Dark Detectives: An Anthology of Supernatural Mysteries

THE SERIAL SLEUTHS

PSYCHIC DETECTIVES. PHANTOM Fighters. Ghostbusters. Call them what you will; for more than 170 years these fictional sleuths have been investigating the strange, the bizarre and the horrific while protecting the world from the forces of darkness and evil.

It is generally accepted that the modern detective story began with Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), in which the author introduced French detective C. Auguste Dupin, who solves a grotesque murder through logical deduction. Poe returned to the character twice more, in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844).

Michael Harrison continued the character’s exploits in a series of seven stories in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the 1960s. These were eventually collected by August Derleth through his Mycroft & Moran imprint as The Exploits of Chavalier Dupin (1968). An expanded edition that included a further five tales appeared in Britain as Murder in the Rue Royale in 1972.

George Egon Hatvary used Dupin to investigate the death of his creator in the 1997 novel The Murder of Edgar Allan Poe, while a search for the detective himself was the basis of Matthew Pearl’s The Poe Shadow (2006).

The character was also featured in the first two issues of Alan Moore’s acclaimed comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999). In 2013 he was revived by author Reggie Oliver to track down a serial killer at the Paris Exhibition in ‘The Green Hour’ (in Psycho-Mania!), and such contributors as Mike Carey, Joe R. Lansdale, Lisa Tuttle and Stephen Volk for the anthology Beyond Rue Morgue: Further Tales of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1st Detective, edited by Paul Kane and Charles Prepolec.

Although there is no cast known for the 1914 short film version of Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the character does not appear in the 1932, 1954 or 1971 adaptations, George C. Scott played the wily detective in a 1986 TV movie. Edward Woodward portrayed Dupin in a 1968 BBC version of the story, as did Daniel Gélin in a 1973 French TV adaptation.

In the early 1940s, Universal Pictures may have briefly considered a series of films featuring Patric Knowles as detective Dr. Paul Dupin, but only The Mystery of Marie Roget (aka Phantom of Paris, 1942) was ever made. Joseph Cotten starred as a character named Dupin, but turned out to be someone else entirely, in the 1951 movie The Man with a Cloak, based on a story by John Dickson Carr.

It was C. Auguste Dupin’s analytical mind that most influenced Arthur Conan Doyle when he created Sherlock Holmes for ‘A Study in Scarlet’, first published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual of 1887. However, when Dr. John Watson compares Holmes to Dupin in that debut story, the Great Detective flatly dismisses Poe’s character as a very inferior fellow.

Within four years the Holmes stories had become incredibly popular as a result of their serialisation in The Strand magazine, and the eccentric consulting detective and his loyal friend and colleague Dr. Watson not only had brushes with the supernatural in the classic novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901–1902) and such later stories as ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ (1923) and ‘The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire’ (1924), but Doyle also created a celebrated formula from which most subsequent psychic sleuths (and their assistants) would be moulded.

On screen, Holmes has of course been portrayed by numerous actors over the years, and many liberties have been taken with the stories, especially when it comes to implications of horror and the supernatural. Some of the more notable instances include The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) and The Scarlet Claw (1944), both with Basil Rathbone; Hammer Films’ The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) with Peter Cushing; A Study in Terror (1965) with John Neville; The Last Vampyre (1993) with Jeremy Brett, and The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire (2002), with Matt Frewer, to name only a few.

One of the earliest short stories featuring a supernatural sleuth appeared in the Christmas 1866 issue of the London Journal: ‘The Ghost Detective’ was written by Mark Lemon, the founder and first editor of the satirical magazine Punch. J. Sheridan Le Fanu created the German physician of the mind Dr. Martin Hesselius, an expert on psychic or physical affliction, to introduce the stories in In a Glass Darkly (1872), while M.P. Shiel’s decadent Russian investigator uses logic to solve crimes without leaving his Gothic castle in Prince Zaleski (1895).

The exploits of ghost-hunter Mr. John Bell, the Master of Mysteries, first appeared in Cassell’s Family Magazine during 1897 before being collected the following year in A Master of Mysteries by L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace. Although mother and son Kate and Hesketh Prichard began writing their series of stories about Flaxman Low in 1896, they didn’t see print in Pearsons Magazine until two years later, and then under the byline E. and H. Heron. Flaxman Low was supposedly an alias for a leading psychologist of the day who investigated genuine cases of the supernatural. Twelve stories were published in Pearsons between 1898 and 1899, including ‘The Story of Baelbrow’, in which the occult investigator battles a living mummy. Collected in 1899 simply as Ghosts, these dozen stories were reissued by The Ghost Story Press in 1993 as Flaxman Low, Psychic Detective and Ash-Tree Press in 2003 as The Experiences of Flaxman Low.

Between 1830 and 1837, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine published a series entitled ‘Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician’, in which the anonymous doctor-narrator sometimes encounters physical and psychological maladies that border on the bizarre. When the publisher was forced to go to court to protect his copyright, the uncredited author of this successful series was revealed as Samuel Warren.

Arthur Machen’s Dyson first delved into the supernatural in ‘The Innermost Light’ (1894), before the character turned up in the 1895 story cycle The Three Impostors and again in ‘The Shining Pyramid’ (1925). Although best remembered for The King in Yellow (1895), Robert W. Chambers also created Westrel Keen, who uses scientific principals to locate missing persons, for a series of stories that appeared in The Idler in 1906. They were collected under their generic title the same year as The Tracer of Lost Persons.

In 1908 Algernon Blackwood’s collection John Silence was published and, due to an extensive advertising campaign mounted by the publisher, quickly became a bestseller. Blackwood based the case files of Dr. Silence, Physician Extraordinary, on his own experiences travelling through Europe at the beginning of the 20th century.

These were usually chronicled by Silence’s associate Mr. Hubbard, and among the best-known tales are ‘Ancient Sorceries’, ‘A Psychical Invasion’ and the werewolf story, ‘The Camp of the Dog’. Despite the book’s phenomenal success, Blackwood only published one other John Silence story—‘A Victim of Higher Space’ appeared in the December 1914 edition of The Occult Review, but had been written earlier and omitted from the book because the author didn’t think it was strong enough.

‘Ancient Sorceries’ was adapted in 1962 for an episode of the now lost Associated-Rediffusion Television series Tales of Mystery, featuring John Laurie as host Algernon Blackwood.

With ‘The Gateway of the Monster’ in The Idler (January, 1910), William Hope Hodgson introduced readers to Thomas Carnacki, who uses a combination of science and sorcery to overcome the supernatural. The character went on to appear in a further eight stories, including one—‘The Hog’ (Weird Tales, January 1947)—which, it has been speculated, might actually have been written or at least extensively revised by August Derleth. On TV, Donald Pleasence portrayed the character in a 1971 adaptation of ‘The Horse of the Invisible’.

Along the same lines as John Silence, Australian Max Rittenberg’s Dr. Xavier Wycherley, Mental Healer, is another psychic psychologist. A total of eighteen stories were published, beginning with ‘The Man Who Lived Again’ in the February 1911 edition of London Magazine, and a selection was subsequently collected as The Mind-Reader (1913).

Twelve stories by British-born pulp writer Victor Rousseau (Avigdor Rousseau Emanuel) about Greek-born soul specialist Dr. Phileas Immanuel originally appeared in Holland’s Magazine between 1913–14, and were finally collected in The Tracer of Egos (2007).

Clearly modelled after Sherlock Holmes, Aylmer Vance is a clairvoyant detective with consulting rooms in London’s Piccadilly and a trusty literary assistant and acolyte named Dexter. Created by Alice and Claude Askew, eight stories appeared in The Weekly Tale-Teller in 1914 and were later collected in Aylmer Vance: Ghost-Seer (1998).

Six stories by Harold Begbie featuring dreamland investigator Andrew Latter appeared in the London Magazine in 1904 and were subsequently collected in The Amazing Dreams of Andrew Latter (2002). Slightly more interesting is antique dealer Moris Klaw, the Dream Detective, created by Sax Rohmer (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), whose most famous character—the insidious Oriental mastermind Fu Manchu—is opposed by his own Holmes and Watson team of Sir Denis Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie.

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).

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 ‘The 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.

Mark Valentine’s Ralph Tyler investigates the occult for excitement. He first teams up with the narrator in ‘The Grave of Ani’ (Dark Dreams #1, 1984) and further tales appeared in a number of small-press journals. In 1987 a short collection of two Tyler tales was published under the title 14 Bellchamber Tower, and Herald of the Hidden and Other Stories (2013) collected ten stories (three previously unpublished).

Valentine also created The Connoisseur, a collector of the outré and bizarre, who made his début in the 1990 issue of Dark Dreams. The author went on to write more than twenty further tales about the aesthetical detective, which have been collected by Tartarus Press in In Violet Veils (1999), Masques and Citadels (2003) and, in collaboration with John Howard, The Collected Connoisseur (2010).

Harry D’Amour is the creation of bestselling fantasist Clive Barker. A down-at-heel investigator in the classic Raymond Chandler mould, D’Amour first appeared in ‘The Last Illusion’ in Clive Barker’s Books of Blood Volume 6 (1985) and ‘The Lost Souls’ in the Christmas 1986 issue of Time Out. He was subsequently featured in the novels The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Everville (1994), before becoming the hero of Barker’s 1995 movie Lord of Illusions, as portrayed by Scott Bakula. The character has also played a major role in the Boom! Studios comic series Hellraiser (2011) featuring the demonic Pinhead, and the two characters are due to be reunited Barker’s long-awaited novel The Scarlet Gospels.

Working-class sorcerer, occult detective and sometimes con man, John Constantine was created by Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben for DC Comics’ The Saga of the Swamp Thing #37 in June 1985. The cynical Londoner went on to appear in his own comics, Hellblazer (1988–2013) and Constantine (2013–), and he has been portrayed by Keanu Reeves in an eponymous 2005 movie and Matt Ryan in a 2014 TV series.

Comics writer Neil Gaiman has featured Constantine in editions of The Sandman and The Books of Magic, while John Shirley has written three Hellblazer novelisations, including a tie-in to the film.

Along the same lines, Max Payne was a character created in 2001 for an action-packed video game, inspired by Norse mythology. Following the murder of his family, the former NYPD Detective uncovers a government conspiracy while battling, amongst other opponents, a self-styled messenger of Hell. Mark Wahlberg played the character in a 2008 movie loosely based on the game.

James Herbert was another bestseller who, in his 1988 novel Haunted, decided to try his own hand at the psychic detective genre. What makes Herbert’s David Ash different is that he is renowned for his dismissal of all things supernatural, until three nights of terror in a reputedly haunted house force him to re-evaluate his beliefs. Haunted was filmed in 1995 by director Lewis Gilbert with Aidan Quinn as Ash, and the character reappeared in Herbert’s novels The Ghosts of Sleath (1994) and Ash (2013).

Penelope Pettiweather, Northwest Ghost Hunter, is another rare female psychic sleuth created by Jessica Amanda Salmonson in the collection Harmless Ghosts (1990). The author subsequently revived her letter-writing investigator for one half of The Mysterious Doom and Other Ghostly Tales of the Pacific Northwest (1992). Absences: Charlie Goode’s Ghosts (1991) was a chapbook that collected five stories about Steve Rasnic Tem’s eponymous antique collector and amateur archaeologist, who has an affinity for the occult. The character has since appeared in stories in All Hallows #2 (1990) and Fantasy Macabre #14 (1992).

Kim Newman first introduced readers to Charles Beauregard, an adventurer in the service of the Diogenes Club, in his alternate-world novella ‘Red Reign’ (in The Mammoth Book of Vampires, 1992), which he expanded into the novel Anno Dracula the same year. Since then, the influence of secret agent Beauregard and the mysterious cabal he works for has spread to various sequels and spin-offs, and served as a unifying nucleus for many of the author’s short stories and subsequent novels.

Parapsychologist Ryerson Biergarten was introduced by T.M. Wright in his 1992 novel Goodlow’s Ghosts. Sleepeasy (1994) was a sequel that resurrected a deceased character from the earlier book, while Biergarten himself was back, this time on the trail of a serial killer, in The Ascending (1994).

In Mark Frost’s The List of 7 (1993), a young Dr. Arthur Doyle teams up with mysterious special agent Jack Sparks (possibly the model for Sherlock Holmes) to confront the supernatural schemes of a secret cabal. The two protagonists were reunited in The 6 Messiahs (1995), set ten years after the original.

New Orleans FBI agent Aloysius Xingu L. Pendergast and NYPD detective Lt. Vincent D’Agosta first appeared as supporting characters in Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s debut novel Relic (1995), about a mythical monster loose in the New York Museum of Natural History. They both returned in the sequel, Reliquary (1997), and have continued to appear in a number of other bestsellers from the writing team. Although the 1997 movie The Relic omitted the pivotal character of Pendergast, Tom Sizemore played D’Agosta.

Marty Burns was once famous. Then he became just another fallen star in Hollywood, working as a low-rent private eye, until the search for a missing hooker in Jay Russell’s Celestial Dogs (1996) involved him in a centuries-old conflict with Japanese demons. Since then, Russell has continued Marty’s exploits in the novels Burning Bright (1997) and Greed & Stuff (2001), the novella Apocalypse Now, Voyager (2005), and a number of short stories.

A Wine of Angels (1998) was the first novel to feature Phil Rickman’s Deliverance Consultant for the Diocese of Hereford Merrily Watkins, who investigates supernatural mysteries. So far the author has written eleven further novels about the Anglican priest, her pagan daughter Jane and damaged musician Lol Robinson.

John Connolly’s Charlie Parker, a former NYPD detective hunting the killer of his wife and young daughter, made his first appearance in the author’s debut novel, Every Dead Thing (1999). Since then he has also been featured in eleven increasingly macabre mysteries.

The start of the 21st century saw an explosion of occult investigators in fiction, mostly fuelled by the rise of the bestselling paranormal romance genre. These included P.N. Elrod’s vampire private detective Jack Fleming, Tanya Huff’s undead Henry Fitzroy, and Jim Butcher’s Chicago wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden.

The Occult Detective (2005) contains seven stories about psychic detective Sidney Taine by Robert Weinberg, while Visions (2009) is a collection of twelve fantasy and horror stories by Richard A. Lupoff, four featuring the author’s psychic detective Abraham ben Zaccheus.

Paul Kane’s Dalton Quayle Rides Out (2007) contains two humorous tales of the eponymous psychic investigator and his good friend, Dr. Humphrey Pemberton. The Adventures of Dalton Quayle appeared four years later and collected seven stories.

With the occult adventure Sherlock Holmes: Revenant (2011), Canadian-based Scottish author William Meikle continued the exploits of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Great Detective in a pastiche novel that was authorised by the Doyle Estate. He followed it with Sherlock Holmes: The Quality of Mercy and Other Stories (2013), containing ten short stories and ‘A Prologue’ by John Hamish Watson, M.D..

Meikle’s Carnacki: Heaven and Hell (2011) was a collection of ten original stories based on the character originally created by William Hope Hodgson, who didn’t even rate a credit in the book.

Of course, there have also been previous anthologies of psychic detective stories. Although it is surprising that August Derleth never compiled one for his Mycroft & Moran imprint, Michel Parry’s The Supernatural Solution (1976) reprinted nine stories about detectives and ghosts by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, E. and H. Heron, William Hope Hodgson, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Dion Fortune, Arthur Machen, Seabury Quinn, Manly Wade Wellman and Dennis Wheatley. Parry also collected six reprints (half of them from his earlier book) by Hodgson, Eustace, E. and H. Heron and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for the slim 1985 volume Ghostbreakers.

A more satisfying compilation was Supernatural Sleuths (1986) from veteran editor Peter Haining, which reprinted twelve stories by Mark Lemon, Algernon Blackwood, Sax Rohmer, Henry A. Hering, Gordon MacCreagh, Gordon Hillman, Margery Lawrence, Joseph Payne Brennan and those old standbys Conan Doyle, E. and H. Heron and Wheatley.

Despite appropriating Haining’s title, Supernatural Sleuths (1996) edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg cast its net for reprint stories wider, including among its fourteen selections tales by William F. Nolan, Ron Goulart, August Derleth and Mack Reynolds, Robert Weinberg and Larry Niven, along with such familiar names as Wellman, Hodgson and Quinn.

Gaslight Grimoire: Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2008), edited by J.R. Campbell and Charles Prepolec, contains eleven original stories by Barbara Hambley, Barbara Roden, Chris Roberson, Kim Newman and others. It was followed by Gaslight Grotesque: Nightmare Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes (2011). Justin Gustainis edited Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives (2011) which features fourteen urban fantasy stories by, amongst others, Carrie Vaughn, Tanya Huff, Lilith Saintcrow, Simon R. Green and T.A. Pratt.

In many ways, this present volume can be viewed as a companion-piece to my Shadows Over Innsmouth trilogy (1994–2013) and the anthology The Mammoth Book of Dracula (1997). As with those other books, it contains a combination of new and reprint fiction and is assembled along a loosely constructed chronology (stretching from Ancient Egyptian times through to the 21st century). I would therefore advise that, for maximum enjoyment, you read this book from beginning to end, and do not dip in and out of the stories. This is especially true of Kim Newman’s multi-part short novel, which was written especially for this volume.

So now it is time to meet some of the greatest fictional detectives (and their faithful amanuenses) who have ever confronted the bizarre and the unusual. Already the forces of darkness are abroad and occult powers are gathering. In the everlasting battle between Good and Evil, these investigators of the unusual set out to solve ancient mysteries and unravel modern hauntings with the aid of their unique powers of deduction and the occasional silver bullet.

Once again, for the supernatural sleuths, the game is afoot …

Stephen Jones

London, England

SEVEN STARS PROLOGUE

IN EGYPT’S LAND

by KIM NEWMAN

After Dracula (1897), The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903) is Bram Stoker’s best and best-known book. It chronicles the gradual possession of Margaret Trelawny by Tera, an ancient Egyptian queen of evil, whose mummified remains have been brought back to their London home by Margaret’s archaeologist father.

Although it never attained the popularity of the author’s earlier novel, The Jewel of the Seven Stars was first adapted as Curse of the Mummy in 1970 for the television series Mystery and Imagination. It has subsequently been filmed several times—by Hammer as Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), as The Awakening (1980) starring Charlton Heston and, most recently, as Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy (1997) with Lou Gossett, Jr.

For his story cycle in this volume, Kim Newman has borrowed bits from Stoker’s book—notably the jewel itself, and the character of Abel Trelawny—much as he co-opted the author’s vampire Count for his Anno Dracula series.

Pai-net’em is a real historical figure, a Pharaoh’s scribe and councillor whose mummy was discovered in 1881. Most biblical scholars, and Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments (1956), assume that the Pharaoh of Exodus was Rameses II. However, Newman has arbitrarily chosen Meneptah III on the grounds that he was even more unpleasant than Rameses and therefore the sort of person to oppress the Israelites and deserve the curses. Egyptian history doesn’t bother to mention the plagues at all, or the Israelites much.

ALL THEBES, ALL Egypt, was filled with the stench. Pai-net’em had bound up his head with linen, bandaging nose and mouth as if wrapping himself for interment. The stench got through, filling his nostrils and throat, curling his tongue.

His eyes were swollen almost shut by weeping boils. Insects clumped around his bloody tears, regathering every time he wiped them away. Eggs laid in the gum around his eyes hatched hourly. Newborn flies chewed with tiny teeth.

Progress through the city was slow. The roads were filled with the dead, animals and men. Darkness was relieved only by the spreading fires. Most of the people were too concerned with private griefs to lend their hands to fighting the flames.

Truly, this was the time of calamities.

* * *

A priest, a man of science, Pharaoh’s closest advisor, he was brought as low as a leper. He could not hold in his mind all that had happened in the last month. Looking at the mottled swellings and punctures on his body, he could not tell the marks of sickness from insect bites, even from the scars left by hailstones.

The Gods must hate Egypt, to let this happen.

Pai-net’em could not number the dead of his household. His grief had been spent on lesser catastrophes, sickening cattle and rioting slaves. Now, with brother and son struck down, his wife dead by her own hand, servants’ corpses strewn like stones about his estates, he had no more grief, no more feeling, in him.

A stream of blood trickled past Pharaoh’s Palace. Tiny frogs hopped in the reddened water. A living carpet—millions of locusts, flies and gnats—covered the streets, slowly reducing the fallen to skeletons. Insects assaulted the feet of those like Pai-net’em who waded perversely about, fixed like stars on their own courses.

The guards lay dead at their posts, wavering masks of flies on their faces. Pai-net’em passed through the open doors. Even here, inside Pharaoh’s house, insects swarmed and gnawed. With the crops and the cattle blasted, many more would die of famine even after the darkness abated.

Lightning was striking all through the city.

* * *

Pai-net’em found Pharaoh in his morning room, hunched on his day-bed, face as swollen and distorted as the lowest slave’s. The great were not spared; indeed, Pharaoh seemed to suffer more than his subjects, for he had far more to lose. If all who lived under him were obliterated, his name would pass from memory.

The old Pharaoh had done much to preserve his name, built many temples, left many writings. This younger man, so addicted to luxury that he neglected public works, had taken to having his name inscribed on tablets over those of his predecessors. It was a desperate act, a cry against the advance of oblivion.

Pai-net’em, Pharaoh said, mouth twisting, tongue swollen. What has brought these curses upon Egypt?

Pai-net’em found he did not have the strength to rise from his kneeling position.

The Israelites claim responsibility, sire.

The Israelites? The conquered people?

Yes. They say their God has visited his wrath upon Egypt.

Pharaoh’s eyes widened.

Why?

They are a sorcerous people. But their claims are fatuous. They have but one God, a child beside our Gods.

This is not the work of the Gods.

Pai-net’em agreed with Pharaoh.

We both know what is at the bottom of this.

You have it here, sire? Pai-net’em asked.

Pharaoh got off his day-bed, flies falling from his robes. Blood streaked his legs. His chest was sunken, his skin rubbed raw or bloated with sickness.

Pai-net’em stood, coughing fluid into his mouth-linen.

Pharaoh opened a wooden box. The darkness of the morning room was assaulted by red light. Pai-net’em remembered the first time he had seen the glow. Then, Pharaoh had been slim and swift and powerful. And he had been secure in his own health, his position.

Bravely, Pharaoh took the object out of the box. It seemed as if he had dipped his hand into fire and pulled out a solid lump of flame.

Pai-net’em got closer and looked at the jewel. A ruby as big as a man’s fist. Inside glinted seven points of red light, in the shape of the seven stars of the night sky. It had fallen into the Nile, from the stars themselves, and turned the river to blood. It was not a jewel, given in tribute to Pharaoh. It was a curse, spat from above at Egypt. It was the source of all miseries, of the insects and the lightning, of the darkness and the death.

Such a beautiful thing, Pharaoh mused, to contain such curses.

Pai-net’em saw the beauty, yet the jewel was hideous, crawling with invisible filth.

He shook his head, thinking with bitter humour of the Israelites’ claim. This was beyond the Gods of any people. This was death made into an object. It could not be destroyed—that had been tried, with chisels and fire—only passed on, to the unwitting.

Take it, Pharaoh said, tossing the jewel to Pai-net’em.

He caught the thing, feeling its horrid pulse.

Take it far from here.

Pai-net’em bowed his head.

He would die in the execution of this task. But he had no other purpose. His name would be remembered for this sacrifice. As long as Egypt endured, so would Pai-net’em.

* * *

Outside the Palace, he held the jewel to his chest, cupping it with his hand. He thought himself the calm centre of a storm. All around, insects and death whirled in bloody darkness. Evils flowed from the stone, but he was shielded from them. It was as if he were inside it rather than it inside his fist.

Everything was tinted red, as if he were looking through the ruby. His limbs were heavy and he felt trapped.

He started to run, away from the Palace.

A burning began in his chest, where the jewel was clutched, as if a blob of molten metal had struck him and was eating its way towards his heart.

He let his hand fall, but the jewel was stuck to his torso, sinking in. Agony filled his chest, and he tore the linen from his face, screaming.

But he still ran, wading through the streams of frogs and locusts. The weakness of his legs was washed away. He no longer felt anything.

He knew he was dying, but that the jewel kept his body from falling. He shrank inside himself, withdrawing into the ruby, suspended among the Seven Stars. This was not death as he knew it, a calm passage into a dignified afterlife where his family and servants awaited, but a change of perception. He would remain in the world, but be apart from it. As he had served Pharaoh, so would he now serve the Seven Stars.

From the heart of the red night, he looked down on the devastation that was the Land of Egypt.

And could not weep.

Sister Fidelma

OUR LADY OF DEATH

by PETER TREMAYNE

Sister Fidelma is around twenty-seven years old. Born in Cashel in the 7th century, she is the youngest