The House of Invisible Bondage

Between 1912 and 1934 American authors J. U. Giesy (1877-1947) and Junius B. Smith (1883-1945) wrote a whole series of novels, short stories and novellas featuring the exploits of occult detective Semi Dual. These were serialised in various pulp magazines. The House of Invisible Bondage was serialised in Argosy in 1926.

Semi Dual is a physician but he is also a student of various forms of esoteric knowledge including astrology. He has some limited telepathic abilities. He is a rich man who lives in luxurious and tasteful seclusion in a penthouse above the 20th floor of an apartment house. He has a passionate devotion to the righting of wrongs and a keen interest in crime-solving. He does not operate directly as a private detective but he has persuaded two trusted associates, Glace and Bryce, to set up a private detective agency. When a case interests Semi Dual he allows Glace and Bryce to do the legwork and the routine investigation while he directs things from the background, making use not just of his knowledge of esoteric lore but also his keen understanding of human psychology.

Semi Dual knows that Marya Harding is about to ask for his help. He has no way of knowing this, but he knows it nonetheless. Sure enough a few hours later she shows up seeking help. The help is actually for her friend Moira. Moira’s fiancé Imer Lamb has just been arrested for launching a murderous attack on his valet. It makes no sense. Imer is a healthy, outgoing thoroughly cheerful and good-natured young man. He has no serious vices. His valet is devoted to him and relations between master and servant have always been easy-going and cordial.

Nonetheless Imer is now behind bars. And it’s worse than that. The police surgeon has decided that he is an incurable homicidal maniac. Imer Lamb is likely to spend the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum. In the short term his brother has managed to get him admitted to a private psychiatric clinic.

Semi Dual agrees that this is extremely curious and once he has cast the young man’s horoscope he perceives that the case is much more complex and much more devious. He does not yet know what is behind it all but he does know that Imer Lamb is not a murderous madman.

There are family dramas involved, a has-been Hollywood starlet comes into the picture, there are questions of inheritance, there are various financial entanglements of a dubious nature and there is also the screaming woman at the clinic. On top of this there is another inexplicable outburst of violence, not on the part of Imer Lamb but involving someone closely connected to him.

Semi Dual is a patient man. He may not know the identity of the guilty party but he is weaving a web and that guilty party will inevitably become entangled in it. Semi Dual’s patience is matched by his confidence.

It’s a solid enough plot. The paranormal and occult elements are important and add some spice and flavour but they don’t overwhelm the story. Good old-fashioned detective skills are still required. And the story doesn’t rely on supernatural evil - this is a tale of very human evils such as greed and jealousy.

Semi Dual makes a fascinating hero. In his speech and behaviour he comes across like some kind of medieval wizard. He seems out of place in the world of the 1920s but in fact he is also a man of science and reason.

Bryce is a fun character - a hardboiled ex-cop who is nonetheless a true believer in Semi Dual’s mysterious powers. Moira is a likeable heroine who is determined to stand by the man she loves. There are several villains but they’re not necessarily motivated by pure evil. In this story it’s human weakness that drives people to act badly.

It’s all very entertaining and if (like me) you love occult detective stories you should be well satisfied. Highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed The Complete Cabalistic Cases of Semi Dual, volume 1, which contains the first three Semi Dual novellas. Most of the Semi Dual stories have now been reprinted in paperback by Steeger Books in their Argosy Library series.

Thorp McClusky’s Loot of the Vampire

Thorp McClusky’s short novel Loot of the Vampire was published in two parts in Weird Tales in 1936. It’s a vampire story in a contemporary big-city American setting.

Thorp McClusky (1906-1975) is a rather obscure American writer whose works appeared in pulp magazines in the 1930s.

It begins with a jewel robbery. The jeweller has been discussing the sale of a very valuable string of pearls to a European nobleman. The jeweller is found dead and the pearls are gone. The strange thing is that there’s no obvious way the killer could have made his escape.

Even more curious is the fact that the jeweller seemed to be suffering from a very serious case of anaemia. It’s almost as if there’s no blood at all in the body.

Then on the following day the dead jeweller turns up at the jewellery story, very much alive. The police commissioner and Detective-Lieutenant Peters are both puzzled and alarmed.

They do have a suspect, a Count Woertz. The count is about to hold a mind-reading session at a swank charity party. Lieutenant Peters poses as a guy wanting to have his mind read and discovers, to his consternation, that the count really can read minds.

Peters has an interest in the occult and he wonders if possibly they’re dealing with a vampire.

There’s no solid evidence against the count and the police commissioner has another problem. He’s in love with a sweet girl named Mary. They’re going to be married. The count has threatened to steal Mary away from the commissioner and the big worry is that he may be able to do just that by using some form of mind control.

There’s not much more than this to the plot. There are a couple of slightly creepy moments. There’s no action to speak of. There’s no reign of terror carried out by the vampire.

And to be honest there’s not much suspense. We don’t get enough of a sense that Mary is in real danger, and we don’t get enough of the feeling that the natural order is being threatened and that’s something I consider to be an essential element in supernatural horror.

The sea chase is the highlight and it’s not too badly done.

The vampire in this tale conforms to some of the rules of established vampire lore as it stood at the time, but not all. This vampire cannot tolerate sunlight but on the other hand he’s totally indifferent to garlic. The mirror stuff is an interesting variation on the usual idea. I like vampire stories that vary the rules a bit.

Loot of the Vampire is OK but it doesn’t quite deliver the goods. It’s recommended purely for its historical interest and its curiosity value.

Armchair Fiction have paired this novel with The Man Who Made Maniacs in one of their excellent two-novel paperback editions.

This story seems to belong to a very short-lived 1930s genre, the weird detective story. These were basically hardboiled detective stories with some supernatural and horror elements added for extra spice. That’s actually a promising combination.

If the weird detective story genre attracts you then you should check out Off-Trail Publications’ volume Cult of the Corpses which includes two novellas of this type by Maxwell Hawkins and they’re both far superior to Loot of the Vampire.

Seabury Quinn’s The Dark Angel

The Dark Angel is a collection of tales by Seabury Quinn that were published in Weird Tales in the early 1930s. It includes his short novel The Devil’s Bride.

Seabury Quinn (1889-1969) was an American pulp writer who enjoyed considerable success. In fact in the 1920s and 30s he was the most popular of all the Weird Tales writers. His reputation did not last. While his fellow Weird Tales writers like H.P. Lovecraft Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith have gained at least a limited degree of literary respectability Quinn is still (for the most part) reviled as one of the kinds of hack writer who gave the pulps a bad name.

That’s a bit unfair. Quinn had no literary pretensions whatsoever. He wrote to earn money. To achieve the success that he did achieve he needed to have a very sound instinct for what would work in commercial terms and he most certainly did have that instinct. He wrote commercially oriented pulp fiction and he wrote it very well.

His tales of occult detective Jules de Grandin (with an American doctor named Trowbridge acting as his Watson) are immense fun but they’re also very clever.

Jules de Grandin is a bit like Hercule Poirot if you can imagine Poirot on crystal meth. He’s a wildly over-the-top character, insanely self-confident and utterly unstoppable and remorseless in his pursuit of those who use occult powers for evil.

The Lost Lady is a tale of the East. More specifically it has its origins in French Indo-China. It involves a woman from the East, but not of the East. In involves evil and it involves power but it is the belief in evil and in power that matters. Actually it involves several women, one of whom is (or was) a Khmer temple-slave but she is European, not Khmer.

White slavery was an immensely popular subject at the time (with plenty of salacious potential) but this is not an ordinary story of white slavery. It does however have lots of salacious content.

The Ghost Helper is obviously a ghost story and it’s quite a good one. We start with a married couple and there is obviously some tension between them. Jules de Grandin and his friend Dr Trowbridge are then called in to treat the wife who seems to have been terrified by something. I don’t think it’s giving too much away to reveal that there really is a ghost but it’s the motives of the ghost that are important. A good story.

In Satan’s Stepson an old foe of de Grandin’s returns and he faces a new and even more terrifying foe. It is a tale of a man and a woman who both cheat death, but in very different ways. And it is a tale of a monster, partly human and partly diabolical, not a vampire but just as monstrous. It is a tale of an evil that can only be destroyed in a very specific way. And it is a tale of espionage as well. This is Quinn at his best, superbly inventive and energetic. A very good story.

The Dark Angel involves a series of murders, apparently carried out by an angel of Satan. Jules de Grandin finds that are all kinds of evil in the world and evil is not always where you expect it to be. This one is a bit too obvious but it’s OK.

There’s murder at the ballet in The Heart of Siva. Someone is trying to prevent the Issatakko Ballet Russe from presenting their latest somewhat outrageous production and the motivations could be religious. There’s some decent suspense in this one, some gruesomeness and some sleaze and of course hints of sinister eastern conspiracies and secret societies. And some real creepiness. These are the kinds of things Quinn did well and it’s a very good story.

In The Bleeding Mummy de Grandin and Trowbridge are called to the home of archaeologist Professor Larson, to find that Larson has suffered a grisly and terrifying death. He had been in the process of unwrapping a mummy he had brought back from Egypt. His is just the latest in a series of deaths associated wth his most recent expedition. The first mystery that Jules de Grandin must solve is the manner of the professor’s death but there is another much more ancient mystery to be solved as well. This is a rather scary story and a clever one as well.

The Door to Yesterday deals with a series of mysterious deaths, horrors from the past, a giant snake, voodoo and an interesting take on haunted houses. You can’t go wrong with those ingredients and I’m especially find of voodoo tales so for me this story was definitely a winner.

A Gamble in Souls is one of the cleverer stories in the collection. For some reason de Grandin and Trowbridge pay a visit to the penitentiary, or more specifically to Death Row, and witness a heart-breaking scene. A woman named Beth is saying farewell to the man she loves, a man named Lonny who is to be executed next day. A few hours later de Grandin and Trowbridge encounter the woman again. She is about to commit suicide by throwing herself off a bridge. While they try to dissuade her from suicide she pours out her tragic story. Lonny is innocent. The murder of which he was convicted was carried out by his brother Larry. But Beth is married to Larry and cannot testify against him, and therefore there is no way to save Lonny from the executioner.

The case is so hopeless that even Jules de Grandin is powerless - unless perhaps his old friend Hussein Obeyid can do something to save Lonny. De Grandin has seen Obeyid do many seemingly impossible things. Obeyid thinks that he may be able to help although he can make no guarantees that such a fantastic scheme will work. And it is a fantastic scheme. A very good story.

In The Thing in the Fog two young men are attacked in the city by a huge dog. One is killed, the other seriously hurt and would have been slain had Jules de Grandin not happened to be on the scene. The attack happened at night, in thick fog. The injured young man’s fiancée Sallie is of course dreadfully upset and tells de Grandin a strange story that confirms the Frenchman’s suspicion that they are not dealing with a dog but a werewolf. And this young lady may well be tainted by lycanthropy as well.

Quinn gives his own rather interesting spins to werewolf lore - you don’t need silver bullets to kill a werewolf and the curse of lycanthropy can be transmitted in many ways. These variations on standard werewolf lore are the highlight of the story.

De Grandin has an added incentive in this adventure - Sallie and her young man wish to worry and being a Frenchman de Grandin is determined to see young love triumph. But can the taint of lycanthropy be removed from Sallie? This is a fairly entertaining werewolf tale.

The Hand of Glory is the final story in the collection. The hand of glory itself (the hand of a condemned murderer which was supposed to have magical powers) plays only a minor part in the story. It’s a tale of the old gods (or in this case the old goddesses) exercising their evil powers. Not a bad story but nothing special.

This collection also includes the short novel The Devil’s Bride which I’d already read and which I reviewed here a few years back.

Summing Up

There’s no sense in trying to claim that Seabury Quinn was the equal of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith or Robert E. Howard. He clearly wasn’t. But he knew how to assemble the right ingredients for a pulp story and he knew how to cook up those ingredients into a good entertaining tale. This collection is on the whole pretty enjoyable. Recommended.

About the Murder of a Startled Lady

Between 1930 and 1932 Anthony Abbot wrote four detective novels, very much in the Van Dine mould, featuring New York Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt. He then took a break for a few years before writing four more Thatcher Colt novels heavily influenced by his growing interest in psychic phenomena. The first of these new-look Thatcher Colt mysteries was About the Murder of a Startled Lady, published in 1935.

Abbot’s new interests are immediately apparent in this novel. It begins with a young woman reporting her own murder six months earlier. She makes the report through a medium at a séance, and she also reports that her dismembered body was dumped in the sea at a certain place. Thatcher Colt doesn’t believe in any of this spiritualist nonsense. On the other hand a murder has been reported and Colt decides it would be just as well to send a diver down to have a look and sure enough the body of young woman is found right where the dead girl said it was.

It’s not so much a body as a collection of human bones. Of course there’s no hope of identifying the remains now, except that there’s a man whose services Colt has used in the past, a man who is referred to as a crime sculptor who has the uncanny ability to reconstruct facial features from nothing but a skill. So the dead girl can be identified after all.

Once she’s been identified the story doesn’t become any less odd. The girl and everyone connected with her seem to have been decidedly strange and not entirely what you would call normal. And there’s reason to suspect the girl herself may have been a bit on the strange side.

The psychic elements are just one of the odd features of this tale. Anthony Abbot was always fascinated by the use of science in criminal investigation (there’s some wonderfully esoteric forensic science stuff in About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress.

In About the Murder of a Startled Lady some of the scientific methods used verge on the science fictional. The facial reconstruction also stretches credibility a bit, given the technology of the time. In fact the crime sculptor seems to rely a bit too much on inspiration rather than technique.

Despite the supernatural trappings this is essentially a traditional puzzle-plot mystery with some police procedural overtones. I’m not sure it’s entirely fair play - there is one important clue which in my opinion remains unexplained and the essence of the puzzle-plot mystery is that the solution should not leave any loose ends. Apart from that one false step it’s a decent enough plot.

And Abbot comes up with a very neat and very clever variation on the traditional ending in which the detective gathers together all the suspects to reveal the solution. The solution itself is reasonably satisfactory.

The psychic elements are interesting for several reasons. We never really believe there’s going to be a supernatural solution and Thatcher Colt clearly doesn’t believe so either, but at the same time Colt has to admit that the apparent revelation by the dead girl is difficult to explain. The tricks used by phoney spiritualists were well-known and he expects the trickery to be easily explained but it isn’t. And they’re not just supernatural trappings to add a bit of atmosphere - they are in fact vital plot elements.

Anthony Abbot himself is a character in the Thatcher Colt mysteries. He’s Colt’s secretary and confidant and he’s the narrator of the stories. In other words he’s Colt’s Dr Watson. This fictional version of Anthony Abbot contributes a short foreword in which he makes some rather disparaging remarks about genius amateur detectives with an inexhaustible store of arcane knowledge. It almost sounds like a disavowal of the Van Dine school. This book is somewhat less Van Dine-like than Abbot’s earlier books. At the same time Thatcher Colt is clearly an educated and cultivated man, able to recognise instantly quotations from Dante.

I suspect that fans of puzzle-plot mysteries might find the first batch of four Thatcher Colt mysteries, such as the excellent About the Murder of the Circus Queen, to be more satisfactory than the second batch. It’s worth noting however that About the Murder of the Circus Queen also has a few occultist touches.

About the Murder of a Startled Lady is an intriguing variation on the impossible crime sub-genre. There’s nothing remotely impossible about the murder itself. It’s the process by which the murder is revealed that seems impossible.

This book might not be a masterpiece but it’s worth a look and Abbot is definitely an unfairly neglected mystery writer. Recommended.

The Horror on the Links, Seabury Quinn

The Horror on the Links is the first volume issued by Night Shade Books in their complete collection of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories. The stories in this first volume were all published in Weird Tales between 1925 and 1928. Seabury Quinn was an incredibly prolific contributor to Weird Tales. While his Weird Tales contemporaries like H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard continue to have strong followings Quinn’s reputation has not lasted anywhere near as well. In his day he was however the most popular of all the Weird Tales writers.

Some of de Grandin’s cases have supernatural explanations. Those that have rational explanations are possibly even more bizarre.

The Horror on the Links introduces the two main characters who appear in all the stories. Dr Samuel Trowbridge is the portly and rather staid American doctor who acts as narrator and generally plays the Dr Watson role. He meets colourful French doctor/scientist/occult detective Jules de Grandin when mysterious murders take place in Trowbridge’s home town of Harrisonville. A young man has survived a savage attack with serious injuries which provide a vital clue. Several young women were not so lucky. Trowbridge is the sceptic who cannot believe de Grandin’s crazy theories about the crime.

The Tenants of Broussac moves the action to an ancient chateau in France. The tenants of this crumbling pile all seem to come to extraordinarily grisly ends. It’s a haunted house story but with some fairly effective and atmospheric moments.

In The Isle of Missing Ships de Grandin has been employed by Lloyds of London to investigate the loss of a disturbing number of ships. This story features a memorable villain  and an extremely clever setting beneath the sea (with perhaps just a hint of Captain Nemo). The political incorrectness level of this story is absolutely off the scale.

I can’t say very much at all about The Vengeance of India without risking spoilers. It’s a tale of sudden, very sudden, death and vengeance long delayed.

The Dead Hand employs the fairly well-worn device of a disembodied hand. It’s made more interesting by the fact that in Quinn’s de Grandin stories you never know if the solution is going to involve the supernatural or not and the explanation is quite clever.

Quinn could be quite grisly at times and The House of Horror is very grisly indeed. Lost at night in driving rain de Grandin and Trowbridge take refuge in an old mansion and what they find there shocks even de Grandin. This one is perhaps just a bit too reliant on sheer gruesomeness and really that’s about all this story has going for it.

In Ancient Fires we discover that love can survive even the greatest sacrifice. It’s a kind of ghostly romance story.

The Great God Pan deals with what today would be called a cult.

The Grinning Mummy deals, obviously, with a mummy and naturally enough there’s a curse.

The Man Who Cast No Shadow is a very old central European nobleman. Very old indeed. But perhaps not always quite so old.

The Blood-Flower is pretty obviously a werewolf story but it demonstrates Quinn’s ability to come up with intriguing twists on old ideas. In this case a knowledge of botany is required to combat the lycanthropic menace. We also discover that modern technology can be just as effective as older methods of disposing of werewolves.

A woman who fears she is losing her husband to another woman might not seem like the sort of case that would interest Jules de Grandin but this other female is no ordinary woman, if she is a woman at all. The tale of The Veiled Prophetess all started with a visit to a fortune-teller, and with an Egyptian statue.

The Curse of Everard Maundy is a story of a voodoo curse, but a curse with an unusual twist. It’s almost as if those afflicted curse themselves.

Creeping Shadows begins with a man who has been dead for several days, except that he can’t have been since he was seen alive by three reliable witnesses just a few hours earlier. And it’s a story of death stalking men whose greed tempted them into a very unwise theft indeed.

The White Lady of the Orphanage is a rather grisly story of children who mysteriously vanish from an orphanage. It relies a bit too much on shock value for my tastes.

The Poltergeist tells of a young woman afflicted by strange and frightening manifestations which threaten her sanity and her very life. A poltergeist certainly, but what is more interesting is the origin and nature of this ghostly menace. Jules de Grandin comes to suspect that the answer lies in the past, but whose past?

The Gods of East and West is a duel for the possession of a woman’s soul, fought out between the monstrous Indian goddess Kali and the spirits of the Dakota people of North America.

Mephistopheles and Company, Ltd offers a particular challenge, de Grandin’s adversary being the Devil himself. Or at least a representative of that gentleman. A young Austrian woman is the victim of demonic possession although de Grandin suspects it’s not quite so simple as that.

It was inevitable that sooner or later de Grandin would come up against a case involving ancient Egypt and mummies. The Jewel of Seven Stones is almost a stock-standard mummy story but with a few crucial differences. For one thing the mummy is a Christian mummy. The stones themselves are a nice touch. This is one of Quinn’s more ambitious and complex stories and it’s one of his best, combining horror, suspense and romance.

In The Serpent Woman de Grandin takes on the case of a woman suspected of murdering her child. Is it murder, kidnapping or could it really be a giant snake?

Body and Soul is a tale of Egyptology and an attempt to provide evidence of life after death which unleashes  killer from beyond the grave. Quite a creepy story.

Restless Souls is a story of love and vampires, and love after death. One of the best of the de Grandin stories, and one of the few that adds just a little depth to the hero.

The Chapel of Mystic Horror is an ancient villa that had been dismantled, transported from Cypus to America and reassembled. The evil that was in the villa was brought to America along with the stones.

These stories are fairly consistent in quality. None are truly great stories but they’re all clever and entertaining. There are only a couple that are a little weak and there's a handful (such as The Jewel of Seven Stones and Restless Souls) that are particularly good.

They are also pure pulp. In fact they’re remarkably trashy, although they’re trashy in a good way. Jules de Grandin is a character entirely lacking in subtlety or depth. He’s like a hyperactive Hercule Poirot with none of the qualities that make Poirot interesting. None of this really matters. It’s the plots that matter and they’re gloriously ingenious. Quinn takes just about every horror cliché you can possibly think of - vampires, werewolves, shape-shifters, voodoo, witchcraft, ancient curses, mad scientists - but he always seems to manage to give these old ideas fresh new twists. And for all their trashiness these tales are fast-moving and entertaining and they have the vitality and manic energy of pulp fiction at its best. Quinn is certain not the equal of a Lovecraft or a Robert E. Howard but his stories are inventive and they’re great fun. Recommended.

C. Daly King’s The Complete Curious Mr Tarrant

Charles Daly King (1895-1963) was an American who devoted most of his career to psychology. During the 1930s he wrote half a dozen mystery novels and a collection of short stories, The Curious Mr Tarrant (published in 1935). These eight short stories, along with a handful of others written later, have been published in paperback by Crippen and Landru as The Complete Curious Mr Tarrant.

These tales are certainly not conventional murder mysteries. In some cases it is doubtful if a crime has even been committed. They are however stories of detection. In some ways they resemble the school of occult detective fiction that was enormously popular in the early part of the 20th century. Strange events occur, events which at first appear to be supernatural in origin (in today’s parlance they would more likely be referred to as manifestations of the paranormal). In most occult detective fiction the solution really is supernatural although quite frequently the events do turn out to have a perfectly rational explanation.

In the Mr Tarrant stories there is always a rational explanation. Well, almost always. Just to keep us on our toes King does on very rare occasions actually involve the supernatural. These stories are all in their various ways impossible crime stories and they include a number of true locked-room mysteries.

Mr Tarrant is a gentleman of leisure residing in New York City who happens to have a keen interest in odd unexplained mysteries. He pursues this interest on a strictly amateur basis. He is assisted by his Japanese butler-valet Katoh. Katoh is a most useful individual who was a doctor in his own country and is now a Japanese spy, a circumstance which affords Mr Tarrant a great deal of amusement. As he points out, the intelligence Katoh gathers on behalf of the Japanese government could in fact be found in any good public library.

In the earlier stories we learn very little about Mr Tarrant himself. Jerry Phelan admits to knowing almost nothing about Tarrant’s background. He knows Tarrant is wealthy but he has no idea where that wealth came from. It’s not until the sixth story, The Episode of the Vanishing Harp, that we gain a few insights into Tarrant’s character. He is clearly a man out of sympathy with the modern world, a man who values tradition and who regards democratic institutions with a good deal of scepticism. He is by nature an aristocrat. While he is obviously very well-educated with a broad range of interests he does not go in for the kinds of ostentatious displays of erudition that we expect from a Philo Vance or a Lord Peter Wimsey. Nor does he demonstrate any great degree of snobbery. He has his own views and we get only an occasional glimpse into his interior world. This naturally makes him rather interesting - we long to know more about him.

The Episode of the Codex’ Curse deals with a very valuable Aztec manuscript which, like any self-respecting ancient artifact, is protected by a curse. It’s actually a rather weak story but it does serve to introduce us to Jerry Phelan, the narrator of the stories. Phelan serves as Tarrant’s Dr Watson and like most Dr Watsons he’s not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer. The only subject on which Phelan can claim to speak with any authority at all is golf. Golf in fact seems to be his sole interest in life. The story also establishes Mr Tarrant’s credentials as a man who relies on observation and logic.

The Episode of the Tangible Illusion is very much better, in fact quite superb. Young Jerry has fallen in love with a charming girl named Valerie. Valerie is beautiful, wealthy, intelligent, everything that a man might hope for in a woman, except that she appears to be somewhat crazy. Possibly completely crazy. Or is she? Or could her sleek modernist house really be haunted? By 1935 it wasn’t easy to come up with a totally original haunted house story but that’s exactly what King does.

The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem is a locked-room mystery, and a good one (if rather grim). It seems to me that that there are three problems racing an author trying to write a a locked-room mystery: the solution has to be plausible, it has to avoid being a let-down and it has to be fair. In this story King succeeds on all three counts. The solution is obvious but as Tarrant points out ingrained habits of mind prevent us from seeing it. The Episode of the The Man with Three Eyes uses a similar technique - the solution is simple if only you don’t let preconceptions mislead you.

C. Daly King

In The Episode of the ‘Torment IV’ the mystery of the Mary Celeste is repeated, almost precisely, but on a speedboat on a lake. One thing you have to say about King - even when his stories are far-fetched they’re certainly original and the solution to this mystery is both very far-fetched and very original.

The Episode of the Headless Horrors deals with the discovery of headless corpses on an isolated stretch of road. It involves a subject that always delights me, which I can’t reveal for fear of spoilers.

The Episode of the Vanishing Harp is a particularly fine story, involving an impossible crime, an ancient prophecy and an Irish harp dating from the 9th century. 

The final story in the original collection, The Episode of the Final Bargain, represents a distinct turn for the weird. There is a mystery of sorts but this one is more concerned with seriously occult stuff. It’s an interesting tale but it really is radically different from the earlier stories. It also gives us some further insights into Tarrant’s character and motivations.

Some years after the publication of The Curious Mr Tarrant King was persuaded to write a couple of additional Mr Tarrant stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In these stories Tarrant’s Japanese butler-valet Katoh has mysteriously been replaced by a butler-valet from the Philippines who is in fact in all essentials  the identical character - by the 1940s it was presumably no longer acceptable for the hero to have a Japanese spy as his manservant!

The Episode of the Little Girl Who Wasn't There is another ingenious locked-room mystery which Tarrant solves without ever visiting the crime scene, or indeed without ever leaving his own house. His intervention is purely by means of listening to accounts of the case on the radio, making a couple of telephone calls and doing quite a bit of thinking.

The Episode of the Sinister Invention started life as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Frederic Dannay accepted it for publication in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine but suggested it be changed to make it a Mr Tarrant story. What’s really interesting is that King has left in the story a number of references to London locations and it’s clear that her has done so deliberately, in fact in one case he has drawn particular attention to such a reference. His intention was obviously to make it clear that this really is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche with Tarrant and Jerry Phelan standing in for Holmes and Dr Watson. This adds to the fun of the story - and it really is a delight, capturing just the right slightly whimsical feel.

The Episode of the Perilous Talisman was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1951. And indeed it can in some ways be considered to be either a fantasy or science fiction story, or a horror story. Or a detective story. It concerns an ancient Egyptian artifact that possesses certain very surprising powers. Not quite occult powers though. Perhaps scientific rather than magical, depending on how one defines science and magic. The story also involves a shady politician. Now why would a shady politician want to posses such an artifact? Tarrant has a fair idea of the answer to that question.

These are odd stories that cross genre boundaries but they are fascinating and unusual. Highly recommended.

The Skeleton Closet of Jules de Grandin

The American pulp writer Seabury Quinn (1889-1969) is best known for his stories chronicling the adventures of occult detective Jules de Grandin, described on the back cover of The Skeleton Closet of Jules de Grandin as “the occult Hercule Poirot” - a reasonably apt description. The Skeleton Closet of Jules de Grandin comprises six of the Jules de Grandin stories, all originally published by Weird Tales in 1929 and 1930.

Quinn was very much a pulp writer and while his stories may not have much literary polish they do possess a great deal of energy and flair and Quinn was nothing if not inventive.

The Drums of Damballah opens with a series of inexplicable crimes - the murder of a kindly clergyman, the kidnapping of a baby, the theft of a crucifix from a church. To Jules de Grandin it all adds up to a voodoo cult in 1930s New York, planning human sacrifice. Plus there’s an ape-man. I’m something of a connoisseur of politically incorrect fiction and this may well be the most politically incorrect story I’ve ever encountered. It’s also tremendous fun.

The Doom of the House of Phipps is a good example of Quinn’s favoured method, taking a very clichéd idea and trying to give it a twist. In this case the clichéd idea is a curse that dooms any male member of a particular family who is unwise enough to marry. They will die with their mouths full of blood before they set eyes on their first-born child. This attempt is perhaps a little too contrived but it’s enjoyable enough.

Ancient Egypt and mummy’s curses were incredibly popular in the pulp era but The Dust of Egypt adds some genuinely original and very clever twists involving thought-patterns and belief. A superb little story.

The Brain-Thief is almost as politically incorrect as The Drums of Damballah. An evil Hindu uses hypnotism to control people and steal time from them. He steals not only time but their memories. This is a fine example of Quinn’s ability to come up with remarkably clever ideas and to exploit those ideas to the full.

The Bride of Dewer deals with the legendary practice of droit de seigneur, which supposedly gave a feudal lord the right to sleep with the newly married brides of his vassals on their wedding night. It’s a legend that remains popular despite almost certainly being entirely imaginary. Quinn turns it into a nice little gothic tale as a demon exercises that right over the course of many generations.

Daughter of the Moonlight deals with witchcraft and can also be considered as an unconventional vampire tale, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it deals with early conceptions of vampirism that were current before Bram Stoker created the vampire legend in its modern form. Early ideas on vampirism placed great stress on the power of moonlight. A rather grim tale that demonstrates de Grandin’s ruthlessness in dealing with evil.

Jules de Grandin might resemble Hercule Poirot in his humorous mangling of the English language but in reality he’s considerably more ruthless.

While some occult detective stories offer rationalistic explanations for various mysteries these stories are all avowedly supernatural, or at least they deal with events that defy rationalistic beliefs. One very interesting and fruitful idea that Quinn utilises in several of his tales concerns the power of words and the power of beliefs. Such powers may be supernatural or paranormal or they may be powers of the human mind that science has not yet unravelled.

As well as the many short stories Jules de Grandin also features as the hero of one novel, the deliciously lurid The Devil’s Bride.

Seabury Quinn’s overtly pulpy style has prevented him from gaining the recognition for his occult detective stories that more literary writers such as William Hope Hodgson have gained but his ability to tell clever and original stories in a very entertaining manner should not be underestimated. Highly recommended.

The Secrets of Dr Taverner

Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946) was a British occultist who wrote under the name Dion Fortune. She wrote both fiction and non-fiction. Her fiction includes a collection of short stories, The Secrets of Dr Taverner, about an occult detective and healer. It was published in 1926.

Fortune’s work blends the occult with psychoanalysis and this is the approach favoured by her fictional counterpart Dr Taverner. While these stories are fiction the author claimed that they were all based on fact, and as outlandish as it might seem there is little doubt that she believed this to be true. Whatever one may think of Fortune’s beliefs they did inspire her to write some interesting fiction and The Secrets of Dr Taverner will be of interest to fans of the occult detective genre.

The over-arching theme of these stories is that there is another realm of existence, the Unseen. It is in some ways analogous to the world of faerie, or to an earlier pagan phase of human existence that still lurks under the surface of 20th century life. There is another aspect of the Unseen world - Dr Taverner serves forces that are beyond ordinary human understanding. The concept of secret supernatural entities or “hidden chiefs” to whom occult societies were bound was common in many of the esoteric magical societies that flourished in late Victorian and Edwardian times. Dion Fortune belonged to several of these magical societies and not surprisingly this fact was a major influence on her fiction. 

The first story, Blood-Lust, takes a very original approach indeed to the vampire legend. It’s a variation on the theme of the vampire that feeds on life energies but the way the vampire is created is the really original part. Of all the stories collected here this is the one that is closest to being a true, and very effective, horror story.

The Return of the Ritual deals with the theft of a centuries-old manuscript containing instructions for carrying out an occult ritual.

The Man Who Sought tells of a young man, an aviator and motoring enthusiast, a man obsessed with speed. He always seems to be in a hurry, as if he is searching for something. That’s exactly what he is doing. He is searching for his ideal woman, hence his obsession with speed - she could be anywhere and he has to find her.

The Soul That Would Not Be Born sees the author indulging in her obsession with reincarnation. Reincarnation is a remarkably silly concept but it has to be admitted that it has its literary uses and has formed the basis for some interesting fiction. In this case a reluctant soul must pay the price for sins committed in a past life.

In The Scented Poppies a series of suicides has taken place among the prospective heirs to a large fortune. But were they really suicides? Or murders committed by very unusual occult means? This is one of the most successful stories in the collection.

In The Death Hound a man with a weak heart is tormented by visions of a savage dog attacking him. He is the victim of an occult attack, by means of thought transference, by a man who is his rival for a woman. Thought transference figures in many of these stories, and it’s central in this one. This is also one of a number of stories in which we encounter the shadowy menace of the Black Lodges, mysterious occult societies practising black magic. Dion Fortune took this sort of thing very seriously, claiming to be herself a victim of magical attacks. This is another rather effective story.

A Daughter of Pan is one of the weaker stories, concerning itself fairly predictably with mystical silliness. The Subletting of the Mansion is much more interesting. It’s a very unconventional romantic triangle story with one party attempting to succeed in the romantic rivalry by means of stealing his rival’s body.

Recalled is the weakest tale in the collection, a tedious tale of colonial guilt and the reconciling of east and west. 

The Sea Lure is a mystical love story dealing with elementals. The content is rather silly but it includes some interesting speculations about hysterical stigmata. It’s one of the stories in the collection in which dreams play a large part.

The Power House is another tale of the misuse of magical powers, a theme that recurs in several of these stories. A Son of the Night tells of an earl whose family wishes to have him certified as insane, although Dr Taverner can see that he is simply not quite human. This idea of people who are slightly non-human, who might in earlier times have been considered of elven stock or perhaps denizens of the realm of faerie, recurs in several of these tales.

A very mixed bag overall, and some readers are likely to be put off by a certain irritating preachiness. Fortune takes the occult very very seriously. This is not necessarily a disadvantage when it comes to writing occult fiction but many of these stories are too obviously attempts to persuade us of the author’s mystical beliefs. At the same time several of the stories do work quite well as unconventional supernatural and/or paranormal tales. I’m not sure I’d recommend this collection as a purchase but if you can find a library copy it might perhaps be worth a look. 

I should emphasise that I am judging this collection as occult fiction, while the author undoubtedly intended it to be more in the nature of propaganda for her mystical beliefs.

A Master of Mysteries

Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1844–1914) wrote under the name L. T. Meade, producing countless stories for girls. She also wrote in a variety of other genres, including mysteries and occult detective stories. Most of these were co-authored with Eustace Robert Barton (1854–1943) who wrote under the name Robert Eustace.

A Master of Mysteries, published in 1898, is one of their collections of what could be described as occult detective stories although in fact the hero of these stories, John Bell, is man who specialises in finding rational explanations for apparently occult or inexplicable events such as hauntings. The explanations usually involve a crime, and it is generally a strange and outlandish crime.

This slim volume comprises six stories. The first two stories, The Mystery of the Circular Chamber and The Warder of the Door, are relatively conventional stories of this type dealing with a haunted room in an old house and a family curse involving a door that must always be guarded. The explanations are rational enough although they are also pleasingly bizarre.

In The Mystery of the Felwyn Tunnel Bell must solve a series of unexplained deaths that have occurred near a railway tunnel. Murder is suspected and the police have a suspect but Bell is not so sure that these events are as clear-cut as they seem.

With The Eight-Mile Lock things get a lot stranger. Bell is fairly sure he knows who was responsible for the theft of a very valuable diamond necklace but he needs to discover how the theft was carried out. The methods turns out to be spectacularly bizarre. Like many of the stories of these authors, in this and other collections, the method involves technology that was very high-tech indeed in the 1890s. The authors were clearly fascinated by technology and gadgetry and this fascination is one of the greatest strengths of their stories. At times, as in the story, we are almost approaching what today would be described as steampunk.

The solution to the mystery of How Siva Spoke involves a delightfully outrageous piece of gadgetry, not perhaps high-tech but certainly incredibly ingenious. An eccentric elderly man who has embraced the religion of Brahminism is convinced that he is receiving messages from an idol of the god Siva. As a result of this he is about to be committed to an asylum. Bell has serious doubts as to whether the man is really mad, but at the same time the old gentleman is adamant that the idol really speaks to him. Bell fears that the consequences may be more serious than a committal to an asylum.

To Prove an Alibi also relies on a clever piece of gadgetry, in fact several pieces of gadgetry, and Bell is faced with a thrilling race against time to save the life of an old friend.

The stories are similar in tone to another excellent collection by these two authors, The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, which recounts the crimes of the evil Madame Koluchy, one of fiction’s finest female diabolical criminal masterminds.

It’s the pseudoscientific gadgetry that is the great appeal of these stories and the authors certainly possessed fertile imaginations in this area. These are not stories to be taken too seriously but they are enormous fun and they do provide some genuine chills and thrills. A Master of Mysteries is delightful offbeat entertainment and is recommended.

M. P. Shiel's Prince Zaleski stories

One doesn’t normally think of decadent literature and the detective story as having very much in common with each other. Be that as it may, somehow or other M. P. Shiel managed to combine the two in his Prince Zaleski stories.

Shiel wrote only four Prince Zaleski tales. Three were published in a slim collection in 1895; the fourth did not see publication until 1955, several years after the author’s death, in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

The combination of the detective story with the gothic tale or the weird tale was a very common one at the time. William Hope Hodgson’s stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder and Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence stories being notable examples. The Prince Zaleski stories have something in common with these, but really they form a strange little sub-genre of their very own. There are hints of the world of the irrational, there’s an interest in the psychology not only of the actors in the drama but of the detective himself. But while the mysteries are certainly out of the ordinary, they contain hints not so much of the world of the supernatural as of the world of the fantastic. Perhaps it would be fair to consider them as being related to the branch of literature referred to by the French as the fantastique.

What really distinguishes them though is the atmosphere of decadence. It’s as if Huysmans’ celebrated decadent des Esseintes had decided to try his hand at crime-solving.

Prince Zaleski never leaves his vast, remote and crumbling old house. Consumed by elegant despair and cultured ennui, he smokes hashish and contemplates the beautiful objects with which he has surrounded himself. He shudders at the thought of reading a newspaper. The idea of taking an interest in the world horrifies. From time to time he is visited by his friend Shiel (who narrates the stories). Shiel is interested in crime and knows that from time to time a case arises that is so bizarre that it has the power to rouse Zaleski from his strange dream-world. Zaleski then applies his immense his intellectual gifts to the solving of the puzzle. He is invariably able to solve the crime without having to suffer the ordeal of having to leave his house, or even to stir himself from his divan.

The three original Prince Zaleski stories are all quite different. The Race of Orven is a gothic murder tale combined with a locked-room mystery.

The Stone of the Edmundsbury Monks is much stranger. The ingredients are an ancient amulet, a stone with possibly mystic powers, a family curse, a mysterious Persian, an indecipherable inscription, and an elderly scholar who may be insane or may in fact be all too sane.

The third tale, The S. S., is stranger still. An epidemic of suicide is sweeping Europe. But is it suicide, or murder? Or even both? Can it be possible that thousands of deaths all over the continent could all be linked in a sinister conspiracy? The only clues are  the slips of papyrus coated in honey found under the tongues of the victims. While the other stories start out strange but eventually the mystery is to some extent dispelled, this take just keeps getting stranger.

These stories are truly not quite like anything else in the crime gene, or any other genre for that matter. They are however weirdly and seductively fascinating and I highly recommend them.

Number Seven Queer Street

Margery Lawrence’s Number Seven Queer Street was a rather late entry in the occult detective genre, appearing in 1945. The author was clearly influenced by earlier writers in the genre like Algernon Blackwood and this collection of seven short stories is fairly typical of this fascinating genre.

Lawrence’s occult detective is Miles Pennoyer, although he prefers to be known as a psychic doctor. This is in fact the one factor that distinguishes this collection from others in this genre - Pennoyer’s cases do tend to be more like medical investigations than the cases an occult detective would normally take on. In many of the stories nothing really bizarre or inexplicable has happened, there are no signs of hauntings and similar phenomena. Pennoyer has been called in because someone is concerned that a family member just isn’t quite right although they can’t offer any real explanation. It’s a sense of vague unease that there is something wrong with the person, something that appears to have no physical cause and doesn’t seem to fall within the realm if mental disturbance as such.

Miles Pennoyer is of course a man with a very deep knowledge of the occult, to the extent that he is quite comfortable to describe himself as a magician. It is very definitely white magic that he practises of course.

Any Holmes, no matter how unconventional, has to have his Watson and Pennoyer’s Watson (who in conformity with the established detective story convention serves as narrator) is a successful novelist who has some limited psychic abilities. Slightly unusually, in most of the stories he merely acts as narrator of adventures in which he played no active rôle (although he does played a very active part in The Case of the Moonchild).

Margery Lawrence was either quite well versed in the occult herself or she was very good at making this sort of thing up. Pennoyer operates according to a very definite philosophy of the occult, a philosophy that is developed in some detail during the course of these seven adventures.

The Case of the Bronze Door deals with reincarnation, a theme that will recur (although less prominently) in other stories. It’s a nicely ambiguous story. Pennoyer is faced by an entity that certainly has the ability to do great harm, but it is not an entity that is evil as such. The Case of the Haunted Cathedral certainly involves an evil act, an act that threatens to destroy an architect’s crowning glory, but Pennoyer’s concern is to bring redemption rather than punishment to the author of this evil.

The Case of Ella McLeod is more an occult tragedy than a battle with evil. There’s no real evil at all here, although there is very human pettiness that has tragic consequences. This is another story that deals with reincarnation of a sort but this time Lawrence is aiming to engage the reader’s sympathies rather than to scare or horrify.

The Case of the White Snake is again a tragedy, and again the tragedy is aided if not actively caused by actions that were not intended as evil. It’s one of several stories involving children. In some stories a child is the agency of evil but more often the child is the potential victim. Like The Case of Ella McLeod in some ways it evokes the tragedy of the loss of the past. Both stories are poignant rather than scary but they work fairly successfully and Lawrence avoids indulging in the excessive sentimentality that could so easily shipwreck this type of story.

Lawrence hits top gear with The Case of the Moonchild. This time Pennoyer is confronted by very real evil and this time the threat is not merely to an individual’s or a family’s happiness; this time he faces evil on the grand scale. This is the most colourful and by far the most lurid of the Pennoyer stories and it’s the story that is closest in feel to real full-blown horror. While most of the stories in this volume are successful in evoking a sense of the uncanny this one is the one that works most successfully as pure entertainment.

The Case of the Young Man with the Scar is the longest story in the collection, and it’s the least successful. In this tale Lawrence succumbs to one of the most irritating of writerly vices, the absurd almost-deification of nature contrasted with an even more absurd demonisation of civilisation.  It didn’t quite move me to hurl the book across the room but the thought did cross my mind. It’s also the most poorly structured and rambling of the stories and in general I would have to say that I found this particular story to be a complete and abject failure.

The Case of the Leannabh Sidhe deals with an eleven-year-old boy who seems to have the ability to frighten everyone he comes into contact with. The explanation involves both fairies (the darker and nastier Celtic kind rather than the cute domesticated kind) and golf. And it’s an excellent little tale.

Number Seven Queer Street is an uneven volume but it remains an interesting addition to the occult detective canon. Lawrence generally (with the exception of the one major blemish mentioned earlier) writes very well. Miles Pennoyer is a hero who manages to be brilliant without being annoying. There’s enough occult detail to be satisfying without becoming tedious. This volume earns a definite recommendation although it has to be admitted that getting hold of a copy may present something of a challenge.

Cult of the Corpses

Detective stories were one of the staples of the pulps, as they had been one of the staples of the earlier dime novels. In the early 1930s an odd sub-genre of the detective story briefly flourished: the weird detective story. Off-Trail Publications’ volume Cult of the Corpses includes two novellas of this type by Maxwell Hawkins.

The weird detective story needs to be distinguished from the occult detective story. The occult detective story became very popular at the beginning of the 20th century and survived for nearly half a century. It was to some extent inspired by the enormous success of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories but the occult detective story was in reality more of a sub-genre of the gothic horror tale. It was an attempt to add new interest to the classic ghost story. It was primarily, although not entirely, a British phenomenon. These stories were very popular but most of them had at least a veneer of literary polish.

The weird detective story on the other hand was an off-shoot of the American hardboiled crime story. Supernatural, science fictional or other bizarre elements are tacked on to the basic hardboiled crime story in order to increase the sensational content. The weird detective story was emphatically American. Literary polish was not very much in evidence.

Pulp magazines had from time to time published crime stories with weird elements in the 20s but for a short time in the 30s it became a moderately thriving genre.

The two stories in this collection, Cult of the Corpses and Dealers in Death, were both published in Detective Dragnet magazine in 1931.

Cult of the Corpses sees Assistant District Attorney Benton McCray plunged into a bizarre world of voodoo in New York, and his girlfriend Nan Collette is in line to be the next victim of the murderous voodoo cult. McCray is not easily intimidated by the usual dangers that are part of the job when you’re fighting crime in a big city but this cult poses very different kinds of dangers. While gangsters might not think twice about mowing down their enemies with sub-machine guns the voodoo cult threatens its enemies with a fate worse than death - being transformed into zombies! And this story offers both zombies and machine gun-toting mobsters.

With these ingredients it would be difficult not to come up with a fairly exciting story and Cult of the Corpses is fine pulpy fun. There are all the usual fun elements you expect from a pulp story - narrow escapes, plenty of action, hardboiled dialogue - and it all holds together quite well. Hawkins appears to have done some research on the subject of voodoo in Haiti. Transplanting the voodoo cult to New York City was an obvious move and it works.

Dealers in Death is slightly different. It lacks any supernatural elements but compensates for this by giving us a sinister villain with bizarre methods. Letherius claims to have invented literally hundreds of methods of committing murder that are absolutely guaranteed to be undetectable and he’s turned his obsession into a thriving murder-for-money business. Villains in pulp stories have a tendency to overshadow the heroes and that’s certainly the case here. Fortunately Letherius is sufficiently interesting and sufficiently menacing to keep the reader’s attention riveted.

Maxwell Hawkins (1895-1962) was a newspaperman who had a fairly brief career as a pulp writer in the 1930s. After marrying in 1937 he seems to have largely abandoned his efforts in this arena to concentrate on the more certain rewards of his newspaper career.

Cult of the Corpses and Dealers in Death are both highly entertaining slightly off-beat stories that should delight pulp fans. This volume can certainly be recommended.

The Complete Cabalistic Cases of Semi Dual

The Complete Cabalistic Cases of Semi Dual contains the first three adventures of occult detective Semi Dual, originally published in the pulp magazine The Cavalier Magazine in 1912. All three are novella-length, and all three will provide a good deal of enjoyment to pulp fiction fans.

The narrator is newspaper reporter Gordon Glace. Glace is a typical newspaperman in his zeal for scoops but while he’d do just about anything to get a story in other respects he’s honest and he’s a kind of frustrated romantic. In the first story, The Occult Detector, he is assigned to interview a mysterious man known only by the rather unlikely moniker of Semi Dual. Semi Dual turns out to be half-Persian, providing him with an exotic touch that pulp readers would be sure to appreciate. He lives on the roof of the city’s highest office building, in a kind of luxurious penthouse surrounded by a roof garden.

Glace never does get the interview but he gets something much more valuable. He becomes Semi Dual’s Dr Watson. Their first case together is a murder, a crime that is in fact the result of several other crimes including fraud and blackmail. Glace gets his first inkling of Semi Dual’s methods. Semi Dual appears to be a kind of mystic or psychic although he claims that what appear to the uninitiated to be mysterious occult powers are simply the application of scientific laws, albeit scientific laws that are unknown to modern science. His techniques include the use of astrology but also the analysis of handwriting, neatly combining the scientific and the pseudo-scientific in classic pulp style.

The Significance of the High “D” is the second story and it puts the emphasis on handwriting, but Semi Dual can learn far more from handwriting than the average expert in this field. For Semi Dual it is a window into the soul. It may offer the only hope of saving a young bank teller accused of fraud. In the course of the investigation Gordon Glace makes the acquaintance of the colourful Colonel MacDonohue Sheldon, a bizarre figure straight out of the Wild West whose speculations on the stock market are adventurous if perhaps dubiously legal. Colonel Sheldon is unquestionably a rogue but he is a rogue with an unexpected heart of gold, a man whose virtues are on the same epic scale as his vices. Colonel Sheldon and his family will figure in further adventures.

The third story, The Wistaria Scarf, is much more ambitious. The kidnapping of Colonel Sheldon’s daughter will precipitate a chase that will take Glace and Semi Dual to Paris, thence to Moscow and finally to a mountain in Persia. A mere kidnapping would not be a sufficient basis for such a full-blown pulp adventure so the authors throw in white slavery for good measure (a subject sure to appeal to readers of the pulps).

John Ulrich Giesy (1877-1947) and Junius B. Smith (1883-1945) would go on to produce dozens of Semi Dual stories between 1912 and 1934, stories that would appear in a variety of pulp magazines. Despite the character’s undoubted popularity none of the stories were published in book form until Altus Press brought out the volume reviewed here in 2013.

Occult detectives were enjoying a considerable vogue at the time. An unusual characteristic of the Semi Dual tales is that each case usually has to be solved twice. Semi Dual uses his occult (or paranormal if you prefer a more modern term) powers to uncover the identity of the criminal and to elucidate the main features of the crime. Gordon Glace then employs more conventional methods to gather the hard evidence that a court of law demands. Apart from its inherent interest this technique has the advantage that it makes Glace slightly more than just the usual Dr Watson-like sidekick; this really is a partnership to which both partners contribute.

Semi Dual is the kind of larger-than-life, slightly exotic, definitely eccentric and somewhat mysterious figure that any good fictional occult detective should be. He is clearly a gentleman (his father was a Persian nobleman), he is chivalrous and he is devoted to the pursuit of justice. For Semi Dual crime is an offence to the natural laws of the universe and is thus doubly heinous. Semi Dual is a man of great charm and despite his rather aloof manner of life he is possessed of considerable warmth and kindliness. He has just enough of a quixotic streak to make him more than just a crime-solving machine.

Of course Semi Dual comes across as arrogant, as do so many of the great fictional detectives of both the occult and non-occult sub-species. Readers of the pulps would be unlikely to be greatly bothered by this and he is at least arrogant without being petty.

The publication of this volume is cause for celebration for aficionados of occult detective stories. The three tales included herein are thoroughly enjoyable and the superiority and greater ambition of the third story suggests that a future volume containing more of these stories might well be even more entertaining. Highly recommended.

The Openers of the Gate

L. Adams Beck’s 1930 short story collection The Openers of the Gate is subtitled Stories of the Occult. That’s certainly a fairly accurate description as far as it goes but it is likely to create an impression that these are horror stories. Some of them can almost be considered as horror tales but the author’s purposes are rather different from those of the average horror writer. She makes it quite clear in the preface that she takes these things very seriously indeed, that in fact the occult is to her very much a reality and that she intended these stories to convey real Spiritual Truths. I offer this review as a warning to others who might repeat my mistake of buying this book under the impression they were buying a collection of gothic or horror tales.

The first thing to be noted about this volume is that it is not a collection of occult or psychic detective stories even though it has (for some obscure reason) been given that label and at least one of the stories has appeared in an anthology of occult detective stories. A few of the stories do superficially resemble the occult detective story.

The stories vary wildly in quality. Some are much too sentimental while others betray an embarrassingly naïve belief in what used to be described as mumbo-jumbo. Others still contain exceptionally interesting ideas and some contain moments that can genuinely be described as uncanny or even horrific. Some of these tales are set in England while others  take place in various parts of Asia, most of which Beck would have visited during her extensive travels.

Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (1862-1931), the daughter of an admiral, wrote under various pseudonyms, L. Adams Beck being evidently one she used frequently. In addition to her fiction she wrote books on various esoteric and spiritual subjects and was a devotee of Theosophy. That sort of thing was intellectually much more respectable in the 1920s (when the stories in this collection were written) than it is today. She was one of those Europeans who convinced themselves that wisdom was something only to be found in the Mysterious East and that in Asia everyone was immensely spiritual. It’s a belief that became very tedious indeed in the 1960s but even in the 1920s most people would have (quite reasonably) found such an idea annoying to say the least.

The title story is one of several so drenched in sentimentality and wishful thinking that the reader requires a very strong stomach to finish them. How Felicity Came Home is another egregious example of this tendency. Both stories illustrate the author’s obsession with the spiritual nature of animals. Lord Killary displays the author’s combination of severe morality coupled with syrupy sentimentality.

Waste Manor and The Mystery of Iniquity are much stronger and can be read at least in part as very effective and unusual horror. The Mystery of Iniquity even includes an example of what would today be described as a mind vampire. This story starts off extremely well and builds a nice atmosphere of weirdness and horror only to fall apart at the end when once again the spirituality of the East solves all problems.

Many Waters Cannot Quench Love takes place on a remote tea plantation in Ceylon (as it was then known). It’s one of Beck’s more interesting stories, a tale of a half-English woman and a drunken planter. It’s one of several tales in this volume that can be approached as offbeat ghost stories.

In The Horoscope an English landed gentleman rejects his own culture in favour of Indian culture, which is of course incredibly spiritual and full of wisdom while European culture is wicked and barbaric. If that sounds to you like a story that will turn out to be a load of irritating drivel then your judgment is spot on.   

The Thug is rather intriguing, being one of several of Beck’s tales dealing with past lives. That would normally be enough to put me off completely but it’s actually one of her better efforts and it’s worth persisting with. An Englishman discovers that he is actually a member of the Thuggee cult. The Thugs turn out to be murderous thieves but of course (like every single person in Asia) they’re very spiritual. The story is rather better than it sounds.

Then we get to Hell, a remarkably creepy and unconventional ghost story that would be a very fine story indeed if Beck could have restrained herself from her customary metaphysical silliness.

The last tale is The Man Who Saw, a tale of the wisdom of the East that is truly one of the most excruciatingly bad and embarrassingly silly stories it has ever been my misfortune to encounter.

Overall a mixed bunch with a few unexpected highlights but unless you share the author’s belief that everyone in Asia is wise and spiritual while every European is stupid and barbaric or you hare her enthusiasm for Theosophy you will find this collection very very difficult to struggle through.

Astro, the Master of Mysteries

Astro, the Master of Mysteries is another entry in the occult detective genre and it’s another example of the surprising flexibility of that genre. It offers its own distinctive variation on the basic theme.

Gelett Burgess wrote the stories that comprise this collection some time before 1912 when they were first published in book form. They’re free-standing stories but there is a longer story arc as well, which is a fairly unusual feature for a collection of detective stories.

Astro is an astrologer, palm-reader, fortune-teller and psychic. He’s also a complete charlatan. You might think this would make him either a villain or at best a loveable rogue but in fact he’s very much the hero. You see, despite being a charlatan as a psychic Astro is a detective of genius. He uses the psychic angle to attract customers but when someone hires him to solve a mystery he always gives them their money’s worth.  Very few crimes are capable of baffling Astro.

Any good fictional detective needs a sidekick. Astro’s is the beautiful Valeska. She is a slightly unusual sidekick, being already a skilled detective who is being trained by Astro in the mysteries of the art of crime-solving. There is considerable mutual respect between Astro and Valeska, and there’s a hint that there may be more than respect involved. That’s where the longer story arc (which occupies the entire collection of twenty-four stories) comes in but I won’t spoil it by saying any more. The relationship between Astro and Valeska is as interesting as the actual cases they take on, although the cases are pretty interesting in their own right.

Astro is something of a scientific enthusiast, but he tends to use science more as an illustration of his pet theories than as a crime-solving tool. His interest in science is however an indication of his very logical mind. This, along with a profound understanding of human psychology, is the secret of his success as a detective.

Occult detectives were very much in fashion in 1912, but Burgess also makes use of another element that was in vogue at that time - the fascination with the Mysterious East. Astro himself is Egyptian, although he also claims to be a Buddhist. Astro’s exotic origins are certainly useful to his pose as a psychic but his mind seems to be very much a rational western mind.

The stories themselves cover a wide range of crimes. In some cases there is no actual crime, merely a puzzle that is causing distress to one of Astro’s clients. In other cases there are very real crimes, even involving murder.

Astro, the Master of Mysteries is a very entertaining collection. The stories work well as detective stories in the manner of the time. They don’t have the intricate plotting of the later golden age of detective fiction nor do they adhere rigidly to the so-called rules of “fair play” that characterised the golden age. Nonetheless they’re clever and Astro’s business as a professional psychic gives the tales a unique flavour.

Fans of both straightforward crime fiction and occult detective stories should find a great deal to enjoy here. Highly recommended.

This collection is included in one of Coachwhip Press’s 2 Detectives volumes, paired with Max Rittenberg’s Dr Wycherley collection The Mind Reader.

The Mind-Reader

Max Rittenberg’s The Mind-Reader is yet another entry in the psychic detective sub-genre, and it emphasises once again just how surprisingly varied this rather small sub-genre is.

This 1913 short story collection recounts some of the cases of Dr Xavier Wycherley. Dr Wycherley is a mind doctor. He does not consider himself to be a detective and in fact he dislikes having on occasion to act as one. Nonetheless many of his cases do involve crime and there are times when, for the sake of a patient, Dr Wycherley has to act in that capacity.

Dr Wycherley’s methods involve both hypnosis and psycho-analysis, two subjects that the late Victorians and the Edwardians found both deeply fascinating and somewhat horrifying. Dr Wycherley also takes advantage of certain gifts that would today be considered to be within the realm of the paranormal. At that time we must remember that science had not yet drawn a firm line between strange phenomena that were real and strange phenomena that turned out to have no scientific basis whatsoever (such as psycho-analysis). Dr Wycherley considers himself to be a man of science.

This little book appears to be a collection of many very short stories but in fact many of the stories are linked, so in reality it’s a collection of a small number of relatively long short stories.

Dr Wycherley’s cases take him into various worlds - the world of high politics, the world of espionage, and even the world of faith healing. His patients may be peasants or princes. Wycherley is a kindly man who is fortunate to be sufficiently wealthy (he lives on a private island in a lake) that he does not have to concern himself with the sordid matter of fees.

Wycherley’s main objective is always to heal the minds of his patients. The solving of a crime may be a necessary pre-condition for such a cure but it is not a strong motivating factor for the doctor. Nevertheless he does like to see justice and good prevail.

One case, set in the glamorous environs of Monte Carlo, involves the selling of French naval secrets. Another case confronts him with a crown prince haunted by a tragic secret,  another involves the private affairs of a British Cabinet Minister while yet another of these tales concerns the murder of a zoologist whose particular interest is sloths. Who knew that sloths could be so deadly?

As is so often the case with Victorian and Edwardian fiction it is essential to bear in mind that they are set in a very different world, a world in which concepts like duty still had enormous resonance. The plots simply don’t work unless you take this into account. That could be seen as a weakness in that some modern readers will find this very alienating, but to me it’s one of the great attractions of late 19th and early 20th century fiction - I like my reading to allow me to escape into a completely different world.

Coachwhip Press has released this book as part of their 2 Detectives series, paired with another collection of psychic detective stories, Gelett Burgess’s Astro, the Master of Mysteries.

Anyone who has a taste for the occult or psychic detective sub-genre, and anyone who enjoys crime fiction that is focused on psychology, should certainly consider checking out The Mind-Reader. Highly recommended.

Aleister Crowley’s Simon Iff Stories and Other Works

I’ve never made any secret of my love of occult detective stories. They’re one of my favourite genres. Aleister Crowley’s Simon Iff stories (collected in Wordsworth Editions’ The Simon Iff Stories and Other Works and written during the second decade of the 20th century) certainly belong to this genre but they do have a distinctive flavour all their own.

Simon Iff is an old man. He’s in his 80s but he has the vigour of a man half his age. He also has a characteristically ironic and eccentric view of the world. Simon Iff is the man Crowley hoped to be when he reached that age - he is essentially an idealised self-portrait of the artist as a grand old man.

Among occult or psychic detective tales the Simon Iff stories are rather unique. There are no supernatural elements whatsoever. Not even paranormal phenomena. The cases that Simon Iff investigates are all very human crimes. What qualifies these stories as examples of occult detective stories is the unique methods of Crowley’s detective. Simon Iff is a magus and he uses Crowley’s philosophy (or religion if you prefer) as the basis for his understanding of the world, and this understanding of the world is the key to his methods. Simon Iff also has a profound knowledge of human psychology although his ideas on what makes people tick would appear more than a little eccentric to most people.

Simon Iff believes that in order to solve a crime it is necessary to study the minds of the people involved. Minds are more important than facts. He has no interest in crawling about on the floor looking for clues. He is contemptuous of alibis and bloodstains. He does not even deem it necessary to visit the scene of the crime. All he needs is sufficient information on the persons involved to understand the workings of their minds.

This unusual method necessarily means that the structure of these stories is very different from that of conventional detective stories. There is no gradual uncovering of the sequence of events and there is no gradual accumulation of clues.

The greatest strength of these stories is Crowley’s writing. He could be a very amusing writer indeed and these tales give him the opportunity to display his talent for light-hearted tongue-in-cheek storytelling. The tone is occasionally grim but is more often satirical and even whimsical, or willfully but amusingly perverse.

Many of the stories were written during Crowley’s residence in the United States and have an American setting. Simon Iff’s view of the US (which was undoubtedly identical to Crowley’s) is certainly eccentric.

Crowley had a tendency to magnify his own importance and Simon Iff can be seen as a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy. Iff is a celebrity detective who wines and dines with the high and the mighty.

The major weakness though is that Crowley uses these stories to push his own philosophy, and it’s a fairly silly philosophy. Simon Iff’s continual trashing of conventional morality eventually gets tiresome and predictable. Like Crowley himself the detective is to a large extent contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. He also espouses some remarkably foolish and naïve notions about other cultures, all of which are assumed to be superior to wicked western civilisation.

This Wordsworth volume also contains Golden Twigs, a short series of stories inspired by Sir James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

Serious crime fiction fans may be dismayed by the lack of attention in the Simon Iff stories to most of the conventions of the genre but that is balanced by Simon’s attention to the psychological motivations of crime, even if those psychological motivations often turn out to be bizarre and unlikely.

Crowley buffs will of course enjoy this collection.

The Simon Iff stories (and this collection includes all twenty-three) are unusual but they are  fairly entertaining although Crowley is best enjoyed in small doses. Definitely off-beat and worth a look.