Nothing But the Night Read online

  NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT

  JOHN BLACKBURN

  With a new introduction by

  GREG GBUR

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Nothing but the Night by John Blackburn

  First published London: Jonathan Cape, 1968

  First Valancourt Books edition 2013

  Copyright © 1968 by John Blackburn

  Introduction © 2013 by Greg Gbur

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  Cover image © Shutterstock.com

  Introduction

  John Blackburn’s twelfth book Nothing but the Night highlights a unique “what if?” scenario for the works of the master horror author. It is the only Blackburn novel to have been adapted into a major motion picture,1 a 1973 movie of the same name starring the iconic actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. The movie did poorly at the box office, evidently ending prospects, at least in the short term, of further adaptations. If it had been a hit, however, John Blackburn’s work, with its fast-paced plots, surprising twists and turns, and surprise endings, could have easily kept the movie industry in business for quite some time. Nothing but the Night, one of Blackburn’s most macabre works, should have been the perfect beginning to a long movie run.

  English-born John Fenwick Blackburn (1923-1993) certainly provided enough material to form the basis for a successful string of films. Incredibly prolific, he wrote 28 novels between A Scent of New-Mown Hay in 1958 and The Bad Penny in 1985, on average roughly one book per year. His writing career started while he was working as the director of Red Lion Books in London; when his first book became successful, he resigned in order to write full-time, though he managed an antiquarian bookstore with his wife Joan Clift. Even before writing, Blackburn’s life and career took nearly as many twists as one of his typical novels: he worked at various times as a schoolteacher (in both London and Berlin), a lorry driver, and a radio officer in the Mercantile Marine during World War II.

  Blackburn’s writing lies at a nearly unique intersection of the genres of horror, mystery and thriller. All of his books are fast-paced, filled with unexpected perils, narrow escapes, and sudden twists that send the story in a different direction. Nearly all of his books also provide a mystery of some sort, which is explained with an unexpected revelation in its climax. However, as often as not that revelation turns out to involve a particularly nasty, even supernatural, horror. Part of the joy in reading a Blackburn novel without any foreknowledge is the surprise of seeing exactly what kind of threat is driving the plot.

  Like many thrillers, Nothing but the Night begins with a small event: in this case, the crash of a school bus carrying children from the Van Traylen Home, an orphanage on the isolated Isle of Bala off the northwest coast of Scotland. The driver dies of his injuries, but the children are fine – except for young Mary Valley, whose injuries are psychological and inexplicable. The girl seems to be suffering from flashbacks or hallucinations of a traumatic and devastating fire, an event that she could not have experienced herself. Mr Haynes, the attending psychiatrist, goes against the wishes of the Van Traylen Fellowship and holds Mary for further evaluation, going so far as to bring a hospital colleague, the respected bacteriologist Sir Marcus Levin, into his confidence.

  Convinced that Mary is in a dangerous mental state, Haynes decides on a risky course of action: he brings Mary’s biological mother, Anna Harb, for a family reunion. Harb is troubled herself, having originally lost her daughter while spending time in prison for a triple homicide. She is also convinced that she has psychic powers, and in a first meeting with Haynes declares that her daughter is in fact dead. The meeting of mother and daughter does not go well, culminating with Anna attempting to throw Mary down a flight of stairs, screaming that the young girl is a fiend from hell. Mary is rescued, but Anna escapes. When it is discovered that Anna has murdered again, a nationwide manhunt is initiated.

  This macabre set of circumstances draws the attention of General Charles Kirk, member of Her Majesty’s Foreign Intelligence Service. Kirk has already been investigating the Van Traylen Fellowship, a collection of some thirty wealthy benefactors funding good works throughout the country, including the Van Traylen Home. Over a very short period of time, a handful of Fellowship members have met seemingly accidental but suspicious deaths, including its founder, Helen Van Traylen. Is someone trying to eliminate the Fellowship, and is the attempt on Mary Valley’s life somehow connected? Marcus Levin and General Kirk join forces to get to the bottom of the mystery.

  When Anna Harb’s car is found abandoned on the ferry to the Isle of Bala, the location of the Van Traylen Home, an island-wide search begins for the murderess. But many more surprises, and incredible horror, lie in wait for Kirk and Levin on the island – culminating in the darkness of Guy Fawkes night.

  As noted above, Blackburn is a master of surprise twists in his storytelling. Nothing but the Night is a somewhat unusual novel in that, to borrow some boxing parlance, Blackburn telegraphs his blow quite early in the story. Most readers will determine almost right away that there is something sinister about the seemingly innocent young girl Mary Valley. However, to continue the boxing analogy, when the blow finally does strike home and the true secret is revealed, the reader will likely find that it hits much harder than expected.

  Evil children had in fact become a popular horror theme at the time that Blackburn wrote Nothing but the Night. The most influential of such stories is certainly John Wyndham’s 1958 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, in which the women of the small town of Midwich become mysteriously impregnated with babies that grow into children of supernatural powers and extraterrestrial origin. This novel was made into a 1960 movie titled Village of the Damned, which was successful enough to spawn a sequel in 1963, Children of the Damned. Other stories of the era that featured evil children include William March’s 1954 novel The Bad Seed, about a murderous sociopathic young girl, Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby, introducing the child of Satan, and Jerome Bixby’s 1953 short story It’s a Good Life, about a young boy with godlike powers who terrorizes and dominates his fellow townsfolk. All of these had successful television or movie adaptations, indicating how compelling the idea had become.

  It is unclear, however, exactly why children became not only acceptable as monstrous villains but also popular as such. March’s The Bad Seed, mentioned above, suggests one possibility. By the early 1900s, the public had become quite aware of the scientific debate of “nature versus nurture”: are one’s personality traits inherited biologically from one’s parents (nature) or do they come from environmental factors including parenting (nurture)? Anthropological work by Margaret Mead on the island of Samoa in the 1920s suggested nurture was extremely important, but a growing understanding of genetic inheritance seemed to weigh in favor of nature. The Bad Seed falls directly on the nature side, suggesting that its young heroine, Rhoda, acquired her murderous tendencies from her grandmother. The Midwich Cuckoos also features children who are predestined to be dangerous, in this case thanks to alien manipulation. Stories such as these capitalize on a parent’s natural fears.

  The movie version of The Bad Seed, released in 1956, suggests another reason why bad children could serve as good horror fodder. The end of the film concludes with a theatrical curtain call, and culminates with Patty McCormack (Rhoda) being spanked by actress Nancy Kelly (playing her mother). This rather bi
zarre lighthearted scene intends to reassure parents that, in spite of what the movie might have shown them, a good bit of parenting could have prevented everything! Parenting itself was going through dramatic changes thanks to the 1946 publication of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock. Spock’s book, which was second in sales only to the Bible in its first 52 years, suggested treating children as individuals and adjusting parenting to be less punitive and more based on understanding. To its critics, Baby and Child Care encouraged permissiveness, leading to selfishness and instant gratification in children. It is not too far of a leap to imagine such undisciplined children becoming monsters. Books such as Nothing but the Night could therefore be said to indulge in parenting fears.

  Nothing but the Night’s use of an evil child is also illustrative of how John Blackburn was willing to tap into whatever horror ideas were captivating readers at the time. Another example is his 1959 novel Broken Boy (also published by Valancourt), whose story of a sinister demonic cult seems inspired by the stories of Satanism and witchcraft by fellow Englishman Dennis Wheatley such as The Devil Rides Out (1934). Also noteworthy is Blackburn’s 1976 novel The Face of the Lion, which presents a remarkably ahead of its time threat of a zombie holocaust, possibly inspired by George Rom­ero’s 1968 landmark film Night of the Living Dead. Though Blackburn might have drawn inspiration from other works, it is important to note that he is never derivative: each of his novels stands on its own and takes the initial concept to a uniquely horrifying destination.

  Blackburn is known for the use of recurring stock characters in his novels. Nothing but the Night brings back three of them: General Charles Kirk, Doctor Marcus Levin, and journalist John Forest. General Kirk is a high-ranking member of the Foreign Intelligence Service, and applies powerful detective skills and a blunt pragmatism to the investigation. Doctor Levin, a researcher in bacteria and a recent Nobel Prize winner, has the scientific know-how to unravel the complicated forces at play on the Isle of Bala. John Forest is portrayed as a ruthless and cynical man who will do anything for a story, and tends to cause as many problems as he solves. By Nothing but the Night, Kirk and Levin have worked on a number of cases together, including Blackburn’s first two novels A Scent of New-Mown Hay and A Sour Apple Tree.

  The use of such characters has often been presented as a negative in Blackburn’s work; however, they almost become old friends after one has read through enough of his novels. Later books will bring different groups together to solve a problem, and I’ve found an odd thrill in discovering that two favorites will team up in a newly acquired book.

  Though Blackburn’s books often feel ahead of their time in terms of pacing and ideas, they still contain antiquated concepts that nevertheless give insight into the history of his time. Early in Nothing but the Night, General Kirk tries to solve the mystery of the Van Traylen murders by feeding all known information about the case into a semi-intelligent computer; the computer then returns a print-out confirming that the data suggests a conspiracy against the Fellowship! This view of computing power was obviously over-optimistic: to this day, the closest we have come to such open-ended intelligence is Deep Blue’s win in chess over Garry Kasparov in 1997 and the 2011 win of IBM’s Watson over past “Jeopardy!” champs such as Ken Jennings. Over-hyping of the power of computers was relatively common at that time, however. The television show The Prisoner included an episode titled “The General” which first aired on November 3, 1967; this episode also featured a brilliant computer which could answer almost any question posed it, given enough data. The titular prisoner, Number 6, defeats the machine by asking it the unanswerable question: “Why?”

  Even a super-intelligent computer could not have foreseen the fate of the movie version of Nothing but the Night, which seemed to have everything going for it. Riding a wave of popularity for gruesome stories of black magic, Christopher Lee set up his own production company – Charlemagne – to produce Blackburn’s tale and, as noted earlier, starred in it himself along with his good friend and other veteran horror actor Peter Cushing. The failure of the movie led immediately to Charlemagne’s demise, though Lee himself did not blame the source material. In his autobiography,2 he notes that Nothing but the Night “failed because it was ahead of its time.”

  This may be true; watching the movie today, however, my impression is that it really failed for more mundane reasons. Though the screenplay is remarkably loyal to the plot of the novel, the tone and pacing feel poorly handled. Whereas Blackburn’s novel feels like an ever-accelerating chain of events leading inexorably to disaster, the movie scenes seem leisurely and disconnected. Blackburn’s book draws the reader along, while the movie feels like a collection of isolated incidents. Though the casting of Lee as Colonel Charles Bingham (replacing General Kirk) and Cushing as Sir Mark Ashley (replacing Marcus Levin) is inspired, other key roles seem poorly handled. Evidently John Blackburn himself was disappointed3 with the casting of actress Diana Dors as Anna Harb, and she does come across as more comical than threatening with fiery red hair and a bright red jacket. In the book, Anna Harb is unseen after arriving on the Isle, making her a figure of menace. In the movie, we are treated to numerous scenes of Harb stumbling across the landscape, hiding from the police search parties. Nevertheless, the movie maintains the horrifying finale of the book, and is fascinating to watch.

  In any case, the book Nothing but the Night was well-received by critics, as were the majority of Blackburn’s novels. The most noteworthy review was written by Francis Iles in the November 15, 1968 issue of The Guardian newspaper. Iles wrote, “John Blackburn lives right up to his reputation for the eerie and the sinister in Nothing but the Night (Cape, 21s); a little girl has nightmares, but were they nightmares? Indeed, was she only a little girl?”

  Hopefully this new edition will draw attention back to the long and unfairly neglected works of John Blackburn. Though the first attempt to convert his work to cinema failed, his writing seems a natural, almost inevitable, fit to the big screen.

  Greg Gbur

  March 5, 2013

  Greg Gbur is an associate professor of physics and optical science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He writes the long-running blog “Skulls in the Stars,” which discusses classic horror fiction, physics and the history of science, as well as the curious intersections between the three topics. His science writing has recently been featured in “The Best Science Writing Online 2012,” published by Scientific American. He has previously introduced John Blackburn’s Broken Boy and Bury Him Darkly for Valancourt Books.

  1 There was, however, also a made-for-television movie in 1969 titled Destiny of a Spy, based on Blackburn’s novel The Gaunt Woman.

  2 Christopher Lee, Lord of Misrule (London: Orion Books Ltd, 2003), p. 227.

  3 Stated in the trivia section of the Internet Movie Database entry for Nothing but the Night.

  NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT

  Preface

  Four people found Helen Van Traylen and three of them were close friends. Lord Michael Fawnlee had known her since she was a girl, Dr Eric Yeats was her medical adviser and had attended her during her several illnesses, while Jane Vince had been her housekeeper and companion for over twenty years. The exception was a Church of England curate named Glossop, who knew of Mrs Van Traylen’s charitable activities and had called to collect a subscription for Oxfam.

  Fawnlee and Yeats had been talking to Glossop when they heard the explosion and, being elderly, it took them some time to mount the stairs, while the clergyman did not presume to push past them. On the landing they met Jane Vince and Mary Valley, a small child from the Van Traylen Home who had been staying with her benefactress during the past fortnight. They were both in tears and Miss Vince could only point dumbly towards the door of the bedroom. Yeats was the first to enter the room and he and Fawnlee smiled with relief as their eyes grew accustomed to the dim light.

  ‘Thank God, Eric,’ Fawnlee said. ‘It was just a car back­firing in the street and Jane
is getting old like the rest of us. She imagines things and you’ve been frightening her about Helen’s condition.’

  The curtains were half drawn and in the dusk they could see their friend stretched peacefully out on a sofa in an attitude they had seen a score of times before. She was dressed in the familiar pale-blue housecoat, her walking stick was by her side and an Abyssinian cat named Oscar Wilde was crouched on her shoulder as if guarding his sleeping mistress. Then Jane Vince switched on the lights and screamed.

  Not a stick but a small-bore shotgun lay between Mrs Van Traylen’s wrinkled hands and Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, to give him his full title, was busily licking the little that was left of her face.

  ‘Eight green bottles hanging on the wall . . . Eight green bottles hanging on the wall.’ Almost a year had passed since Helen Van Traylen died and through the open windows of the motor coach ‘Surrey Monarch’ the children’s voices rang shrill and clear above the sounds of the traffic and a church clock starting to strike six.

  ‘And if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there’d be seven green bottles hanging on the wall.’ The bus drew up at the Marford Lane traffic lights and two women wait­ing for their signal to cross the road smiled up at the faces of the little boys and girls sitting in twos and singing so tune­fully. Nice kids, they thought. Well dressed and obviously well brought up. Probably some private school on their way back from an outing. Very different from the young hooli­gans who were dragging down the neighbourhood since those new council flats had been built last year. All singing in tune and all looking so happy.

  ‘Five green bottles hanging on the wall.’

  ‘Noisy little bastards!’ Frank Reynolds, the coach driver, muttered to himself as the lights changed and he accelerated across the junction. He felt ill and tired, the rush hour traffic was building up and he was due to deliver the party at London Airport by six thirty sharp.