The Signalman is a character in Caitlin R. Kiernan's Tinfoil Dossier series, the only character who appears in all three books. He is a senior agent of the shadowy organization known as Albany, a cynical and burnt-out alcoholic who is nonetheless one of the agency's most effective assets. He has a reputation as "the one who never flinched,"[1] and as "one of the last of Albany’s True Believers, a stone-cold MiB, the agency man through and through."[2] He is introduced as one of the main characters in Agents of Dreamland (2017), plays a minor but pivotal role in Black Helicopters (2018), and is again a prominent onstage figure in The Tindalos Asset (2020).
The character's full name is never given; his nickname comes from the railroad watch he always carries, manufactured by the Elgin Watch Company of Elgin, Illinois, in 1888. In The Tindalos Asset, we learn that his first name is Quentin.[2] He has an apartment in the hills above Santa Monica, California.[1]
He is born in 1960, in Birmingham, Alabama.[2] When he is eight years old, in 1968, he watches a late-show movie on TV, The Star Maiden, that has a profound effect on him.[1]
His career with Albany begins in 1981. By 2011, he is partnered with the supernatural assassin Ellison Nicodemo, who is also his lover. A botched attempt to terminate the Mythos-powered serial killer Jehosheba Talog leaves Nicodemo severely traumatized.[2]
In 2012, he makes the determination to drop an atomic bomb on Deer Isle, Maine, to end a shoggoth invasion. He is working at this point with Mary Vance, recently recruited by Albany from the FBI.[3]
The Signalman and Vance in 2015 investigate a doomsday cult known as the Moonlight Ranch at the Salton Sea in California, and discover that the cult members have infected themselves with a virulent fungus brought from Yuggoth. Vance herself turns out to be infected.[1] The Signalman considers resigning from the agency after this case.[2]
By 2017, The Signalman has a new partner, Mackenzie Regan, and the pair investigate a series of unnatural events caused by the reappearance of Talog. In early 2018, The Signalman reactivates Nicodemo, who has become a junkie. On January 18, 2018, Talog brings down an Albany plane carrying The Signalman, Regan, and Nicodemo by flooding it with water, killing The Signalman. He is buried in a cemetery east of Birmingham on February 19, 2018. Nicodemo inherits his watch.[2]
Antecedents[]
Charles Dickens wrote a story of the supernatural called "The Signalman" (1866), which H. P. Lovecraft described as "a tale of ghostly warning...touched with a verisimilitude which allies it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic school."[4]