Conan Compendium by L. Sprague de Camp

Author:L. Sprague de Camp [Camp, L. Sprague de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Amra vol. 2 no. 14 1961

A Man Named John

by John Pocsik

Probably the most outworn cliché of macabre fiction today is that of the psychic detective, the so-called “spook-hunter” of John Silence fame. So.many trite and stereotyped stories have been written about them in past years that they have become an almost obsolete fixture and many times serve as an object of ridicule and scorn in various plays and satires.

Algernon Blackwood was the first to use the psychic detective when he created John Silence. Some of these stories are good and some are not; it all depends on the reader’s individual likes or dislikes. Fans of Robert E. Howard might enjoy Silence as a series-character, but they might also dislike both the vagueness of Blackwood’s style and the lack of really two-fisted action.

Down through the twenties and thirties, many stories of this type were written, but most of these are not worth the mentioning unless one might consider Howard’s Solomon Kane as a hunter of demons. During this period, the psychic detective story evolved into the more modern and hence more interesting forms; less emphasis was given to the “hypersensitivity” of men towards psychical phenomena and more action and daring were added as is evidenced by the Jules de Grandin stories of Seabury Quinn.

With the dawn of the forties, the psychic detective (with changes) enjoyed a brief glow of fame in the hands of two skilled writers. The first was August Derleth, who created an altogether different type of psychic detective in the characters of Andrew Phelan and Professor Laban Shrewsbury. Derleth wrote five connected novelletes about these two men, who ally themselves with Hastur the unspeakable to combat the menace of Cthulhu; these five stories comprise the contents of the Arkham House book, The Trail of Cthulhu.

The second writer, with whom we are most concerned, is Manly Wade Wellman. In 1943 he created a series of stories about a man named John Thunstone. Wellman pictured Thunstone in a manner remarkably similar to Howard: John is a big, massive man, broad of chest and well muscled; his face is a determined one, his eyes grey above his neatly trimmed moustache. He is an independently wealthy man, highly cultured, who lives in sumptuous ease: one might call him the Mr Lucky of fantasy. His sole purpose in life seems to be the destruction of evil magic and to this end he has become a learned scholar of spells and counterspells of the occult arts. Many times, however, has he had to use his fists and his brawn to carry out his designs. Romantically, he is interested in blonde Sharon Hill, the Countess Montesco, but it is doubtful if they ever get married. Wellman also tells us that Thunstone himself admits that he is not psychic; therefore he is not a psychic detective in the sense of Blackwood’s John Silence.

Fifteen stories about John Thunstone were published in Weird Tales. I shall give short summaries of each in the following paragraphs.

“The Third Cry to Legba” (Nov 1943) introduces Thunstone to the reading public.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.