The Tangled Miracle

Bertram Brooker

• Publisher: Invisible Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781988784816
• eBook ISBN: 9781988784847
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A first-rate thriller from one of Canada's pioneer abstract painters.

A cult leader announces a miracle will take place and she will rise to heaven. A medium prophesies the date, publicity gets to work, and all of America hums with anticipation. On the appointed day, she disappears and scientist Mortimer Hood, there to verify the miracle, must investigate how—and whether—the whole thing is a hoax, or if the priestess has been murdered.

Originally published in 1936, this edition features a new introduction by poet and academic Gregory Betts.

The Tangled Miracle

A Mortimer Hood Mystery

by Bertram Brooker

A.K.A Huxley Herne

Invisible Publishing

Halifax & Prince Edward County

Introduction © Gregory Betts, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The tangled miracle / Bertram Brooker.

Names: Brooker, Bertram, 1888-1955, author.

Description: Originally published under the author’s pseudonym of Huxley Herne: London : T. Nelson, 1936.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210259582 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210259590 | ISBN 9781988784816 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988784847 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8503.R63 T35 2021 | DDC C813/.52—dc23

Throwback series editor: Bart Vautour

Cover design: Megan Fildes

Cover painting: Ascending Forms by Bertram Brooker

Printed and bound in Canada

Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Prince Edward County

www.invisiblepublishing.com

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

The Great Debunker: An Introduction to The Tangled Miracle

by Gregory Betts

In a world of murder, charlatans, and occult secret societies, it takes a special kind of addled detective to see through mystical machinations of a charismatic cult leader intent on creating a new religion. Bertram Brooker, originally writing under the pseudonym Huxley Herne, spins a macabre, insightful tale of an occultist group that attempts to fake a miracle. Mortimer Hood—psychical detective, scientist, and “the terror of frauds”—is hired to confirm their publicity stunt, while the hungry media has already fallen for their charlatanism. Indeed, the press is too consumed with markets and readership and a splashy story to bother fact-checking the mystical spectacle set to unfold.

In light of Hitler’s rise to power just years before, and of his tight, unprecedented use of media, the novel offers an early and particularly perceptive exploration of power, truth, and the dilemma of a passive and uncritical free-press. Truth, in such a world, becomes a constantly shifting rendition of possible truths. The question is how can Hood, and by extension contemporary readers, overcome the attractive but false stories from a docile press?

Deploying the genre conventions of detective fiction, the novel opens with Hood in his New York City office mapping the lasciviously drawn contours of a young woman seeking to hire him. Hood perfectly fulfills the role of the quiet-yet-confident amorous detective-hero. She, for her part, comes bearing the obligatory cash-filled envelope with which to entice him into her world of mystery and intrigue. A “strange new cult” has sprung up around the principle of Assumptionism (the belief that the human body can ascend to heaven with the soul, though only for anointed prophets and saints). The members of the cult believe an assumptionist miracle is about to befall their founder and leader, who will disappear or be “translated into heaven” in the immediate future. Appreciating the marketing windfall that miracles represent in the economy of religious exchange, the cult hires Mortimer Hood, skeptical scientist—and himself an author of the bestselling book The World of Spooks and Spoofs—to validate the authenticity of the miracle to the general public.

Though set in the 1930s, the wider context of the book can be traced back to Croydon, England, in the 1880s, where Bertram Brooker grew up poor, alongside an asthmatic brother. In the same neighbourhood, though down on the more affluent Tennison Road, lived Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Young Brooker donned a cape and deerstalker hat and seized upon Doyle’s brilliant sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. He began entertaining his crew of fellow urchins—and his sick brother—with puppet shows and plays featuring the adventures of the great debunker Holmes. The Brookers moved to Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, in 1905, after a doctor prescribed Canada for the sake of its clean air. The men in the family, including teenaged Bertram, easily found work on the expanding Grand Trunk Pacific railway.

In 1936, around the same time as he released The Tangled Miracle, Brooker published another novel called Think of the Earth, which won the very first Tweedsmuir Award (later renamed the Governor General’s Award). The book depicts the construction of the railway across the prairies from the perspective of a somewhat intellectual British émigré. The hero, Tavistock, is seduced by a diabolic misreading of mysticism. The plot, though, maps out his gradual debunking of his own delusions. Poignantly, the hero becomes convinced that salvation depends upon the murder of an innocent Métis man. In real life, Louis Riel, an innocent Métis man from what is now Manitoba, was hung by Canada as a kind of sacrifice to the growth and expansion of the nation. Tavistock, in contrast, spares the Métis man when he realizes the horror of such an act. Readers today will likely appreciate Brooker’s recognition that violence in the name of God, gods, or country, was no antidote to the problem of colonialism and imperialism. Contemporary readers of Think of the Earth and The Tangled Miracle will also note, of course, that his language and vocabulary, particular in relation to gender, ability, and ethnicity, are dated by almost a century and suited to the popular market of that time rather than our own.

Brooker was surrounded by and steeped in mysticism (the belief in an exalted form of spiritual consciousness) and spiritualism (the belief that the living can communicate with the dead). The Tangled Miracle extends the debunking spirit of Think of the Earth by looking at the twinned rise of mass media, and the celebrity hucksters that glommed on to its power. Though it depicts a very different geography than Think of the Earth, it too tells the tale of a man demystifying the worst abuses and excesses of mysticism. These books, together, show how Brooker wrestled with the claims made by these communities. Where Think of the Earth wrestles with the psychological temptations of mysticism felt by an individual, The Tangled Miracle examines the promotional temptations of public spectacle capitalized upon by groups and corporations. It is worth recalling that, as part of his day job, Brooker published a guidebook for advertisers called Subconscious Selling in 1923. The uses of the media outlined in that book become abuses in the plot of The Tangled Miracle.

This book wasn’t the first time Brooker had explored the intersection of new media and detective stories. Earlier in his career, after leaving the railway business, he moved to Neepawa, Manitoba, to open and operate The Roxy, one of Canada’s first movie theatres (with his aforementioned brother). Inspired by the brand new medium of film, Brooker wrote a series of detective movies in 1912 and 1913 that were produced by the Vitagraph Company in New York City, and which were generally considered successful. He recoiled with suspicion from the industry, though, as his “mind was transformed into a seething whirlpool of ghastly plots.” Brooker walked away and left the theatre to his brother, who operated it well into the 1930s. The theatre appears by name in Margaret Laurence’s A Bird in the House, amongst other stories and literary cameos.

Brooker then moved on to Winnipeg. At the time, Winnipeg was a hotspot for culture, but also for mysticism and its spurious cousins spiritualism, for...

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