Critical parapsychology is what we might call a niche genre. But it's one in which the late Trevor H Hall was second to none. He also wrote about stage magicians and tricksters, so for him the two blended inexorably. What we have here is an oddity even for him. Edmund Gurney was a man who had everything. He was rich, good-looking, an obvious genius. Yet he died along in a commercial hotel in Brighton in June 1888, when he was just forty-one.
The trickery is not disputed. Gurney was secretary of the Society for Psychical Research and did the bulk of the research and writing himself. His particular interests were telepathy and mesmerism. He became involved with two young Brighton men, George Smith and Douglas Blackburn who had been doing a mind-reading act at the Aquarium. They became the objects of his research, his obsession. The experiments purported to be scientific but were a long way from it. The young men had never pretended their act was anything other than muscle-reading yet Gurney, the genius, let himself be convinced.
Hall argues that the trickery was about to be revealed and that Gurney, who suffered from extreme depression which he tried to fend off by overwork, simply could not take another disappointment. He argues his case well and thoroughly but one could just as easily argue that he was killed by someone higher or lower than him in the SPR hierarchy. His friend Frederick Myers, for example, or his brother Arthur Myers, who was one of the first on the scene. Or Frank Podmore, Gurney's assistant at the SPR, who was said to have interests of a different kind in the Brighton Boys. Or indeed the remaining Brighton Boy, Smith, who had become Gurney's private secretary. The other stage faker, Blackburn, had emigrated to South Africa by this point, where he became a celebrated novelist.
Fascinating...
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