THE DEEP ONES: "The Wigwam and the Cabin Grayling; or, Murder Will Out" by William Gilmore Simms

"Grayling; or, Murder Will Out" by William Gilmore Simms.

Discussion begins July 3, 2024.

Originally published by Wiley and Putnam in two volumes—the first series in October 1845 and the second in February 1846—for the Library of American Books series - http://simms.library.sc.edu/view_item.php?item=118263



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1291990

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

East Coast Ghosts
Great American Ghost Stories: Chilling Tales by Poe, Bierce, Hawthorne and Others

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://tinyurl.com/mryuyjza

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gilmore_Simms
https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/simms1/bio.html
https://www.eapoe.org/people/simmswg.htm
https://tinyurl.com/2s4jj8cj

I made a mistake when nominating this.

The title is "Grayling; or, Murder Will Out?". Wigwam and the Cabin is the name of the collection in appeared in.

You can find biographical material on Simms at: http://simms.library.sc.edu/biography.php.

You can also find the story at: http://simms.library.sc.edu/view_item.php?item=118264

>2 RandyStafford: HTTP ERROR 503 at sc.edu

>3 paradoxosalpha: Just checked the links. They both worked for me.

I still get the 503 on both.

It's a pretty typical -- apart from the setting of the post-American Revolutionary War -- ghost story.

However, it's beginning and end show why Poe would have liked it. We begin with the sort of moralizing Poe didn't like and end with a tale celebrating the combination of logic and imagination, "ratiocination" as Poe called it in his Auguste Dupin stories, that shows there never was any ghost to begin with. Yet, imagination does bring a murderer to justice.

If anyone is having the same problem that I (still) have with the links in >2 RandyStafford:, I just succeeded in accessing the text at https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/simmscabin1/simmscabin1.html

It's odd that the links aren't working for people. My Macbook is currently so cranky that currently it can't even open the Deep Ones story spreadsheet. Yet I could read the story.

The setting was an usual one for me. I don't think I've read any fiction set in the post-Revolutionary period; or, come to think of it, non-fiction either. Although I did read material relating to the British side in the same period: a while ago I read Edmund Burke's A Philosphical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful - a key text if you have an interest in the Gothic - and much later I pushed through the rest of the material in the Penguin Classics edition: "Thoughts on the cause of the present discontents"; "Speech on American taxation"; "Speech on conciliation with the colonies"; "Letter to the sheriifs of Bristol on the affairs of America". My biggest takeaway - how inept the UK Government of the time was (Burke's perspective, of course, but reading that in 2022 there was no avoiding the feeling of "the more things change, the more they stay the same").

The story was for the most part a traditional ghost story, actually closer to a "real life" ghost story than a traditionally-structured professional fiction. The naturalistic explanation offered in the final section of the story was a genuine surprise to me. I was initially skeptical (I'd bought into the supernatural angle from the off, I suppose) but it was bringing me round by the end, even with the rather dubious psychological reasoning (or so it would seem in for example a modern detective TV show). However it is as per >6 RandyStafford: the combination of logic and imagination that Poe uses in the stories that get him hailed as the father of the detective story.