John Silence, Physician Extraordinary

Continuing “Horror May-hem” with book #4 for the year, Algernon Blackwood’s 1908 collection of stories about the titular “occult detective”, not the first of his kind (Le Fanu and Machen had beaten him to it in the 1800s) but more influential on later ones than his predecessors were. A curious set of five stories (plus one more Blackwood wrote for a later collection), in that Silence’s part in them is highly variable… the actual “I” narrating the stories is actually his assistant Hubbard, whose own part in the stories is similarly up and down. As for Silence, he’s only really a leading actor in two and a half of the stories, he’s essentially a deus ex machina in the fourth, and does practically nothing in the remaining one; he’s the link that connects all these stories but he’s only really partly the star of his own book. I wonder if that’s because there’s only so much you could probably do with the character, who is the sort of all-knowing unfailingly good guy who’s hard to make terribly interesting (even Sherlock Holmes made mistakes).

But, all that considered, I still enjoyed this a lot (though the idea in the last story that the young Canadian man becomes a werewolf partly because of his Native ancestry is a bit… ergh). Lovecraft hails him as the master of atmosphere in Supernatural Horror in Literature, and I think atmosphere is what the book does best; you get a really solid sense of place (and you do get a good variety of settings across these tales) and overall enigmatic vibe of things in each story. This also at least begins to plug a major gap in my knowledge of the supernatural classics; of Lovecraft’s “big four” (Blackwood, Dunsany, James and Machen, with Hodgson kind of bringing up the rear as a later discovery), Blackwood was until now the only one I hadn’t at least one full book by (I’d only read one story, that being “The Wendigo”; no, I haven’t even read the celebrated “Willows” before). I have now done that and intend to continue doing so.

Parenthetically: though I used that Dover cover art I actually read John Silence in one of those giant Delphi “complete works” collections. The latter actually includes a picture of the first edition, but I chose against using that cos, frankly, there’s a swastika on the cover. I mean, it’s a 1908 book, it’s a pre-Hitler swastika, so it’s not a bad one. But even so… I’ve actually seen with my own eyes in an antiquarian bookshop books from a hundred years earlier with swastikas in the cover design, and though I knew they weren’t bad ones (I think the books were from 1912 or something) it was still immensely jarring at first. So I decided to go with the more recent cover art. Fucking Nazis.