Occam’s razor – it even sounds occult. This theory posits that the simplest answer is always the most correct. Occam clearly didn’t read any crime fiction in his day. Detectives in fiction have long tried to tease out the correct answer to the murderous riddles presented to them. Second guessing human intellect, nastiness, and ability to deceive is no fool’s game. A detective needs to be on their game at all times so as to catch even the tiniest clues that bear no significance to anything at the time. Discovering the human culprits is a mastermind’s game.
Consider then what it must take to bring down those criminal minds that are not human. How do you track a murderous demon or a thieving ghost? Where do you start to comprehend the actions and thoughts of such incomprehensible creatures? Sometimes the final solution and resolution isn’t come upon by following the simplest answers and theories – there are times when the path less travelled and even the impossible are the only cornerstones you can follow. The shadows are where your salvations lies and you cannot take any light in with you.
Occult detectives have become their own genre over time as readers enjoy seeing the purely fanciful creations of authors unravelled by minds operating at such peak performance as to exist on another plane from ours, or another dimension. Dr Abraham Van Helsing has a longer legacy to ponder than just being the human in Dracula’s famous tale. Sleuths of the things that go bump in the night have been conjured by pulp masters Sax Rohmer and Robert E Howard to great effect with Moris Klaw and Steve Harrison respectively. Dashiell Hammett dabbled in the occult in The Dain Curse. Even Douglas Adams threw his hat in the ring with the Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Most recently, the concept seems to be culturally represented by Harry Dresden of The Dresden Files – even though he doesn’t fit the role as well because he is a wizard and thus entrenched in the world of the strange. The occult detective works best when he is a man, as you or I, and he enters into this strange equation with as much trepidation as we would. The occult detective should understand the world to come degree – thus he can survive his forays into this strange abyss of the unknown – and he can even use certain elements to his advantage but once he becomes part of the landscape he ceases to represent the reader and their views. The occult detective holds back the world of the strange, he does not succumb completely to it.
Imagine John Carpenter’s The Thing if Kurt Russell’s Macready was actually an interstellar bounty hunter tracking the monster instead of just a man who likes to share a drink with his chess cheating bitch of a computer. The grounded aspect of the occult detective is where he shines from – and it makes us enjoy his cheeky use of the mystical because he’s taking the power from the other side and using it against them. It’s like shooting a Nazi with a Luger or sending an Alien out the airlock to be killed in the deep space from whence it came. There can be contemptible familiarity but never complacent immersion.
Around the same time Alan Moore was creating John Constantine within the pages of The Saga of the Swamp Thing, another British inconspicuously formed an occult detective who would capture the minds of many over the decades despite his meagre amount of appearances. Clive Barker was seen as the future of horror and that pundit was correct in his assertion. If Stephen King was the new Stoker of horror then Barker was the Lovecraft. Immortal creatures, hidden worlds, intense visuals, and buckets of blood carved a niche for Barker that became its own genre. If you needed a spooky idea or a sick concept, he was your man. Yet one of his most beloved characters, besides the Cenobite with the head covered in nails, has been the very human and down to earth Harry D’Amour.
We first meet D’Amour in ‘The Last Illusion,’ the very last story in Barker’s Books of Blood. D’Amour has a back catalogue of cases, one he fearfully estimates might soon end in fratricide, and yet when he hears the fear in the voice of the woman on the phone line – the one who tells him she does ‘need somebody who has experience…with the occult’ – he instantly knows his only course of action. The jacket is on and he is out the door.
D’Amour’s feverish rush to the call for action is even more admirable because we have quickly been made aware of his most impressive, and recent, failure. There was a case in Brooklyn, on the hauntingly named Wyckoff Street, where D’Amour survived but the hinted at body count explains at what cost. He left the case with the surviving priests, and a new fear of stairs, and a mind clearly blown open to the true possibilities of the occult that surrounds everyone in this narrative. Barker shows us, within a page and a half, that D’Amour is selfless and brave and yet not completely successful or perfect. D’Amour is fallible and that is always the most connective and endearing trait of a P.I. D’Amour clearly has a longer history with the strange and yet we are only as good as our last go and D’Amour is one in the hole. This lady offers a chance for redemption.
Barker explains him as a basic pulp hero who happens to be caught up in a more complex pulp horror tale. In the liner notes to The Last Illusion (the 1996 film adaptation of the short story, starring Scott Bakula in a gritty turn as D’Amour), Barker states, “[D’Amour’s] destiny, it seems, is to be in constant struggle with what might be loosely called ‘the forces of darkness’, though he claims he’d be quite content investigating insurance fraud…He’s not a Van Helsing, defiantly facing off against some implacable evil with faith and holy water. His antecedents are the troubled, weary and often lovelorn heroes of film noir – private detectives with an eye for a beautiful widow and an aversion to razors.” Barker very purposefully created D’Amour to be the perfect occult detective – aware and yet resistant. He’s a basic man, who would love nothing but a basic life, yet he understands his world is anything but basic. And it is this understanding that drives him to action because to do anything less when he knows what he knows and is capable of what little he can muster would be criminal. D’Amour might be tired, perhaps even afraid at times, but he is not a bad man and could never knowingly do wrong.
The grieving widow of his first narrated case, Dorothea, talks of how she feels New York, the location itself, was somehow attributable to the events that lead to her husband’s death. D’Amour replies, “Don’t blame New York. It can’t help itself.” This is how he sees the world, even the things of evil virtue aren’t to be held accountable for their unfortunate glamour. Inanimate paraphernalia is not liable for its perceived actions but real people, those who make conscious choices, are most certainly to be held responsible for the effects they cause daily. This is how D’Amour sees the world, and it is also what drives him to act because he constantly holds himself accountable.
The initial aspects of this case – a magician (or illusionist) who has died and whose wife feels it was no accident – involves D’Amour sitting by the corpse as some sort of bastardised bodyguard after the fact. While sitting with the dead husband, all he can think about is the beauty of the widow. He imagines her visiting him – next to the coffin in the bedroom – and inviting him to sample delicacies of which poems should be written. He thinks this about the widow while sitting next to, and looking at, the deceased husband. D’Amour is nothing if not intricately human.
In the end, D’Amour is victorious, in a way, and he also collects an enemy for life. He isn’t able to solve the entire conspiracy and defeat the hordes of unholy monsters that plague his day but he does manage to affect some small triumph for the widow’s desires and that is enough to see him onto the next case.
It is interesting to note that in the presence of insidiously evil power D’Amour’s response is to pull his .38 and simply fire. His methods, in the face of the inhuman, are so simplistically human. The bullet holes might cause light to escape these creatures rather than blood but a wound is a wound and if he can inflict enough he might just win.
It is this level of perseverance that places D’Amour next to Philip Marlowe and the Continental Op. He beats the case open, even when not completely wanting to anymore, and this ability to stumble upon the next step as much as deduce it makes D’Amour a gumshoe for the ages. The other timeless skill D’Amour masters is an unflappable cynicism about the world, and for him the worlds beyond our world. In The Last Illusion, Harry is presented with a Mexican stand-off between the strange aid of the deceased, Valentin, and the widow. They argue with him over what is to be done with the body, and which of them is to be trusted. Valentin is revealed to be a scaly demon himself – a misrepresentation and yet one he scrabbles to explain as having proper reason. Dorothea screams at D’Amour to shoot the scum and yet he does not succumb to the instant feelings of prejudice and fear many would hold close when presented with such an unearthly creature. He still analyses the situation and through a simple faux pas ascertains who the villain of the scene is and makes no hesitation in plugging them with his simple weapon. He does not rely on uninformed reflex but rather facts and untold instincts. He also wishes to do no harm so when he causes harm he must feel certain it is the only way and the proper way.
It would take a decade before Barker would truly devote time to D’Amour again and it would come in the novel Everville. A mammoth tale of elemental beings fighting for existential supremacy, D’Amour disappears amidst the monumental gaps of amazing ideas as much as he grounds the action and brings a human perspective to the proceedings. The book is good but it is not D’Amour’s tale. He is poised to return in Barker’s next tome, The Scarlet Gospels, and we can only hope this new tale sticks more to the simple brilliance in which he was initially presented to us. The Last Illusion is the perfect blend of a pulp detective against a pulp horror landscape.
The concept of an ordinary man stuck in an extraordinary situation is the basis of much fiction but D’Amour shows you can keep the man ordinary, though extraordinary in some aspects, and then make his surrounding narrative something else entirely. The world can crumble away, everything you believe in can be revealed as a sham, but a man will always be a man and if he holds true to that he is capable of anything. D’Amour is one hell of a gumshoe because he is exactly what we hope we would be in these situations. A brave face and a pocket full of providence still need the spine of a hero upon which to be placed.
You may stick to Sherlock Holmes’ theory that once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Yet what truth must be understood in a world where the impossible can become real? To quote a moment of confusion D’Amour struggles through – “this was a strange sea. Infinitely deep, infinitely terrible.” There, anything goes.
Posted on April 16th, 2012 by ryan
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