The second case for John Burke's occult investigator takes Dr Alexander Caspian and Bronwen into the murky world of London's secret societies, and pits them against a psychic parasite which preys upon the misguided hopes of desperate people for its own sinister ends.
It all begins innocuously enough when Caspian is consulted by the MP Joseph Hinde, a fellow member of the Pantheon Club, who confesses to increasing concern over the behaviour of his daughter Laura. A once happy and carefree girl has become secretive and dissembling, given to making covert assignations which she refuses to discuss. When Caspian's attempt to hypnotize Laura is thwarted he and Bronwen are compelled to utilize their telepathic powers to disinter Laura's secret. Their incursion into Laura's mind alerts them to the presence of another intrusive presence already lodged there, a strange veiled figure called Ilona who both commands Laura to attend upon her and tempts her by stoking subconcious lesbian fantasies.
Pretty racy stuff huh, however restrained the language Burke couches it in.
The question Caspian is confronted with is whether Ilona is real or an alter ego conjured up in the brain of a grief stricken girl.
From this point on Caspian's investigation proceeds along more prosaic lines, but it still manages to discover a secret society whose own members remain strangely ignorant of belonging to it between meetings. Pretty soon those same members are turning up dead with fingernails ripped off and tufts of hair torn out. Everything points to the impending culmination of a mystical zodiacal rite; a rite in which Bronwen finds herself selected for pivotal involvement.
THE BLACK CHARADE is that rarest of beasts, a follow up book that is the superior of its progenitor.
THE DEVIL'S FOOTSTEPS is a terrific book but this one excels it in every respect. Its cast of colourful characters are wonderfully sketched in, from the buttoned up puritanical Hinde to the bluff and blustering Thornhill who believes that a single lifetime just isn't sufficent for the contributions he might make to the world: from the haunted alcoholic actress Elaine Mancroft to the mysterious widow Elizabeth
Relph, newly returned from India with the whiff of scandal attendant upon her. Best of all is the creepy Wentworth, a backstreet peddlar in smut and a masochist, locked in a symbiotic relationship with his teenage doxy cum dominatrix Annie. Wentworth is the beneficiary of one of Burke's best physical descriptions:
"His buttery complexion, with streaks and blotches of darker hue caught in it, gave him a sluggish, bilious appearance. One felt it would take only a push or a harsh word to make him crumple moistly in on himself."
As with
THE DEVIL'S FOOTSTEPS this is a story sparing in its use of shocks and sensation, which only goes to emphasize their effectiveness when they do occur. Again its the inexorable feeling of something dreadful being formulated that powers the story and keeps you reading. Burke's storytelling skill has a compulsiveness that his own siren creature Ilona would envy.
If there is one mild disappointment to be had then it lies in Bronwen's peripherality to the plot. Domestic bliss appears to have rather dampened her wonderful celtic fire and independent spirit. Here she appears content to offer wry reproofs on Caspian's instances of masculine presumption whereas before she would have been indignant. Even so the pair remain an intensely likeable and credibly affectionate couple.
Caspian himself is still an intriguing protagonist, all the more so for proving himself a far from infallible hero. He jumps to erroneous conclusions and makes errors of judgement. In the book's fiery climax it is the bullish Hinde who makes the more pragmatic action in saving the endangered women.
Despite a few reservations about those instances where characters vary in mental fortitude in order to keep the plot on track this is a quite magnificent book. I recommend it unreservably.
Readers of psychic detective fiction will particularly appreciate Burke's housing of Caspian in a residence on Cheyne Walk. Presumably he meant us to assume that a certain Thomas Carnacki esquire drops in to talk shop between books.
