The first line of the biography is: 'Who was Algernon Blackwood?' This seems to be the main problem. If the author apologizes for the subject's obscurity in the very first line, what hope do others have? And it gets worse.

We learn that even after twenty years of research, Ashley still finds his subject elusive and hard to pin down.

This is only by degree but the thought is perplexing in a double-edged way: either it’s full of holes or it’s missing what the author terms ‘important information’ such as what he had for breakfast on the nineteenth of February 1891. His research is undoubtedly meticulous in the extreme and what Ashley thinks is inadequate is detailed enough for me, especially when the subject is Algernon Blackwood.

Apparently, Blackwood never kept notes and a lot of the information is secondhand. He died over fifty years ago at the age of 82. Had this book appeared in the fifties or even the sixties, there would be many more people still alive or sufficiently compus mentus to directly remember his radio and television appearances and it would have been received much better.

I have vague memories of a television series which adapted one of his stories and also a book or two but I must confess, I only remembered them because of a name association I'd made at the time with the short story 'Flowers for Algernon' by Daniel Keyes (1959).

OK, not a good start, you say. However, once forced to read the book, you have to agree that it's actually like the curate's egg - good in parts. Blackwood appears to have had a very interesting life and he was, by all accounts, a person that people remembered in a positive way.

There's a story concerning his contemporary, H.G. Wells, and the construction of a new telescope at Mount Palomar to investigate the distant reaches of the universe. Anyway, Wells, who was a miserable old bugger by this time, said it was a useless exercise but Blackwood was full of enthusiasm and expectation, a character trait which was with him all his life.

All this would have counted for nothing had he not written two hundred short stories and a dozen novels. Personally, I don't like his work. The short story entitled 'The Willows' is reputedly one of his best but I found it to be overly verbose and tediously descriptive. Although it didn't lack pace, it was a pace that varied from dead slow to stop. I know this will come as utter sacrilege to many but Blackwood's work is deeply rooted in the worst that the late Victorian era had to offer.

I don't believe in spirits, ghosts and associated mumbo jumbo and much of the fiction in this genre has no effect on me. To my mind, there's enough horrors in real life without imagining them. For those not spiritually insensitive and for those with a liking for the above, Blackwood's stories are reputed by some to be amongst the best on offer. Some are still in print, including compilations by Mike Ashley.

This review concerns the biography which describes Blackwood's life from it's semi-aristocratic beginnings through hell in New York to general stability as a writer in later life. Blackwood had ants in his pants.

He couldn't settle anywhere apparently and roamed the globe to visit lonely and desolate places where he found spiritual solace. I suppose it was better than a steady job in the mill or down the pit. His play, 'A Prisoner in Fairyland', was used the basis for Elgar's 'The Starlight Express' in 1915 but it was a failure. What? Webber? Never heard of him!

‘How much of Blackwood is spin’, that's a question I asked myself? As the biography describes, he was a bit of an entrepreneur in his time but his varied enterprises failed. Even a century ago, spin and image were important. This is easier to manufacture if information is scanty, perhaps deliberately so, and what's there has to be embellished. It's not beyond possibility that Blackwood, on the success of his writings, cultivated a mysterious and spiritual image.

After all, if you're going to sell horror and ghost stories, all the better to be a bit odd yourself. Later, during his broadcasting career, he was dubbed the 'ghost man' - a title which he reputedly didn't like but one which may have been lucrative. Inwardly, I wonder if Blackwood laughed at it all, thinking that here he was, a joker, making money out of his life's experiences at last.

Mike Ashley is himself an accomplished author with more than fifty books to his credit, including 'Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction' and 'The Pendragon Chronicles' but this biography and other works concerning Blackwood Blackwood seem to be his main preoccupation.

He's been interested in the author for almost forty years. Such dedication is commendable but, absorbing as he finds the subject himself, this feeling isn't necessarily reciprocated by a wide sector of society. By its nature, this biography must have a narrow field of view and a relatively limited readership.

In summary, the fact that the finished script was much longer than the printed book and some forty thousand words had to be taken out, speaks for the author’s dedication. If you are of a like mind with plenty of time to spare and with a penchant for weird Victorian/Edwardian characters, then this book is for you.

Blackwood comes through as an eccentric, kindly character but I think most people would prefer to be introduced to his life story by a fifty minute episode of BBC's Timewatch, for example, rather than this hefty volume which is more for the purists.

Rod MacDonald

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