A Case of Eavesdropping - Algernon Blackwood

 A Case of Eavesdropping - Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood is revered by students of weird literature, and largely ignored by students of the literary mainstream. Whereas writers of the Romantic and early Victorian eras could produce ghost stories and be taken seriously, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras reveal the divisions into genres that still inform literary opinions. Some of the generation born in the 1860s receive a grudging respect, notably M R James and E F Benson, both associated with Cambridge University. Blackwood doesn’t receive that kind of acceptance.

A Case of Eavesdropping is a good example of what Blackwood does well, and of what he does badly. It was first published in the December 1900 edition of Pall Mall Magazine. It is a very early story in Blackwood’s career. His first collection of stories, including A Case of Eavesdropping, was not published until 1906. 

The story is a fairly straightforward haunted house piece, sharing many basic elements with Le Fanu’s An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street. The focal character of the narrative, Jim Shorthouse, is, like Le Fanu’s students, a tenant whose room is subject to a haunting. However, the nature of the haunting itself is very different. It is a reasonably well-constructed chiller with some interesting details saved for the conclusion. The landlady is a most unpleasant creation. When she reveals what she knows at the end of the story, she also reveals the extent to which she is prepared to go in order to preserve her income from the room. However, the description of her physical appearance is unpleasant for the wrong reasons; and Blackwood’s clumsy attempts to indicate a ‘Western’ accent are disturbing, again, for the wrong reasons.

And this, alas, is something of a problem with Blackwood’s writing. He is an uneven stylist. Fairly frequently in this story, the reader is faced with a sentence that is just odd; almost out of place. Consequently, his control over tone is a little wayward. 

Even so, A Case of Eavesdropping is worth reading. Jim is an engaging character. His reactions to events are delightfully real, even if they aren’t what we would see ourselves doing. One of the more disturbing details in the narrative is the effect on the partition, especially when coupled with the strange weakness that Jim experiences. 

Apart from the fairly obvious revelation that landlords are, generally, not in the business of caring, A Case of Eavesdropping places the reader in the position of thinking about the noises heard from an adjoining room. What would you do if you were Jim? 

As a footnote, it is worth mentioning that this story, Le Fanu’s and Lytton’s all appear in Peter Haining’s excellent anthology, The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories. They are easy to find elsewhere, but, nonetheless, Haining puts together a great selection, following the sub-genre to the end of the 20th century. He could be a bit of an unreliable editor. Misattributions are, sadly, not rare in his anthologies. However, he rescued some good works from neglect, such as Barbauld’s Sir Bertrand; and, as in this case, his extensive reading sometimes allowed him to assemble a really good selection of stories in a single volume.