Timothy S. Murphy – { feuilleton }

Coincidence time again: this ancient TV drama was posted to YouTube a few days ago just as I was finishing Timothy S. Murphy’s very commendable study of William Hope Hodgson’s fiction, William Hope Hodgson and the Rise of the Weird: Possibilities of the Dark. As drama or even basic entertainment, The Whistling Room is the opposite of commendable but it is notable for being the first screen adaptation of a Hodgson story. Hodgson’s fiction has never been popular with film or television dramatists. His two major weird novels, The Night Land and The House on the Borderland, would require lavish expenditure and special effects to do them justice, while the latter has a narrative shape and a lack of characterisation that would either repel any interest or incur considerable mangling of the story.

More appealing for screen adapters are Hodgson’s tales of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, a collection of short mysteries with a supernatural atmosphere and neat resolutions. The Whistling Room, a US production for Chevron Theatre in 1952, is the first of two Carnacki adaptations, the other appearing almost 20 years later when Thames TV included The Horse of the Invisible in their first series of The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes. The Carnacki character was Hodgson’s take on the occult detective or psychic investigator, a short-lived offshoot of the post-Sherlock Holmes detection boom of the 1890s, and the concurrent interest in Spiritualism (or “Spiritism”, as Aleister Crowley always insisted it should be called). Carnacki is as resourceful and energetic as Hodgson’s other protagonists, and as an investigator he’s happy to use modern technology (electricity, cameras, vacuum tubes) to combat incursions from other dimensions. Hodgson’s descriptions of these encounters are freighted with all the capitalised terminology that recurs throughout The Night Land: “Outer Monstrosities”, “a Force from Outside”, “the Ab-human”. Carnacki’s exploits, however, have often been dismissed as hack-work when compared to the author’s novels or his tales of the Sargasso Sea. (The one Carnacki story that even detractors favour, The Hog, was a longer piece that only turned up many years after Hodgson’s death.) The stories are at their best when the mystery is an authentically supernatural menace, instead of another Scooby-Doo-like fraud being perpetrated by a disgruntled minor character.

The Whistling Room was the third Carnacki tale from an early series of five that ran in The Idler in 1910. The story is one of those that concern genuinely supernatural events, and is essentially a repetition of the first of the Idler episodes, The Gateway of the Monster, in which a room in an old house is haunted by an antique curse that plagues the present owners. The room in question isn’t as deadly as the menace in the first story, the mysterious whistling (or “hooning”) being more of a threat to the nerves of the household than to life or limb. But the whistling soon resolves into a more material manifestation.

Whatever power the original story may possess is thoroughly absent from the TV adaptation, a mere sketch of a narrative that wasn’t very substantial to begin with. Alan Napier—Alfred the butler in the Batman TV series—is hopelessly miscast as Carnacki, being more of a bungling buffoon than any kind of serious investigator. There’s no mention here of Carnacki’s favourite occult tools, the “Saaamaaa Ritual” and the Sigsand Manuscript, while the closest we get to his Electric Pentacle is a ridiculous “Day-Ray”, a raygun-like emitter of captured sunlight that has no effect at all on the cursed room. The room itself and its mysterious whistling is more comical than frightening, with dancing furniture that wouldn’t be out of place in Pee-wee’s Playhouse, while the Irish setting of the story is signalled by terrible attempts at Irish accents from two of the actors. Nobody actually says “begorrah” or mentions leprechauns but much of the dialogue is pure stereotype. The adaptation by Howard J. Green even shunts the resolution into Scooby-Doo territory when one of the local lads is found to be partially responsible for the whistling noises, an explanation that Hodgson’s Carnacki goes to some trouble to rule from his investigation.

I wouldn’t usually write so much about something that scarcely deserves the attention but this film is such an obscure item we’re fortunate to be able to see it at all. I’ve been wondering what prompted the producers to choose this particular story. The Whistling Room was first published in the US in 1947, in the expanded Carnacki collection from Myecroft and Moran, an imprint of Arkham House. If Howard J. Green (or whoever) had taken the story from there then we have to wonder why he favoured this one over the others. I think it’s more likely that Dennis Wheatley’s A Century of Horror Stories (1935) was the source, a British anthology but one which would have had wider distribution than an Arkham House limited edition. The only other option listed at ISFDB is a US magazine, the final (?) issue of The Mysterious Traveler Mystery Reader. But this was published in 1952 which puts it too close to the TV production given the time required to commission and schedule an adaptation, even a poor one such as this. Whatever the answer, I feel that thanks are due to the uploader for making The Whistling Room available. Now that my curiosity has been assuaged I’ll return to hoping that someone eventually gives us a better copy of The Voice in the Night.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Jean-Michel Nicollet
• Suspicion: The Voice in the Night
• Hodgsonian vibrations
• The Horse of the Invisible
• Tentacles #2: The Lost Continent
• Tentacles #1: The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’
• Hodgson versus Houdini
• Weekend links: Hodgson edition
• Druillet meets Hodgson

Savoy Books, 1984.

A couple more recent arrivals that feature my work. These are of minority interest but worth noting since academic articles don’t always travel beyond a small audience of subscribers.

A recent issue of Foundation (The International Review of Science Fiction), Volume 45.1, number 123, contains an article by Mark P. Williams, Underground Assemblages: Savoy Dreams and The Starry Wisdom. This examines the legacy of New Worlds magazine under the editorship of Michael Moorcock (from 1964 to 1974) via two writing collections, Savoy Dreams (Savoy Books, 1984) and The Starry Wisdom (Creation Books, 1994). The two collections are very different: Savoy Dreams, edited by David Britton and Michael Butterworth, was an eclectic overview of Savoy’s publishing endeavours up to that point. Among the original writing there’s fiction by Butterworth, M. John Harrison (the first publication of the Viriconium story, Lords of Misrule) and others, plus a reaction by Michael Moorcock to William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night, a book that Savoy had contracted to publish before police harassment forced the company’s bankruptcy. The rest of the book is taken up with press reviews of Savoy books.

Creation Books, 1994. Cover art by Peter Smith.

The Starry Wisdom should require less of an introduction since the book has been in print since 1994, and has a small, possibly notorious, reputation among HP Lovecraft enthusiasts. Editor DM Mitchell felt that the assembling of post-Lovecraftian fiction up to that point had been too cosy and insular: too many story collections were being edited and written by groups of friends in the genre fiction “community”, with the result that the stories were often stale and complacent. The startling newness of Lovecraft’s imagination in comparison to many of his contemporaries in Weird Tales seemed to have been bled away into pastiche, a process that began soon after Lovecraft’s death. Mitchell’s solution was to commission original pieces of Lovecraft-inspired work from writers outside the genre world, notably Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and newcomer David Conway; he also reprinted pieces that would never appear elsewhere as Lovecraftian fiction, including Wind Die. You Die. We Die. by William Burroughs, and Prisoner of the Coral Deep by JG Ballard. Burroughs and Ballard connect directly to New Worlds, of course (Ballard wrote about Burroughs for the magazine), while the pair cast a shadow over many of Savoy’s book productions. Both Savoy Dreams and The Starry Wisdom featured comic strips; Tales of the Cramps by Kris Guidio appeared in Savoy Dreams, while The Starry Wisdom contained strips by Mike Philbin & James Havoc, Rick Grimes, and the first publication of my own adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu.

I was surprised—and pleased—that my comic strip receives a fair amount of scrutiny in Williams’ piece. My Lovecraft strips have received almost no attention from the comics world, a consequence of having been printed by book publishers and distributed to book shops. (A rare exception was this recent piece by Matt Maxwell.) When you’ve been overlooked in this manner it’s a surprise to find your work receiving serious evaluation from an entirely different quarter. Mark P. Williams’ essay examines the contents of both collections, my strip included, as “assemblages”. This is a valid critique in the case of the Cthulhu strip since Lovecraft’s story is itself an assemblage of what seems at first to be unrelated data. The comic adaptation assembles a range of cultural references—some genuine, others invented—to parallel the narrator’s investigation, and even uses genuine documents in places, including columns from The New York Times. I don’t know if Williams has seen the blog post I made that points out many of the cultural references but he notes some of the more overt ones, such as Joseph Conrad appearing as the doomed Professor Angell, Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead, and so on. While I was drawing the strip I was trying to imagine the story as an RKO production, a hybrid of two island films—The Most Dangerous Game and King Kong—and Orson Welles’ unmade Heart of Darkness. These references, many of which aren’t very obvious, were largely for my own amusement. The series I created with David Britton that followed the Lovecraft strips, Reverbstorm, puts assemblage and cultural reference at the forefront.

Cover art is my illustration for Remnants from Lovecraft’s Monsters, edited by Ellen Datlow.

The Cthulhu strip and the Reverbstorm series—now collected as Lord Horror: Reverbstorm—are the subject of a very perceptive piece by Benjamin Noys in the latest edition of Genre, an academic journal published by Duke University Press. This number of the journal is a kind of Weird special edited by Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Murphy. Noys’ Full Spectrum Offence: Savoy’s Reverbstorm and the Weirding of Modernity is the final article in a publication that examines aspects of the “Old Weird” (ie: the Lovecraft-era Weird Tales) and contrasts it with the more recent “New Weird”. The latter was a short-lived label coined by M. John Harrison in 2003 for a range of fiction that was ignoring genre boundaries, and consciously developing the Weird as a project. China Miéville was one of the most visible proponents of the New Weird, and Harrison’s term emerged in part as a response to Miéville’s fiction. Miéville is interviewed in this issue of Genre where, as usual, he has some very worthwhile things to say. He prefers the term “haute Weird” for the original manifestation, possibly because it avoids the negative connotations of the word “old”.

A spread from part 7 of Reverbstorm.

Benjamin Noys’ article is lengthy and resists easy summary, but it begins by investigating the way my work on the Lovecraft strips permeated the Lord Horror comics and dictated some of the imagery, in particular the architectural forms and eruptions of monstrosity. Later discussion concerns the way that Reverbstorm forces the Weird and Modernism together, a collision that I believe is still unique anywhere, never mind in the comics medium. Noys’ piece has given me a lot to think about, not least for its being the first substantial critical appraisal of Reverbstorm. The series is a difficult one, being deliberately excessive and avant-garde, and presenting the reader with a torrent of interrelating cultural references. Many of these are itemised in the appendix but the success (or not) of their working together, and the potential sparking of connections, depends very much on the prior knowledge of the individual reader. Noys is not only knowledgeable but adept at forging his own connections while situating the series in the larger context of the Weird, old (or haute) and new. Even without the inclusion of my work inside the journal and on the cover, I’d recommend this issue of Genre to anyone with an interest in the subject. One of the reasons I favour the Weird as a chosen work label is the way it evades (or ignores) generic boundaries. Years ago I realised that many of the things I liked the best in the arts were the chimeras, those works that transgress boundaries and created new hybrids. No surprise then that I enjoy a genre that refuses easy definition. There aren’t many masts I pin my colours to but the Weird is one of them.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Weird

Tag: Timothy S. Murphy

The Whistling Room, 1952

Old Weird and New Weird