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The Hypnotic Tales of Rafael Sabatini

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Today, few people would recognize the name “Rafael Sabatini”, but in the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most popular authors in the world. He was called “the Alexandre Dumas of Modern Fiction” and “the Prince of Storytellers”, and he almost singlehandedly resurrected the genre of the swashbuckler both in literature and on film. Historical romances and adventure stories were Sabatini’s stock-in-trade and the focal point of the majority of his literary writings, but for a brief time, at the beginning of his writing career, he must have had at least a passing interest in hypnotism, for he would write, not one, but two stories dealing with the subject.

The first of his hypnotic tales was The Avenger, which appeared in the March 1909 issue of Gunter’s Magazine. In The Avenger, we meet Roger Galliphant, a man with medical training and a strong interest in psychology and psychic research. Galliphant is also a powerful hypnotist who, while performing a simple demonstration of hypnotism in front of friends, discovers that an acquaintance of his, James Chester, has used hypnotism to commit at least two murders. Roger Galliphant, knowing the difficulty of proving Chester’s crimes in a court of law, plans on avenging the murder victims’ deaths, and he does so by using his own hypnotic powers against those of Chester’s—and thus a battle between hypnotists ensues. Roger Galliphant also appears in Sabatini’s second tale dealing with hypnosis, The Dream, a novelette published in the August 1912 issue of The Story-Teller. Galliphant appears toward the end of the story when he is needed as an eminent authority on hypnotism, and he must decide if Francis Orpington was under the influence of hypnotic suggestion when he killed an unarmed man.