Wormwoodiana

The British crime writer Derek Raymond, best known for his bleak "Factory" novels, coined the term "Black Novel" in his autobiography The Hidden Files (1999) which describes a challenging strain of fiction. For Raymond, Black Novels are not instances of crime fiction (though many are) but instead a mode of story-telling fusing depictions of systemic rot and brutality with social critique. At their core, they necessarily immerse the reader in the dark side of humanity, and serve as lenses to view the human condition. Black Novels are almost always brutal, but are always compassionate and insist on an empathetic stance towards characters who live outside of the margins of respectability.

The attributes of the Black Novel are four-fold:

- A street-level focus capturing life's raw texture

- Characters' inner depths brought to the forefront

- Social critique woven into depictions of crime, poverty, and oppression

- Written in the language of the street

Raymond places his own works alongside a Black Novel lineage that, despite their strict definition, offer a surprising amount of room for nuance in the way that they focus their societal lenses.

Unsurprisingly, the Factory series fulfills the Black Novel ethos but reader beware, the novels are not for the squeamish. Set against the backdrop of Thatcher-era Britain, they follow an unnamed Detective Sergeant who prowls Fisher-esque dank locales. Violence is ever-present and treated as the stark reality of lives beset by poverty, addiction, and abuse. Through the detective’s grim investigations, Raymond captures the language of the street in all its rawness, giving voice to the disaffected while maintaining a grim and bitter dark-humor throughout. Despite the brutality, the Detective leverages a talent for seeing victims and perpetrators as fully human to administer a meager portion of justice. Raymond crafts a pitiless but empathetic record of social collapse, showing how crime fiction can confront systemic rot while plumbing the depths of empathy. Raymond's Factory series is the purest and most intense examples of the Black Novel, and while I enjoyed them, I now find his expanded list more fascinating still.

The Black Novels listed in Raymond's autobiography form a constellation of works that fulfill the attributes he outlined in vastly different ways. First, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) introduces the wisecracking detective Marlowe in a Los Angeles populated by despicable characters who cross and double-cross each other at every turn. The Big Sleep is probably the most congruous ancestor to the Factory series and is clearly a huge influence on Raymond. Moreover, George Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970) captures the fatalism of working-class criminals that ritualistically engage in power-plays for fleeting gain. The character Eddie Coyle is as Factory-like a criminal as could be written, and his analogue is found throughout the Factory novels. 

Similarly, Charles Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) attempts to explore the gothic underside of Victorian respectability in its unfinished form. While it's unclear how the novel would have progressed had Dickens lived to complete it, it's clear that John Jasper would have felt at home in a Factory novel. The last pure Factory-esque precursor is the titular character in Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1866). The novel explores bourgeois respectability tainted by infidelity and betrayal, and inevitably spirals toward a ruthlessly macabre ending. While the novel lacks any supernatural elements, some ghastly hallucinations are used to great effect in the story and adopted by Raymond in his posthumously published pre-Factory novel Nightmare in the Street.

Moving further afield, George Orwell's Coming Up for Air (1939) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) both dissect the grinding effects of class, money, futility, and thwarted aspiration. Bitter, acerbic humor saturates both novels and hons a sharp edge to the former's theme of nostalgia and the latter's 1930's prefiguration of "turn on, tune in, drop out." On the other hand, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry and Albert Camus' The Stranger both depict violence in an uncannily poetic, detached fashion. This detachment is used to great effect in Raymond's Factory novels, albeit ratcheted up to even more extremes. 

Next, Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust (1939) follows a young artist as he navigates a Depression-era Hollywood steeped in affectation and spectacle. While Raymond's novels use street denizens as its tools of social critique, West's novel targets the "American Dream" by focusing its lens onto the Hollywood fringe. Finally, Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) absurdly depicts the crushing banality of bureaucratic inscrutability. Kafka (I would add Borges and Ligotti also) was a master of what I would call contraptional fiction which is a technique where a writer builds an absurd conceptual machine in their stories, and runs their characters through it in a way that adheres to the machine's internal logic. The Factory novels operate in a similar way by building a grotesque meat-grinder for its poor characters.

Since finding Raymond's description of the Black Novel I've tried to find other examples of the sub-genre that Raymond didn't list, but have met with little success. However, one that stands out so far is Horace McCoy's novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935). The story follows an economically strapped couple participating in a Depression-era dance marathon. The sardonic closing line echoed in the book's title left me breathless and would have fit hand in glove with Factory novel dialogue. The search for more Black Novels continues, but if Derek Raymond was right the world will always provide the raw material for them. Indubitably there are more out there waiting to be found and more waiting to be written.

(Fogus)

I’ve previously written about the Frederick W. Rolfe, Baron Corvo Collection at Georgetown University, originally owned by the publishing house and preservation society Boo-Hooray, founded by Swedish-born Johan Kugelberg in 2010. Because of this provenance, materials and references from Boo-Hooray feature prominently in the collection. Among its rarities is a slight booklet by Kugelberg himself titled Baron Corvo, the Greatest Asshole Who Ever Lived. Below, I’ll offer a brief account of this curious artifact.

First, let me address the title, which is the literary equivalent to “click-bait.” That said, there’s a deeper meaning to the predicate nominative in the title. Almost certainly, if we held a vote for someone better exemplifying its colloquial usage, then Baron Corvo would certainly place far below any number of people populating even modern headlines. Rather, Kugelberg uses a meaning more in line with Georges Bataille’s idea of The Solar Anus, which to risk oversimplification, is a surrealist metaphor for cosmic inevitability. It’s easy to view Baron Corvo as merely a tragic eccentric (he was), but Kugelberg paints a picture of him as someone whose vitality burned so hot that it could only ever destroy and then burn itself out.

In a bit of literary flair, Kugelberg likens Baron Corvo to a Dickensian figure seen through the lens of Lautréamont: larger than life, exaggerated, darkly fascinating, and grotesque. An example of Corvo playing as such a character is revealed in the story behind the book Hadrian the Seventh. The work isn’t merely a novel, but instead serves as a revenge fantasy where a man suspiciously like Corvo himself becomes Pope and through force of will attempts to mold the Catholic Church in his own image. Picturing Corvo slumped over his writing desk furiously scrawling his lurid and lovely rancor onto the page is sardonic and saturnine all at once. I personally find these glimpses beyond the veil, where the novel is the man and vise-versa utterly compelling when reading Corvo and Kugelberg captures this intrigue masterfully.

Indeed, in the tempest that was his life, Baron Corvo himself became a machine that turned failures and grudges into fiction. Kugelberg likens Corvo to Joni Mitchell who turned her heartbreaks into songs and also to Lester Bangs who wrote music reviews that were really about Lester Bangs. Every one of Corvo’s novels are fundamentally autobiographical, sometimes pathetic, sometimes brilliant, but they are always unmistakably Corvine. I can’t help but find this side of Corvo haunting. Years ago I watched a BBC Two documentary on the life of Mervyn Peake and I have since been haunted by the utterly Peakian life that the author lived. Certainly there are innumerable authors who wrote their own experiences into their works, but I suspect that there are very few authors who lived such fictionalized existences as Peake and Corvo, both of whom seemed to inhabit their own narrative universes.

Moreover, the booklet briefly describes (nearly to the point of libel) the picaresque life that Baron Corvo lived: drifting from job to job, bouncing from one benefactor to another, perpetually on the move, and always making very bad decisions along the way. Corvo had a unique talent for the English language, but that ability was dwarfed by his truly epic talent at burning bridges. People would help him, and he’d inevitably turn on them. He perpetually desired patrons, but was even more driven by a hatred for being patronized. He was his own worst enemy, always and without fail. Baron Corvo never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, nor did he ever fail to fail in spectacular ways. In A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, the reader quickly understands that every critical friendship and benefaction was inescapably burdened by the weight of Corvo’s imminent unravelling. That said, the Baron’s betrayals and blow-ups weren’t accidents but instead they were the way he functioned at the deepest level of his being, and many readers find it very difficult to look away.

Baron Corvo was a genius, a crank, a con, and a visionary all at once. He wrecked his life at every turn, but unlike most who go down in flames, he turned the ashes into art. Kugelberg’s booklet is the best elucidation of the paradox at the heart of the Corvo cult, describing a man who was repellent and objectionable while simultaneously magnetic and irresistible, who continues to fascinate more than a century after his death.

(Fogus)

Of particular interest among the items in the “Frederick W. Rolfe, Baron Corvo Collection” at Georgetown University are a pile of letters in which Corvo fanatic Donald Weeks describes his adventures in the U.K., engaging in research for the biography Corvo (1971) and hunting for ephemera related to the Baron. While skimming the letters, I happened upon a fascinating claim by Weeks in a letter to “Stan & Joan” dated October 25, 1970: ‘An inventor, Rolfe may have “invented” the disappearing murder weapon in the form of the icicle (Toto story, 1898-9).’

Although I can’t recall ever reading a story using a melting murder weapon, I’m familiar with the plot device, having first encountered it many years ago in the Colombo episode “The Most Crucial Game." I was astonished at the prospect that the device may have originated with Corvo, and so I decided to go on a hunt to prove it.

I found an early lead in an appendix entry in Weeks’ aforementioned biography. Weeks mentions the Baron’s use of the device in the Toto story “About Our Lady of Dreams” published in the collection, In His Own Image (1901). Julian Symons notes in the same entry that the earliest use of the plot device that he knew of was published 10-years later in Anna Katherine Green’s locked-room mystery Initials Only (1911). Indeed, Green’s novel is generally credited with utilizing the first instance of the icicle weapon, specifically in the form of an exceedingly impractical bullet.

By contrast, Corvo’s icicle was the cause of the mysterious death of the butcher-boy Aristide via stabbing under a secluded cliff summit. In the story, Aristide’s friend Diodato, charged with murder, was eventually exonerated thanks to an angelic dream vision visited on Frat’ Innocente-of-the-Nine-Quires. It’s unknown if Ms. Green had read the Toto story before writing her novel and thus impossible to determine if she found any inspiration there. Therefore, I determined that another angle of attack in my quest was needed to determine if there were any earlier icicle uses than Corvo’s.

I’d be a liar if I said that the prospect of finding an earlier example in the infinity of literature prior to 1901 didn’t intimidate me. However, there was one potential investigative trail immediately available. As I mentioned earlier, Julian Symons mentioned Green’s novel in the Corvo endnote, but he closed with an interesting aside: ‘The actual use of an icicle has been attributed to the Medici’.

This seemed like a promising path for progress as the Medici factored prominently in Corvo’s book Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901). Alas, I couldn’t find a single mention of icicles there at all, and even tracing a significant portion of the reference material listed in the first edition proved fruitless. That said, there are dozens of references that I was unable to gain access to, so there’s a possibility that the Medici icicle simply awaits future discovery. Despite this possibility, the path forward appeared daunting indeed.

However, in my explorations I came across a story of the son of a parish clerk of Brampton in Devon who died from a wound inflicted by an icicle that fell from the local tower in 1776. The epitaph to the child reads:

Bless my i.i.i.i.i.i.

Here he lies

In a sad pickle

Kill’d by icicle

Did Corvo know of this epitaph? Was this the inspiration for his Toto story? These are unanswerable questions of course, and so I found myself back at the beginning. However, during my work as a programming language designer I’ve found value in a powerful technique for problem solving – reframing the question. I determined that it was too much to try and trace the vague idea of “mysterious death by icicle” and instead convinced myself that it would suffice to place the Baron’s use in a historical context instead.

Reframing the problem led me to John Dickson Carr’s famous locked-room mystery novel The Hollow Man (1935). Carr wrote many locked room mysteries in his time, but The Hollow Man is arguably the preeminent example of its kind. The novel itself contains a metanarrative element in which the investigator Dr. Gideon Fell holds a “locked room lecture” enumerating the classes and their instantiations of locked-room murders. In the lecture, Fell outlines two main branches of locked-room murder: one, no murder was in the room;  two, murder was in the room.

Like much of the historical analysis around locked-room mysteries, I’ll play fast and loose with the term “room” and liken it to the solitude of an icy summit. The primary type of “no murder” described by Fell are ‘a series of coincidences ending in an accident which looks like a murder.’ Interestingly, Fell outlines particular literary instances of death involving icicles, but they all involved either suicide or murder. Therefore, I think that Corvo’s Toto plot fits nicely into Fell’s accidental death category and occupies a unique niche within it.

I was happy to claim a small victory, but I’m not one for half-measures. Therefore, I decided to read the rest of the “locked room lecture” to see if I could gain more insight into avenues for further exploration. Imagine my surprise when I soon came across an aside on icicles by Fell: ‘To continue with regard to the icicle; its actual use has been attributed to the Medici.’

It was at that moment that the boulder of my free time again slipped from my grasp and rolled back down the proverbial hill. It dawned on me that perhaps trying to trace the lineage of literary firsts was a futile effort and I now consider myself fortunate that I managed to stumble on a fixpoint. Truly, doing so allowed me to take a step back and accept the fact that although I’d like to think that there are deep and finite connections to find, I’m now of the mind that perhaps ideas are hanging in the aether, waiting to embed themselves into the skulls of unsuspecting authors passing underneath.

(Fogus)