Dark Detectives

by Stephen Jones

  Moris Klaw solves the cases he is consulted on by sleeping at the scene of the crime and absorbing the psychic vibrations. The first story appeared in 1913, but they were not collected in book form—as The Dream Detective—until seven years later. A similar talent was employed by Herman Landon’s Godfrey Usher, who is consulted by the police and tunes into the vibrations at the scene of the crime in a series of stories that appeared in Detective Story Magazine in 1918.

  During this period, psychic detectives proliferated in the cheaper weekly and monthly periodicals. These included Bertram Atkey’s Mesmer Milann, Moray Dalton’s Cosmo Thaw, Rose Champion de Crespigny’s Norton Vyse: Psychic, Douglas Newton’s Dr. Dyn in Cassell’s Magazine and Paul Toft in Pearson’s Magazine, and Vincent Cornier’s Barnabas Hildreth, who was possibly an immortal priest of Ancient Egypt.

  Probably the first female psychic sleuth was Sheila Crerar, created by Ella Scrymsour, who encountered ghosts and werewolves in a series of stories in The Blue Magazine in 1920. Uel (Samuel) Key’s Professor Arnold Rhymer is a “specialist in spooks” who becomes involved in attempts by Germany to use psychic powers against Britain during the First World War. Five stories were collected in The Broken Fang (1920). Prominent ghost-hunter Elliott O’Donnell recreated his own real-life experiences in a series of stories featuring Damon Vance that appeared in The Novel Magazine in 1922.

  Like Algernon Blackwood, Dion Fortune (Violet Mary Firth) was also a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, one of many new mystical movements that emerged in late Victorian times, and she later founded her own Society of the Inner Light. Using her experiences as a medium and her knowledge of occult lore as background, Fortune created psychologist Dr. Taverner, who runs a nursing home and investigates the supernatural with the aid of his associate and biographer, Dr. Rhodes. Fortune strongly implied that her hero was based on a real person, most likely MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn. Some of these stories first appeared in Royal Magazine and were later collected in The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, published in 1926.

  In 1925 Seabury Quinn created Jules de Grandin, a French detective living in New Jersey, who solves fantastic cases with the help of the county doctor, Samuel Trowbridge. Quinn, the editor of a magazine for undertakers, had been struggling for a new fiction idea and Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, had suggested he make the dapper detective the lead character in a series of stories. The first, ‘The Horror on the Links’, was published in the October 1925 issue of Weird Tales, and over the next twenty-six years Quinn wrote ninety-three stories about de Grandin and Trowbridge, with many of these tales voted into first place by the readers of the pulp magazine. The author subsequently selected and revised ten of the most popular adventures for the 1966 Mycroft & Moran collection, The Phantom-Fighter.

  Victor Rousseau created Dr. Martinus for rival pulp Ghost Stories, introducing psychic researcher Martinus, a Dutchman living in New York, and his assistant Eugene Branscombe in ‘Child or Demon—Which?’ in the October 1926 issue. Concurrently with this series, Rousseau was also chronicling the exploits of Dr. Brodsky, Surgeon of Souls, in Weird Tales. Over at Strange Tales, adventure writer Gordon MacCreagh published two stories about Dr. Muncing—Exorcist and his confrontation with a nasty demon. More jovial was Henry A. Hering’s Mr. Psyche, of Psyche & Co.—Ghosts and Spectre Purveyors, Archipelago Street, Soho, who appeared in the first of a series of stories in the Windsor magazine in 1927.

  A.M. (Alfred McLelland) Burrage’s ten stories of occult detective Francis Chard and his assistant Torrance ran in consecutive issues of Blue Magazine from February 1927. These were collected in The Occult Files of Francis Chard: Some Ghost Stories (1996), along with two earlier stories featuring Derek Scarpe, “the man who made haunted houses his hobby”, which originally appeared in the June and July 1920 issues of Novel Magazine.

  After Conan Doyle published his last Sherlock Holmes story in 1927, young Wisconsin writer August Derleth wrote to the author asking if he could continue the series. When his request was rejected, Derleth went ahead anyway and created Solar Pons, whose Watson was Dr. Lyndon Parker. The characters were first introduced in ‘The Adventure of the Black Narcissus’ in Dragnet (February, 1929), and Derleth completed sixty-eight stories about Pons before his death in 1971. The series was subsequently continued by Basil Copper, and the Mycroft & Moran imprint was revived in 1998 to publish Derleth’s The Final Adventures of Solar Pons, an original collection comprising a novel and six early stories.

  Gregory George Gordon was a former policeman turned detective known as Gees, who appeared in a series of novels written by British author Jack Mann (E. Charles Vivian). After his non-supernatural debut in Gees’ First Case (1936), the character encountered werewolves, ancient sorcerers and even an Egyptian cat goddess, before becoming involved with a witch in the final novel, Her Ways Are Death (1940).

  Throughout the 1930s, many pulp characters—such as Maxwell Grant’s The Shadow, Grant Stockbridge’s The Spider, Kenneth Robeson’s Doc Savage, Zorro’s Doctor Death and Paul Ernst’s Dr. Satan—combined the attributes of the psychic detective with that of the comic-book superhero or villain. Gordon Hillman’s globetrotting tales of Cranshawe were more traditional and appeared throughout the decade in Ghost Stories. However, the public started to lose interest in stories about the supernatural during the real-life horrors of World War II, and many pulp titles began to fold.

  One of the last strongholds of this type of fiction was Weird Tales, and a new three-part serial began in the January 1938 issue that introduced occult investigator Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant. ‘The Hairy Ones Shall Dance’ was written by Manly Wade Wellman under the pen name “Gans T. Field”, and the author chronicled Pursuivant’s adventures in three more tales, concluding with ‘The Half-Haunted’ (Weird Tales, September 1941), in which the character is amusingly consulted by Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge.

  Wellman used another pseudonym, “Hampton Wells”, for ‘Vigil’, a story in the December 1939 issue of Strange Tales that marked the only adventure of supernatural savant Professor Nathan Enderby and his Chinese servant, Quong. Far more enduring was Wellman’s John Thunstone, a New York playboy and student of the occult who battles evil with his silver sword cane. He made his debut in ‘The Third Cry of Legba’ (Weird Tales, November 1943) and appeared in fourteen more stories in the magazine up until 1951. Wellman returned to the character in the 1980s with another story and a couple of novels.

  Back in Britain, Dennis Wheatley created Neils Orsen, “the world’s greatest psychic investigator”, for four stories that were published in the collection Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts (1943). This character was modelled after real-life occultist Henry Dewhirst, who supposedly accurately predicted Wheatley’s success as a novelist before the writer’s career had even started. Meanwhile, Margery Lawrence’s Number Seven Queer Street (1945) established the address of psychic Dr. Miles Pennoyer, whose cases are recorded by his young friend and psychic sensitive, solicitor Jerome Latimer.

  The 1950s were not particularly kind to the psychic sleuths. Norman Parcell was forced to self-publish his collection Costello, Psychic Investigator (1954) under the pen name “John Nicholson”. At least Manly Wade Wellman continued to keep the genre alive with his tales of John the Balladeer, who travels the Carolina mountains and battles the forces of evil with his silver-stringed guitar. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, John’s adventures were finally collected in the Arkham House volume Who Fears the Devil? (1963).

  Edward D. Hoch introduced his possibly immortal investigator Simon Ark in the story ‘Village of the Dead’ (Famous Detective Stories, February 1955). After that Hoch published nearly forty stories featuring Ark, a 2,000-year-old Coptic priest who had been cursed at Christ’s crucifixion, many of them collected in The Judges of Hades and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971), City of Brass and Other Simon Ark Stories (1971) and The Quests of Simon Ark (1984).
<
br />   John Rackham’s Egyptologist Dr. K.N. Wilson made his first appearance in the December 1960 issue of the British magazine Science Fantasy. Three more stories followed over the next two years. Ron Goulart introduced bungling Victorian detective Dr. Plumrose with the eponymously titled story ‘Plumrose’ in the June 1963 Fantastic Stories. Two further stories appeared the same year before the author turned his attentions to his comic scientific sleuth Max Kearny.

  A welcome return to form came with Joseph Payne Brennan’s Lucius Leffing, a contemporary investigator who lives in a house surrounded by Victorian trappings in New Haven, Connecticut. Brennan himself is Leffing’s associate and chronicler, and the two first team up to solve the mystery of ‘The Haunted Housewife’ in the Winter 1962 issue of the author’s own small press magazine, Macabre. Over the next fifteen years the Leffing stories appeared in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and were collected in The Casebook of Lucius Leffing (1972) and The Chronicles of Lucius Leffing (1977). Publisher Donald M. Grant collaborated with Brennan to write Act of Providence (1979), a short Leffing novel set during the First World Fantasy Convention, and a collection of further stories, The Adventures of Lucius Leffing, appeared in 1990, the year of Brennan’s death.

  Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy is usually involved in more magical mysteries. Set in an alternate-world England, Darcy is Investigator-in-Chief for the Court of Good King John, assisted by forensic sorcerer Sean O Lochlainn. The Lord Darcy series comprises the novel Too Many Magicians (1967) and two collections, Murder and Magic (1979) and Lord Darcy Investigates (1981). Following Garrett’s death in 1987, Michael Kurland (who had previously published a pair of enjoyable Sherlock Holmes pastiches) extended the series with two further adventures, Ten Little Wizards (1988) and A Study in Sorcery (1989).

  While developing his own version of H.P. Lovecraft’s famed Cthulhu Mythos, Brian Lumley introduced occult detective Titus Crow in ‘An Item of Supporting Evidence’ in the Summer 1970 issue of The Arkham Collector. This story along with several more featuring Crow appeared in the author’s first collection, The Caller of the Black (1971), since when the character has been featured in a number of other tales and a series of successful novels.

  Frank Lauria’s aptly titled novel Doctor Orient (1970) introduced readers to Dr. Owen Orient, a physician and psychic adept who has evolved beyond other men. This master of telepathic powers and initiate of dark mysteries returned in Raga Six (1972), Lady Sativa (1973) and Baron Orgaz (1974). A belated coda to the series was The Seth Papers (1979), in which Orient is pursued by various nations and a neo-fascist cult seeking to exploit his occult gifts.

  Describing himself as “the world’s only practising psychic detective”, Francis St. Clare was the creation of Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes. This consulting detective and his sexy assistant Frederica Masters first appeared in ‘Someone is Dead’ (in The Elemental, 1974), since when they have been featured in more than half-a-dozen further stories and the 1993 novel The Psychic Detective.

  Screenwriter/director Nicholas Meyer’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Seven PerCent Solution (1974) became a bestseller and was adapted by the author for the movies two years later. He has continued the “posthumous memoirs” of the Great Detective in The West-End Horror (1976) and The Canary Trainer (1993), the latter involving Gaston Leroux’s famed Phantom of the Paris Opera House. The following year both characters clashed again, this time in Sam Siciliano’s The Angel of the Opera.

  Also published in 1994, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and famed magician and escapologist Harry Houdini (Enrich Weiss) team up to solve a series of bizarre murders based on various short stories by Edgar Allan Poe in William Hjortsberg’s Nevermore.

  Houdini himself was the hero of ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs’, battling subterranean monstrosities beneath the Egyptian pyramids in the May–June 1924 issue of Weird Tales, although the story was in fact ghostwritten for the showman by H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft and Houdini have themselves been teamed up, alongside other famous names, in such books as Pulptime by Peter H. Cannon (1984) and The Arcanum by Thomas Wheeler (2004).

  Based on a then-unpublished novel by Jeff Rice, the 1971 TV movie The Night Stalker introduced audiences to Darren McGavin’s investigative Chicago journalist, Carl Kolchak, who uncovers a world of the supernatural that no one will believe. When first broadcast, it was the highest-rated TV movie ever in America and led to a sequel, once again scripted by Richard Matheson, entitled The Night Strangler (1972). A single season of Kolchak: The Night Stalker followed on ABC-TV (1974–75), and Rice’s novels of the two TV movies were published in 1973 and 1974, respectively.

  An acknowledged inspiration for The X-Files (1993–2002), The Night Stalker was unsuccessfully revived as a short-lived TV series in 2005 with Irish actor Stuart Townsend miscast as Kolchak, and since 2003 Moonstone Books has been publishing a series of comic books, anthologies and new novels by C.J. Henderson based on the character.

  During the 1970s, Manly Wade Wellman returned to the psychic investigator genre with a number of tales about mountain man Lee Cobbett, a friend of Judge Pursuivant. These appeared in Witchcraft & Sorcery 9 (1973), Whispers (June 1975) and the World Fantasy Convention 1983 souvenir book, and both characters turned up in ‘Chastel’ in The Year’s Best Horror Stories Series VII (1979). Hal Stryker, a young wanderer interested in the occult, was another of Wellman’s mountain man heroes. He appeared in a trio of stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (March 1978), Whispers (October 1978) and New Terrors 1 (1980).

  A more modern variation on the theme is F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack, who made his début in the novel The Tomb (1981). A self-made outcast who exists within the gaps of modern society, Jack has no official identity, no social security number and pays no taxes. He hires himself out for cash to “fix” situations that have no legal remedy. Further novelettes and short stories have appeared in various anthologies, and Jack has been featured in a string of popular novels, including a youthful version of the character aimed at young adults.

  Guy N. Smith’s Mark Sabat is an ex-priest, SAS-trained killer and exorcist whose mission is to hunt down and destroy his mortal enemy, his brother, who has chosen the Left Hand Path of Evil. The character was introduced in the novel Sabat 1: The Graveyard Vultures (1982), and his exploits continued in 2: The Blood Merchants (1982), 3: Cannibal Cult (1982) and 4: The Druid Connection (1983). The first Sabat short story, ‘Vampire Village’, appeared in Fantasy Tales #1 (1988) and The Sabat Omnibus was published in 1996.

  The July 1982 issue of the Italian weird fantasy magazine Kadath was a special Occult Detectives edition that not only included a new John Thunstone story by Manly Wade Wellman and a new Titus Crow novella by Brian Lumley, but it also featured the début of two new series to the canon of psychic sleuths: Brian Mooney’s ‘The Affair at Durmamnay Hall’ marked the first appearance of Reuben Calloway and his assistant, Catholic priest Roderick Shea, while Mike Chinn’s ‘The Death-Wish Mandate’ introduced readers to near-immortal aviator Damian Paladin and his business partner Leigh Oswin. Mooney’s Calloway and Shea went on to appear in such anthologies as Shadows Over Innsmouth (1994) and The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural (1994), while two further Paladin stories appeared in Winter Chills 2 (1987) and Fantasy Tales #11 (1987) before all three were revised and included, along with three original tales, in the chapbook The Paladin Mandates (1998).

  When his family is kidnapped by supernatural forces, family man Dan Brady transforms himself into an avenging enemy of the occult in the novel Nighthunter 1: The Stalking (1983), written by Robert Holdstock under the pen name “Robert Faulcon”. Brady continued his quest to track down his wife and children and defeat the dark forces that had taken them in 2: The Talisman (1983), 3: The Ghost Dance (1983), 4: The Shrine (1984), 5: The Hexing (1984) and 6: The Labyrinth (1987).

  Created by Australian author Rick Kennett, motorcycle-riding Ernie Pine investigated a haunted village in ‘Th
e Roads of Donnington’ (in The 20th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, 1984) and his further encounters with the supernatural are chronicled in the chapbook The Reluctant Ghost-Hunter (1991). Kennett also discovered that both A.F. Kidd and himself had been independently writing new stories about William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki. These three individual stories, plus one collaboration, were eventually collected in a 1992 Ghost Story Society chapbook and expanded by a further eight tales ten years later into No. 472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki, the Untold Stories.

  Carnacki teamed up with the second Doctor and his two companions in Andrew Cartmel’s novella, Doctor Who: Foreign Devils (2002). Meanwhile, Hodgson’s ghost-finder also came to the aid of Sherlock Holmes, who is suffering from amnesia, in The Shadow of Reichenbach Falls (2008) by John R. King (J. Robert King), and the pair teamed up again in Guy Adams’ 2012 novel Sherlock Holmes: The Breath of God.

  The two detectives also investigated the occult together in Barbara Hambley’s short story ‘The Adventure of the Antiquarian’s Niece’ in Shadows Over Baker Street (2003) and A.F. Kidd’s ‘The Grantchester Grimoire’ in Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2008), and Carnacki was revealed to be one of the members of an earlier League in Alan Moore’s 2007 graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier.

  Best known for his possession novel The Manitou (1975) and its various sequels featuring demon-busting rogue psychic Harry Erskine, in 1997 British author Graham Masterton published Rook, about the eponymous remedial high school teacher who can see ghosts and investigates supernatural cases. It was followed by Tooth and Claw (1997), The Terror (1998), Snowman (1999), Swimmer (2001), Darkroom (2003), Demon’s Door (2011) and Garden of Evil (2013), in which Rook helps his students overcome a variety of evil entities.