enough. Death in a Gothic tale must appear horrific beyond reason such as the heir crushed by a giant helmet. They can prove to be fake such as the Locked Room Mystery tradition allows. Think of The Hound of the Baskervilles. But there is also the actual supernatural death such as Lucy Westenra’s conversion to being a vampire and her dispatch by the vampire-hunters. The shocking death became such a part of the Pulps like the Doc Savage franchise that each novel always begin with a horrible death, some supernatural appearing, but explained by Science in the end.
3. The investigation phase follows whether the story has a logic or fantastical explanation. John Dickson Carr’s Dr. Fell and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin collect clues or evidence in the same way. Where these clues will lead is different.
4. The big reveal/climax is another thing they share but they look quite different depending which way you go. The typical ending of an Agatha Christie style mystery is all the suspects are gathered together and Hercules Poirot will make us sit and listen to his thinking and finally, a villain is arrested. It has become such a common trope that they made a board game using it.
For the supernatural tale, this ending is a little different. You could have Jules de Grandin collect the suspects and say, “By the Little Green Pig, the vampire is—” but that is far too static for a good story. Usually there is a confrontation scene as in Dracula, where the heroes finally take on the big bad and stick a shiv in his throat. The monster is revealed and the detective/hero fights them until they are defeated. There can be a denouement where de Grandin explains to Trowbridge what it all meant. This would have been obvious to us if de Grandin had shared key information with us, but he does not. Ghostbreaker writers are not beholden to the Detective Club’s “Rules of Fair Play” that Mystery writer are. They can even have the killer be a Chinaman. (Rules #V:”No Chinaman must figure in the story.” This is horribly racist, of course, but it comes from many lazy writers failing to explain their puzzles but simply shrugging it off on a marginalized group. This is a Gothic trend begun by Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868).
5. The denouement has been achieved at last and two very different endings could have happened. The killer was Stapledon who wanted to inherit the Baskerville fortunes or there really was a werewolf living in the abandoned house. The reader receives the satisfaction from such stories with slightly different spins. For the straight Mystery reader, order is restored. There are no monsters in the world. All is safe. For the Horror fan, the world is safe but not because monsters aren’t real but because we have brave men and women like Jules de Grandin and Luna Bartendale. The terrors can go back into the toy box until the next vampire/intelligent gorilla/killer plant escapes in Sunnydale. Both of these are equally Gothic tropes. One descended from Anne Radcliffe, who liked to spoil all the monsters, and the other from J. Sheridan le Fanu, who could handle a ghost or two.
Conclusion
As with all fiction, how well either of these two directions is achieved depends on the author’s ability. Arthur Conan Doyle pulled off the explained Gothic many times with great success. Conversely, the cartoon Scooby-Doo did it week after week, to mixed results. Did we ever think there was a real werewolf in that house. Were we surprised it was Principal Dingwell under the mask? The same is true for the supernatural version. Bram Stoker convinces us that vampires are real. Kolchak chasing Eric Braeden around with fuzz on his face, not so much.
Which you prefer as a reader, the explained or the supernatural explanation (and that unusual choice, both) is a matter of personal preference. My bias is always toward the monster side. This must say something about me as a person. It also explains why I read SF/F/H predominately. I like my Gothic tropes to be fantastical. I can admire the detective that can untangle all the clues and actually surprise me with the solution. But if that solution involves a ghost or a slime monster created in an underground lab, I am always happier. A fun example of this was a show I recently watched, Dublin Murders (2019) starring Kilian Scott and Sarah Greene. You get the logical result on three crimes but the disappearance of two children back in the 1980s is left unexplained unless you believe in fairies. Most of us aren’t Arthur Conan Doyle. It was a daring and very Gothic way to end the series.
I enjoy writing ghostbreaker stories with my Book Collector series. No lie, the Noir feel is fun to play with but the monsters always prove to be real…
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