Three Incomplete Occult Detectives: Jim Shorthouse, Diana Marburg, and Derek Scarpe

As I discussed earlier, my current approach to unearthing early occult detectives is to proceed on an author-by-author basis.  In other words, I read and read about specific authors celebrated for their contributions to supernatural literature.  Exploring Algernon Blackwood, for example, led me to “A Woman’s Ghost Story,” which features an occult detective.

Jim Shorthouse

Blackwood’s works also include four stories that spotlight a character named Jim Shorthouse.  Jim keeps bumping into things that go bump in the night, so I wondered if he qualifies as an occult detective.  In “The Empty House,” it almost seems like his Aunt Julia will do the detecting.  After all, she’s the one with “a mania for psychical research,” and she’s the one who asks Jim to join her on a ghost hunt.  Very quickly, though, we see that Jim takes charge — that he’s the one with the mental fortitude to handle what they confront.

Jim’s struggle to keep panic in check is a central tension in all the Shorthouse stories.  He’s also psychically sensitive.  For instance, in “A Case of Eavesdropping,” his landlady describes him as “kind of quick and sensitive” to explain why he had a ghostly encounter when others didn’t.  This story is the least “detective-ish” in that Jim happens upon a haunting and doesn’t quite know what to do about it.  That landlady does all the explaining-the-mystery work at the end.  Likewise, in “The Strange Adventures of a Private Secretary in New York” Jim unintentionally finds himself in the company of a were-beast — but this time he’s surprisingly skilled at managing the situation.  In terms of the character’s chronology, “With Intent to Steal” seems to be the final in the sequence in that Jim has become a seasoned occult detective, one who may well be past his prime.

All four stories are collected in The Empty House and Other Stories (1906), but oddly enough, they’re placed in a different order than I put them above.  And they’re not placed beside one another.  And there are inconsistencies in narrative perspective.  And there are more inconsistencies — or, at least, gaps — in Jim’s character development.  Was this a series character Blackwood never finished?  Did the author figure he could fill in those gaps with additional stories, but he lost interest?  We’ll probably never know.

Diana Marburg

While Diana Marburg’s characterization is more consistent than Jim Shorthouse’s, she has a similarly “unfinished” air about her.  Diana uses palm-reading to identify criminals, a neat twist on the clairvoyant detective.  Since she has a fairly easy time identifying the culprit, these stories become how-dunits as Diana uses old-fashioned detective work to prove her palmistry.  Despite the promise of this premise, so far as I know, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace penned only three Marburg cases.  This is even though they had previously collaborated on a full book’s worth of John Bell stories.  (Bell is under 1897 on my Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives.)

I’m still looking into the Marburg series, hoping to find more of Diana’s cases.  After magazine publication, the stories were collected in the book The Oracle of Maddox Street (1904).  The tales I know about are “The Dead Hand,” “Finger Tips,” and “Sir Penn Caryll’s Engagement,” the first three titles in the Table of Contents of this hard-to-find collection.  One of the later stories is “The Secret of Emu Plain,” another John Bell story, so not all of the works are about Marburg.  Help with this would be greatly appreciated!

Derek Scarpe

The final “incomplete” occult detective is A.M. Burrage’s Derek Scarpe.  His two cases probably never made it into a book until Ash-Tree Press published The Occult Files of Francis Chard:  Some Ghost Stories by A.M. Burrage (1996).  On his Lovecraft Is Missing website, Larry Latham theorizes that only two Scarpe stories were written because of their poor quality.  The stories do suffer from Victorian restraint, especially unfortunate since they were published in 1920 — a decade after John Silence and Carnacki had given up the ghost-hunting for far more insidious monsters.

To be fair, though, I offer these scans of the two Scarpe tales: “The Severed Head” and “The House of Treburyan.” In his favor, when Derek confronts a spectral severed head on a billiards table, his first response is to grab a pool cue.  So, at least, there is that.

Look on the Tarnished Side

“Yeah, but those silver linings are a real pain to keep clean.” — Finbar Kelly

Charlotte Riddell’s Theophilus Edlyd and the Symbiosis of Criminal and Physical Laws

At the end of last month, Jess Nevins put up a very intriguing blog post about a short-story series that features African-American women who act as occult detectives.  Nevins reports that the Gee’s Bend series ran from 1886 to 1891, starting in the Colored Library of Sport, Story and Adventure and continuing in two other publications.  Heartbreakingly, he adds that the close to two dozen stories are unavailable to the general public.  Let’s hope some publisher tracks these down and reprints them!

Charlotte Riddell

Until I’m able to see a few of the Gee’s Bend stories, I simply don’t know enough to include them in my Chronological Bibliography of Early Occult Detectives. However, I have added a very different kind of fictional occult detective character.  He is Charlotte Riddell’s Theophilus Edlyd, and he could easily become the poster-child for what I’ve dubbed the novice-detective.

This character’s first and final case is narrated in a single short story, “The Open Door,” from 1882.  Like Henry Patterson from Riddell’s The Uninhabited House (1875), Edlyd is a law clerk who gladly accepts payment to solve the mystery of a client’s allegedly haunted house.  He isn’t the capable detective Patterson is — but that’s the point.  He’s bumbling along, in search of a career.  Law clerking really isn’t right for him, so he take a stab (in the dark, of course) at occult detection.  Not easy to pay the bills as a supernatural sleuth, though.  Kind of a creepy trade, too.  Happily, “The Open Door” ends with Edlyd’s experience in ghost-hunting — ahem! – opening a door to a more suitable occupation.  As this tale suggests, Riddell’s ghost stories stand out partly because of her smart handling of characterization.

Riddell’s tales also work especially well to illustrate something central to a lot of Victorian ghost fiction:  the symbiosis of criminal and physical laws.  A) Some long-unsolved crime — a murder or the theft of, say, an inheritance — leads to a ghostly manifestation.  B) Said manifestation inspires a character to look into the matter.  C) Solving the crime then lays the ghost to rest.

“Moses Coming Down From Mt. Sinai” (1866), by Gustave Doré

It might seem simple.  It might feel like a cheat in terms of crafting a mystery.  But there’s a very weighty implication here, one Victorian writers and readers must have been very fond of, given how often it appears in their ghost stories. The suggestion is that morality is so interwoven into the cosmological fabric that getting away with murder or theft creates wrinkles in Creation itself!

This symbiosis between criminal and physical laws makes more sense if we assume that typical Victorians probably traced their laws against murder and theft back to the Sixth and Eighth Sayings (or Commandments or Utterances or Statements) that Moses brought down Mount Sinai on stone tablets.

The Creator’s laws of moral behavior work in harmony with the physical laws underpinning His Creation in these Victorian ghost stories.  There’s a certain logic there, a certain elegant equation.  And there’s a certain grand unifying theory that many other mystery writers either reject or simply miss altogether.

A Lunch Menu, Not a Screen Menu

“‘I refuse to eat at any restaurant that has a TV screen hovering over me!’ insisted a woman on the bar stool next to me.  ‘So, yeah,’ she then muttered, ‘I haven’t eaten out in a couple of years.’” — Finbar Kelly

Vera Van Slyke: Help for the Haunted – Story #7 – “Houdini Slept Here”

First, yes, I realize I jumped over Story #6 of the Vera Van Slyke: Help for the Haunted series.  Rest assured that it will become available.  My great-grandaunt left her manuscripts in random sequence, and I’ve been having to do a fair amount of my own historical hunting to put her ghost-hunting chronicles in chronological order.

Hey, Girl

Besides, this one has Harry Houdini in it!

Lucille Parsell (a.k.a. my great-grandaunt, Ludmila “Lída”Prášilová) seemed hesitant to tell this story.  Frankly, I had some reservations, too.  It does not present Mr. Houdini in the most flattering stage light, after all.  But there is evidence to support the claim that The Handcuff King had trouble keeping his hands to himself — despite his being married.  In fact, I recommend this post on the topic found at John Cox’s fun and informative Wild About Harry website.

And I’m very proud of how my great-grandaunt dealt with the situation.

In this month’s story, Houdini finds himself threatened with blackmail for an earlier indiscretion — and haunted by it.  Can Vera Van Slyke help him escape from the shackles of his past?  Follow this link to enjoy “Houdini Slept Here” in .pdf, .epub. or .mobi format.

The Ambiguity of Remembering

“The past can be an anchor.  However, the past can also be an anchor.” — Finbar Kelly

Whirlwind Memories of the Monster of the American Midwest

Earlier this week, a couple of tornados rampaged through towns south of Oklahoma City — about a hour’s drive from where I live.  It’s left me thinking about how certain monsters go with certain places.  I grew up in the American Midwest, specifically, Illinois.  Fewer tornadoes than Oklahoma, but hardly safe from them.

In fact, lurking amid of my earliest memories are those nights when the sirens sounded and my parents woke me up to rush us all down to the basement.  It was our version of the London Blitz.  And the boy who crept back upstairs developed a curious interest in monsters, albeit more humanoid and cinematic ones.  Vampires, werewolves, and the other usual suspects.

Perhaps they served as a distraction from the real monster.

But distractions only distract for so long.  When I was in my 20s, I moved to the Boston area (which, of course, recently experienced another kind of monster).  Down the street, the Somerville Theatre gave me the chance to finally see the famous 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz on the big screen!  I had grown up with this movie, mostly watching it in black & white.  My father — one of the first on his block to have TV in the early 1950s — took forever to make the transition to color television.  But, as I sat in that movie theater, it wasn’t Judy Garland’s journey into Technicolor that affected me most.  It wasn’t even seeing those demonic flying monkeys projected ten-feet tall.

It was the tornado scene.  Nightmarish memories.  Sweaty palms.  An urge to seek shelter.  I had journeyed all the way into New England, but it wasn’t far enough for me to escape the monster of the Midwest.

Then I journeyed back.  Wisconsin first, but then into Oklahoma.  Into Tornado Alley’s express lane.

During this week’s local news stories of tragedy and loss and destruction and survival and reunion and resilience, I came up with an idea for a story of my own.  A fictional story — maybe a short story.  Maybe an audio drama?  Anyway, it involves a group of characters traveling from California to Oklahoma — catch that nod to Steinbeck? — to film a low-budget zombie movie.  Let’s say the zombie plague is an aftereffect of crops genetically engineered by the Malsatan Corporation.  (Any resemblance between Malsatan Corp. and any real agricultural corporation that’s frankensteining your side dishes is purely coincidental.)

Almost right away, a major tornado strikes!  Once the skies begin to clear, our zombie-movie cast and crew are drawn into the rescue efforts.  For example, they learn that the search through the rubble for survivors will have to be postponed due to the sun going down, so they offer their lights.  The actors organize a fundraiser variety show.  The make-up artist helps kids enjoy their bruised and bloodied faces by turning them into three-foot zombies that go stomping around the hospital.  Along the way, the filmmakers learn that the stereotypes about Midwesterners don’t hold up.  And the Midwesterners learn that stereotypes about people from the West Coast — well, stereotypes aren’t always inaccurate.

In the end, what little budget there was for the film is gone.  The zombie movie is never made, but the cast and crew have experienced a very different kind of monster.  Sure, a monster that’s far less trendy and profitable than zombies.  But one that’s far more real.

At its core, you see, it would be a story about growing up.  A semi-autobiographical story.