by Mike Ashley
© 2020 by Mike Ashley
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-945863-52-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-945863-54-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-945863-53-0
Cover illustration by Mélanie Delon
Cover design by Claudia Noble
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Introduction, Mike Ashley
Green Tea, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The Shining Pyramid, Arthur Machen
The Haunted Child, Arabella Kenealy
The Mystery of the Felwyn Tunnel, L. T. Meade & Robert Eustace
The Story of Yand Manor House, E. & H. Heron
The Tapping on the Wainscot, Allan Upward
Samaris, Robert W. Chambers
The Whistling Room, William Hope Hodgson
The Woman with the Crooked Nose, Victor Rousseau
The Sorcerer of Arjuzanx, Max Rittenberg
The Ivory Statue, Sax Rohmer
The Stranger, Claude & Alice Askew
The Swaying Vision, Jessie Douglas Kerruish
The Sanatorium, F. Tennyson Jesse
The Villa on the Borderive Road, Rose Champion de Crespigny
The Room of Fear, Ella Scrymsour
The Seven Fires, Philippa Forest
The Subletting of the Mansion, Dion Fortune
The Jest of Warburg Tantavul, Seabury Quinn
The Soldier, A. M. Burrage
The Horror of the Height, Sydney Horler
The Mystery of Iniquity, L. Adams Beck
The Thought-Monster, Amelia Reynolds Long
The Shut Room, Henry S. Whitehead
Dr. Muncing, Exorcist, Gordon MacCreagh
The Case of the Haunted Cathedral, Margery Lawrence
The Shonokins, Manly Wade Wellman
The Dead of Winter Apparition, Joseph Payne Brennan
The Garden of Paris, Eric Williams
St. Michael & All Angels, Mark Valentine
Jeremiah, Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Copyright Acknowledgments and Story Sources
About the Editor
INTRODUCTION
MIKE ASHLEY
THIS ANTHOLOGY BRINGS TOGETHER THIRTY-ONE STORIES FEATURING the investigations of the psychic or occult detective. The detective may not necessarily have any psychic abilities of their own—though some do have a form of second-sight—but usually have a profound knowledge of occult matters, often as a result of years of esoteric studies in remote parts of the world.
The occult detective became a popular theme in weird fiction in the years before and around the First World War, bringing together the two popular genres of the detective story and supernatural fiction. Inevitably the success of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories was a prompt to many writers to turn to crime fiction and introduce elements of the strange and outré, even though Holmes himself had no interest in crimes which may have had some occult cause. It provided a format for a detective with astonishing knowledge of the weird and the wonderful to be assisted by a colleague who may not necessarily have the same knowledge or skills, but had abilities of his own which invariably helped resolve the case.
Having said that, stories of psychic detectives go back way earlier than Sherlock Holmes. In this volume I want to follow the growth and development of the psychic detective through the stories and characters ranging from Sheridan Le Fanu’s Martin Hesselius from 1869 to Jessica Salmonson’s Penelope Pettiweather from 1990, encompassing the classic period from just before the First World War with the Westrel Keen stories by Robert W. Chambers, the Carnacki adventures by William Hope Hodgson, and including such detectives as Moris Klaw by Sax Rohmer, Solange Fontaine by F. Tennyson Jesse, and Francis Chard by A. M. Burrage. I was keen to include many lesser known characters and this volume includes several stories either never previously reprinted, such as those by Allan Upward, L. Adams Beck, Philippa Forest, and Eric Williams, or those otherwise available only in limited edition volumes such as the stories by Jessie Douglas Kerruish, Rose Champion de Crespigny, and Ella Scrymsour. I hope that even though you may have encountered some of these stories before, the majority will be new.
These stories run the full range of weird fiction from the haunted house to afflicted children, possession, crypto-monsters, horrors from the distant past, and a disturbing range of occult powers. Almost all the stories are from connected series and the introductions to each story provide background on the authors and their works so that you can track down further stories featuring these fighters of fear.
The emergence of the occult detective parallels to some degree the growth of interest in spiritualism that emerged following the claims by the New York sisters Kate and Margaret Fox in 1848 that they had made contact with the spirit of a murder victim. The sisters became famous, and even though they eventually confessed that their performances were a hoax, the public had become sufficiently convinced in spiritualist beliefs and the role of a medium that the movement grew. It was through the exploits of certain mediums, such as Daniel Dunglas Home in the 1850s, that the scientific community became interested in spiritualism and hauntings, leading to the emergence of ghost clubs and societies. The first of these, the Ghost Society, was founded by Edward White Benson (the father of writers E. F., A. C., and R. H. Benson) at Cambridge University in 1851 for the serious study of psychic and spiritual phenomena. The Society moved to London in 1862 and was officially relaunched as the Ghost Club, which included Charles Dickens as a member. A leading light amongst these investigators was the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who became cofounder of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882, serving as its first president. The SPR became renowned for its thorough investigations of mediums and psychic phenomena, exposing many hoaxes. Its investigators, which included Frank Podmore, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers, and Richard Hodgson, were the real occult detectives.
In fiction, the idea of someone investigating the strange and unusual as a regular part of their work goes back at least as far as 1830. It was then that Samuel Warren began his long running and hugely popular series “Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician” in the Scottish-based Blackwood’s Magazine. The stories appeared anonymously and many believed they were true, which added to their popularity. Several verged on the macabre and occasionally the supernatural, though Warren’s physician explores these as if they were diseases of the mind, way ahead of the theories of psychologists. The best such example is “The Spectre-Smitten” (1831) where a patient is apparently driven crazy by having seen the ghost of a recently deceased neighbour. Warren leaves the final solution open as to whether it was a genuine ghost or a delusion, but the nature of that series was such that it opened the doors to the occult detective and our first author, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.
DR. MARTIN HESSELIUS IN
GREEN TEA
>
JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU
The format used by Samuel Warren in “The Spectre-Smitten” formed the basis of the following story by Sheridan Le Fanu that introduces us to Dr. Martin Hesselius who, although a physician, is drawn to cases of the inexplicable. Le Fanu provides a prologue to the story that includes a number of factors that became common in many later stories. Firstly, it is narrated in the first-person by Dr. Hesselius’s private secretary, and it tells us Hesselius has a private fortune, which allows him to pick and choose his cases, and that his knowledge was “immense.” He became a dedicated analyst pursuing his cases to the bitter end. He left behind him a significant body of work—two hundred and thirty case files we later learn—which the narrator is organizing. When “Green Tea” was serialized in All the Year Round in 1869 it was the only story to feature Dr. Hesselius directly, but when Le Fanu included this story in his collection In a Glass Darkly in 1872 he brought together four other stories, some of which were revised from their original publication, none of which had featured Hesselius, but which were now presented as being amongst his cases. By so doing Le Fanu established that alluring idea, used so superbly by Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories, of a colleague who has been working through the recorded cases to select those of special interest.
Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) was an Irish author of Huguenot descent who produced a significant body of work, much of which is in the realms of the supernatural or macabre. His earliest story, “The Ghost and the Bone-Setter” (1838), was later included in the posthumous collection The Purcell Papers (1880) that also uses the framing device of stories selected from various papers, this time those of the parish priest, Francis Purcell. He collected local stories and oddities, but he did not investigate them, so wasn’t a true occult detective. Le Fanu’s first collection of weird tales was Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), but during his life he was better known for his novels, notably The House by the Churchyard (1863), Uncle Silas (1864), and Wylder’s Hand (1864), which were typical Victorian tales of gothic mystery. It was not until after his death that his ghost stories were rediscovered, such as the volume Madam Crowl’s Ghost (1923), assembled by M. R. James. Le Fanu is now recognized as one of the pioneers of the modern weird tale, with such classics as “Schalken the Painter” (1839), “Carmilla” (1871), plus the following, which opens the archives of the occult detective.
PROLOGUE: MARTIN HESSELIUS, THE GERMAN PHYSICIAN
THOUGH CAREFULLY EDUCATED IN MEDICINE AND SURGERY, I HAVE never practised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place.
In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term “easy circumstances.” He was an old man when I first saw him; nearly five-and-thirty years my senior.
In Dr. Martin Hesselius, I found my master. His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight. My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it was well-founded.
For nearly twenty years I acted as his medical secretary. His immense collection of papers he has left in my care, to be arranged, indexed and bound. His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in two distinct characters. He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman might, and when in this style of narrative he had seen the patient either through his own hall-door, to the light of day, or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returns upon the narrative, and in the terms of his art and with all the force and originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis and illustration.
Here and there a case strikes me as of a kind to amuse or horrify a lay reader with an interest quite different from the peculiar one which it may possess for an expert. With slight modifications, chiefly of language, and of course a change of names, I copy the following. The narrator is Dr. Martin Hesselius. I find it among the voluminous notes of cases which he made during a tour in England about sixty-four years ago.
It is related in series of letters to his friend Professor Van Loo of Leyden. The professor was not a physician, but a chemist, and a man who read history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, written a play.
The narrative is therefore, if somewhat less valuable as a medical record, necessarily written in a manner more likely to interest an unlearned reader.
These letters, from a memorandum attached, appear to have been returned on the death of the professor, in 1819, to Dr. Hesselius. They are written, some in English, some in French, but the greater part in German. I am a faithful, though I am conscious, by no means a graceful translator, and although here and there I omit some passages, and shorten others, and disguise names, I have interpolated nothing.
I: DR. HESSELIUS RELATES HOW HE MET THE REV. MR. JENNINGS
THE REV. MR. JENNINGS IS TALL AND THIN. HE IS MIDDLE-AGED AND dresses with a natty, old-fashioned, high-church precision. He is naturally a little stately, but not at all stiff. His features, without being handsome, are well formed, and their expression extremely kind, but also shy.
I met him one evening at Lady Mary Heyduke’s. The modesty and benevolence of his countenance are extremely prepossessing.
We were but a small party, and he joined agreeably enough in the conversation. He seems to enjoy listening very much more than contributing to the talk; but what he says is always to the purpose and well said. He is a great favourite of Lady Mary’s, who it seems, consults him upon many things, and thinks him the most happy and blessed person on earth. Little knows she about him.
The Rev. Mr. Jennings is a bachelor, and has, they say sixty thousand pounds in the funds. He is a charitable man. He is most anxious to be actively employed in his sacred profession, and yet though always tolerably well elsewhere, when he goes down to his vicarage in Warwickshire, to engage in the actual duties of his sacred calling, his health soon fails him, and in a very strange way. So says Lady Mary.
There is no doubt that Mr. Jennings’ health does break down in, generally, a sudden and mysterious way, sometimes in the very act of officiating in his old and pretty church at Kenlis. It may be his heart, it may be his brain. But so it has happened three or four times, or oftener, that after proceeding a certain way in the service, he has on a sudden stopped short, and after a silence, apparently quite unable to resume, he has fallen into solitary, inaudible prayer, his hands and his eyes uplifted, and then pale as death, and in the agitation of a strange shame and horror, descended trembling, and got into the vestry-room, leaving his congregation, without explanation, to themselves. This occurred when his curate was absent. When he goes down to Kenlis now, he always takes care to provide a clergyman to share his duty, and to supply his place on the instant should he become thus suddenly incapacitated.
When Mr. Jennings breaks down quite, and beats a retreat from the vicarage, and returns to London, where, in a dark street off Piccadilly, he inhabits a very narrow house, Lady Mary says that he is always perfectly well. I have my own opinion about that. There are degrees of course. We shall see.
Mr. Jennings is a perfectly gentlemanlike man. People, however, remark something odd. There is an impression a little ambiguous. One thing which certainly contributes to it, people I think don’t remember; or, perhaps, distinctly remark. But I did, almost immediately. Mr. Jennings has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his
eye followed the movements of something there. This, of course, is not always. It occurs now and then. But often enough to give a certain oddity, as I have said, to his manner, and in this glance travelling along the floor there is something both shy and anxious.
A medical philosopher, as you are good enough to call me, elaborating theories by the aid of cases sought out by himself, and by him watched and scrutinised with more time at command, and consequently infinitely more minuteness than the ordinary practitioner can afford, falls insensibly into habits of observation, which accompany him everywhere, and are exercised, as some people would say, impertinently, upon every subject that presents itself with the least likelihood of rewarding inquiry.
There was a promise of this kind in the slight, timid, kindly, but reserved gentleman, whom I met for the first time at this agreeable little evening gathering. I observed, of course, more than I here set down; but I reserve all that borders on the technical for a strictly scientific paper.
I may remark, that when I here speak of medical science, I do so, as I hope some day to see it more generally understood, in a much more comprehensive sense than its generally material treatment would warrant. I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organised substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man’s existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body—a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection “in power.”
The person who weighs the consequences of these positions will probably see their practical bearing upon medical science. This is, however, by no means the proper place for displaying the proofs and discussing the consequences of this too generally unrecognized state of facts.
