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GHOST_FINDER

                                           May    28, 2006
                                     Rev:  August  9, 2006

The "Carnacki The Ghost-Finder",
stories by William Hope Hodgson

The first ones were published ~1910.
About 20 years after Holmes began.

I was very impressed with these stories
when I was a kid, and I'm glad to see
that they hold up.  These are early
entries into the narrow sub-genre of
"psychic detective".  These use a gimmick
which, to my knowledge, is unique: You
never know at the outset whether the
strange events will turn out to be some
sort of hoax, or genuinely supernatural.

It's not too hard to think of series
where the detectives *always* find a
hoax (e.g. "Scooby-Doo"); and it's
not too hard to think of a series
where there's always a supernatural
manifestation, ("Kolchak the
Night-Stalker" comes to my mind, and
I gather that "The X-Files" is a
similar case).

Carnacki alone seems to inhabit
a universe of both sprites and
tricksters.


An attempt was made by the
BBC to translate these
stories to television, but
in my opinion they did not
succeed terribly well.

Part of the charm of the stories is
that Carnacki has some very fancy
high-tech equipment, which in
restrospect all has a dated Edwardian
cast to it, for example the "electric
pentagram".

The BBC just didn't have the knack of
getting this across visually: Carnacki's
gear looks junky rather than antique.

The other trouble is a difficulty of the
visual arts in general: they have a hard
time dealing with the *absence* of the
visual.  Some of the more effective
scenes in the stories have Carnacki
cowering in the dark, straining to
understand what's happening.

This sort of thing is
impossible to do in
film.

At least, not without violating
the standard film conventions:

In principle, you could do lots of
"voice over", and let the screen go
totally dark during key scenes.

In practice, the pressure is strong
to stay out of the main character's
head, and keep the blue lights on.

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