Also in 1963, Wilson’s novel The Man Without a Shadow (published in the US as The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme), the second in the Gerard Sorme trilogy, appeared in print. It featured Caradoc Cunningham, a larger than life character and practitioner of sex magic, based on the ‘Great Beast’ Aleister Crowley, who, when he first meets Sorme, impresses him with his telepathic powers. This anticipates the chapter on Crowley in The Occult by several years. Wilson then went on to write a short biography, Aleister Crowley: The Nature of the Beast, in 1987 (recently reprinted).
In a later novel, The Glass Cage, published in 1966, Damon Reade, a William Blake scholar, is approached by the police in the hope that he can help them catch the Thames Murderer, who leaves a quote from Blake beside each victim. Reade has a file of correspondence from Blake fans and decides to take a couple of the weirder letters to an old man in his village who has ‘strange powers’ and whom he believes will be able to tell intuitively if one of them has been written by the murderer.
