The Hawkins Dynasty, part one

Blake Hawkins – The Hunter (1908-1944)

Blake Hawkins’ father died at the Battle of Jutland, leaving him and his mother, Edith, alone in the crime-ridden East End of London. After the war ended, thousands of demobilised British soldiers thronged the cheaper districts of London. One of them, former-private Nathan Collins, shot Edith dead in 1923, after she slapped him for drunkenly mistaking her for a prostitute.

Orphaned at the age of 15, Blake was taken in by Colonel Steve Stackhouse, an American veteran maimed during the final days of the war and a lodger in the Hawkins house. Collins was arrested but walked free after his friends intimidated witnesses into silence. Blake swore vengeance on Collins. Stackhouse, as overcome with grief as the young Blake, taught Blake how to use the Colt M1911 automatic handguns he had carried until his injury. The idea was that Blake would kill Collins because Stackhouse couldn’t do so himself.

In 1926, Collins slipped up during a drunken argument and admitted to shooting ‘a tart’ in 1923. He was finally convicted of the murder of Edith Hawkins and hanged in 1929.

In 1930, Stackhouse was kidnapped and sacrificed by the Cult of the Golden Knife. Enraged at Stackhouse's murder, and with a desire to mete out the vengeance that had been denied to him with Nathan Collins’ execution, Hawkins donned a mask and became the Hunter, self-proclaimed ‘Enemy of Crime’. For years, his main targets were East End gangsters, although he frequently went up against Golden Knife covens.

Scotland Yard spent years trying (half-heartedly) to track the Hunter down, while simultaneously taking advantage of the trail of dead he left behind to crack literally thousands of unsolved cases. In 1939, the war began, and the detectives tracking the Hunter were transferred to the more vital pursuit of trapping German spies. At about the same time, the Hunter stopped leaving such a trail of bodies.

It emerged later that he had joined the army and was fighting in North Africa. MI5 located him, in the aftermath of a battle for an oasis town in Libya, where he had single-handedly taken out an entire company of Afrika Korps infantry, before moving through the town and executing locals who collaborated with the Germans. MI5 gave Blake Hawkins a choice: remain the Hunter and become a propaganda hero for the British war effort, or be arrested and hanged for several hundred murders stretching back to 1930.

Patriotism won out, and the Hunter became a poster boy for the British press, who conveniently ‘forgot’ that he was a serial killer and repainted him as a ‘Crusader for Justice’ and ‘The Hunter of Hitler’. His true identity was not made public. After a series of covert and overt operations alongside various Allied superhumans (despite not actually being one himself), Blake Hawkins married Sally Smith, a clerk in the typing pool assigned to the superhuman taskforce. In 1942, their son, Peter, was born.

On May 12th-15th, 1944, the Hunter and a team of SAS commandoes went up against Albrecht von Gribblefaust in Leipzig. Slaughtering his way through wave after wave of increasingly tough genecrafted troops, the Hunter eventually found himself trapped in an ammunition storehouse, where Albrecht had been storing his V4 cruise missiles. As Albrecht’s forces closed in on him, the Hunter decided to destroy Albrecht’s missiles and blew up the ammo dump. The blast destroyed four square miles of Leipzig and killed an estimated 15,000 Germans, mainly civilians.

His body was destroyed in the blast, but Churchill led a minute’s silence in the House of Commons and memorials were erected first in Westminster Abbey and later in Avalon Cemetery. The minute’s silence was repeated at 2.48pm on May 15th, 1946, across Britain, exactly a year after the Leipzig blast.

Four years after his death, at the request of his widow, the British people were finally told the Hunter's identity, and Blake Hawkins' name was inscribed onto the Hunter's memorials.


(In recent years, the Hunter has become known simply as ‘Hunter’. During his life, he was referred to by the definite article.)


The Hunter’s Best-Selling Bad Guys

The Cult of the Golden Knife - I’m still working on these. Cthulhoid bad guys, basically, with an immortal leader that the Hunter killed several times.

’Simple’ Simon McCloskey - An East End crime lord whose schemes were repeatedly foiled by the Hunter. Despite a feud running from 1934 up until the Hunter’s death, the two of them only met on one occasion, in 1938, during which the Hunter blew off three of McCloskey’s fingers. Having thought himself previously untouchable, McCloskey went into hiding, leaving the day-to-day running of his empire in the hands of his son, also called Simon. McCloskey Senior succumbed to delusional paranoia, and refused to meet anyone face-to-face in case they were the Hunter (after all, no one knew what he looked like at the time). He only re-emerged into the sunlight after the Hunter’s death in Leipzig had been confirmed beyond all doubt. During his time in hiding, McCloskey had come into contact with a race of beings he called ‘Ghouls’, who lived in the Victorian sewer tunnels beneath the streets of London, feeding on drunken vagrants or corpses dug up from cemeteries. McCloskey & Son used the Ghouls as muscle in a series of gang wars throughout the 1940s and 50s, and the McCloskey gang still form a prominent part of the London underworld today.

Overmind - A stage hypnotist turned psychic puppeteer. Overmind controlled those around him into committing crimes on his behalf: robbing banks, bumping off detectives, holding up lorries, stealing valuable artefacts and so on. The main problem that the Hunter faced in fighting his plots was that the vast majority of Overmind’s puppets were innocent civilians, rather than criminals that the Hunter could allow himself to kill. He was never much more than a minor annoyance to the superhuman community until after his death, by the Hunter’s guns, in 1938. Nazi spies, who had long been observing Overmind’s abilities (and who had once come close to becoming his slaves when he detected them), stole his corpse and transported it to Germany, whereupon Dr Franz Grauss, an SS necro-scientist and occultist, managed to restore life to the brain. The necro-scientist fled with the bottled brain in 1945, eventually settling in a village in East Anglia. In 1948, Grauss, and the entire village, were transformed into mindless automatons under the (now insane) Overmind’s control, until they were freed by the Embassy. Overmind managed to get through the British Army’s perimeter cordon and escape the Embassy heroes by turning soldiers to his cause and ordering them to open fire on his pursuers.


Stories that came to light after Hunter’s death:

(1949) In 1944, the Hunter violently assaulted a French civilian in Caen, following the town’s liberation. Lucien Perot, a hotelier, had refused to give up his own room for Hawkins after all the other rooms had already been filled with British and American soldiers. Perot was hospitalised, and Hawkins was reprimanded (but not charged) by his superiors.

(1951) After years of rumours that Steve Stackhouse had actually been Edith Hawkins’ lover, letters were discovered that proved he was actually a homosexual and had been in a relationship with a man known only as ‘G’, who visited the Hawkins house on regular basis. Salacious (and unfounded) tabloid gossip speculated that Blake had been abused by Stackhouse as a child. Some went so far as to say that Blake Hawkins and Stackhouse had been lovers, and that Hawkins’ marriage to Sally Smith was a sham, designed to protect the Hunter’s reputation once he became known to the British public as a war hero.

(1952) For years, no one was quite sure where the money in the Hawkins Trust came from. Many assumed that Blake Hawkins had made some wise investments with his army pay, or that Stackhouse had left the money to him. In actuality, £5000 of the trust fund was Stackhouse’s money, but most of the £100,000 sum was made up of money stolen from the Hunter’s victims during his war on crime. The fact that the trust now belonged to Peter Hawkins, and that it had been so thoroughly laundered, and of course that it was the proceeds of crime anyway, meant that no one managed to ever reclaim any of the money in court. Nevertheless, Peter Hawkins made a series of sizeable donations to the widows and orphans left behind by his father’s vigilantism.

(1952) In 1933, Nathan Collins’s mother was shot dead in a village in the Cotswolds, ten years to the day after Collins murdered Edith Hawkins. The police never found the culprit. Several newspapers in the early 50s noted that Mrs Collins was killed with .45 calibre bullets, of the same kind used by Hunter’s trademark Colt M1911s.

(1954) It emerged that Hunter had been present at the field execution of seventeen surrendered Wehrmacht soldiers in the weeks following D-Day. A month later, evidence of involvement in three other wartime massacres was published in the Daily Mirror, although no one ever suggested that Hunter had personally pulled any triggers.

(1955) Radio transcripts leaked from inside the Ministry of Defence archives revealed a panicked conversation between an SAS sergeant from the Hunter’s team in Leipzig, and a British Army command post in the main Allied force outside the city, in which it becomes apparent that the Hunter’s death was not as heroic as had been portrayed in 1944. The Hunter was planting dynamite in the V4 racks not because the unit had been cut off, as had been the official story, but because he had taken a terminal rifle wound to the stomach and was bitterly angry that he would not be able to personally kill von Gribblefaust (who he erroneously believed to still be in Leipzig at this time). Worse, he had fired warning shots at his own troops when they tried to stop him.

(Can anyone think of any more damaging rumours, revealed between the late 40s and early 60s, that could have tarnished Hunter’s reputation, posthumously?)


Descendents:

Peter Hawkins – Orion (1942-1989)


Christian Hawkins – Orion the Hunter (1966-present)