Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life

In his day, Algernon Blackwood was among the best known writers in the horror field. Today he's less known except to devotees of that genre. But Blackwood didn't consider himself a horror writer. He said all his stories were based on personal experiences or those of close friends and, though he found the strange in the most ordinary of those experiences, he was most concerned with expanding consciousness for a greater understanding of life and nature. Blackwood remains a mysterious figure and Mike Ashley has done a marvelous job of finding sources to interpret his life and career, all the more marvelous because the writer left only fragmentary details of his activities and Ashley had to play detective to find his material. What Ashley unveils is a creative person who was not only an untiring writer (he was still penning stories in his late eighties) but also a world traveler, an undercover agent in World War 1 and a storyteller on radio and TV. His attitude toward life was that one is never to old to try new things. An admirable attitude. Ashley's writing is at times pedestrian but his subject makes it worth plugging on.

Blackwood's life was indeed extraordinary, and so was the man. When you write about such an incredible character, you can hardly go wrong. This book is, to date, THE standard biography of Algernon Blackwood, one of the greatest supernatural tale writers of all times (trust not me, but the sound judgement of HP Lovecraft!). As one can sense from his writings, Blackwood had a copious first-hand experience of the weird. " An extraordinary Life" follows AB through his pilgrimages around the world, tries its best to peep into the life of a quite mysterious fellow, and traces some of the sources of his wondrous tales. The last part is perhaps a bit boring, but hei, if you are a Blackwood's aficionado, this is a must. PS Nobody knows yet the true identity of Dr. Silence: the case is open for further investigations.

It was about time. Blackwood, who died just over fifty years ago, was one of the great twentieth-century masters of the weird tale; H P Lovecraft, no less, called his long story "The Willows" possibly the greatest weird tale ever written, and S T Joshi has said that his book Incredible Adventures may be the greatest weird collection. The more one reads of Blackwood, the more one is amazed at his present obscurity - an obscurity which may at last be starting to lift. The product of twenty years' research, including interviews with several people who knew Blackwood personally, this first ever full-length biography is an amazing achievement, particularly in view of Blackwood's cavalier attitude towards personal possessions, including documents. Ashley's extraordinary life of this extraordinary man details eighty-two years encompassing two world wars (during the first of which Blackwood served as a secret agent in Switzerland), innumerable travels round the world, near-starvation and vagrancy in New York, the high society of the 1920s and salvation by burning sausage during the London Blitz. Though clumsily written, the book's narrative is commendably clear; Blackwood was an immensely pleasant and sociable individual who met and befriended a great many people in the course of a long and eventful life, but although I raced through his biography I never once had to check back to find out who was who. Ashley perhaps harps a little too much on the fact that Blackwood originated the term "Starlight Express", but he does so for a better reason than mere topicality - he's trying to emphasise Blackwood's continuing (perhaps growing) relevance to the present. As S T Joshi remarked at the end of his chapter on Blackwood in The Weird Tale, Blackwood is a writer waiting to be discovered. Ashley's book should shorten the wait considerably.