The Ghostbreakers: Three Famous Fakes

Ghostbreaker tales don’t always play fair. Take these three famous fakes for instance. They appear to be tales of the occult, with ghosts and mediums, but they ultimately arrive at that type of story M. R. James hated: “…a class of which I disapprove—the ghost-story which peters out into a natural explanation…” These are Mystery stories dressed in the semblance of a ghost story. The tradition runs parallel to the actual supernatural story. Both the real ghost and the fake ghost are descended from the Gothic novels of the 1700s. (If we like adjectives we might call one school the Walpolian (real) and the other the Radcliffian (fake) ghostbreaker tale.)

Many of the classic occult detective writers allowed this dichotomy to exist in their fiction. Sherlock Holmes is entirely of the Radcliffian school, with all of his vampires, phantom hounds and slithering death curses proving to be earthly. On the other side, E. M. Scrymsour’s Shiela Crerar and Manly Wade Wellman’s Judge Hilary Pursuivant only have cases clearly of the true supernatural variety. While still others like Flaxman Low, Carnacki, even the Pulpy Jules de Grandin, offered up both.

A. Conan Doyle

This either/or approach was pretty common back in the early days of the ghostbreakers. All three authors I am going to look at today wrote true supernatural tales. All of them are better known for their Mystery fiction. Of course, the first has to be Arthur Conan Doyle, author of those Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand. He also wrote many other kinds of stories for other magazines like the London Society Magazine. “Selecting a Ghost: The Ghosts of Goresthorpe Grange” (London Society Magazine, December 1883) is a tongue-in-cheek poke at the noveau riche. Mr. and Mrs. D’Odd are people with money. They buy Goresthorpe Grange, acquire a fake coat-of-arms and other symbols of the gentry. But they lack a ghost for their home. Jorrocks over at Havistock Farms has one, so Mr. D’Odd must get one too.

To do this he speaks to his brother-in-law, Jack Brockett, the same fellow who found them their heraldry seal (for a large fee). He goes around to the mediums trying to find someone who can put ghosts into a building rather than take them out. He fails to find anyone until he is overheard in the pub. Mr. Abrahams appears after a short wait to put a ghost into the D’Odd’s ballroom. Abrahams is  described as a small, goblin-like man.

The selection of a ghost begins after Mr. D’Odd has inhaled much Lucoptolycus, an inhalant. A parade of ghosts appear before the man. First is the invisible entity, the great ethereal sigh-heaver. Next is the fiendish old woman that Sir Walter Scott was partial to. The third is the cavalier with a blood stain over his heart. He is a favorite of Dickens. The fourth is the murderer with the deep voice. He is good for haunting a large park. The next is a tall man with blood red eyes. He is the American blood-curdler, the embodiment of Edgar Alan Poe. The last is a woman, sentimental and ill-used. D’Odds picks the last.

He wakes from a kind of stupor to find his wife yelling. The house has been robbed. All his visions of ghosts float away. Later he learns he has been a victim of the notorious Jemmy Wilson, alias the Nottingham crackster. The Lucoptolycus was actually a drug to induce the ghostly visions. The criminals have made off with several expensive items including his fake coat-of-arms. Mr. D’Odd regrets his love of ghost story fiction that helped induce the different spectres. Doyle gets to list some of his favorite types of ghosts in this manner.

This story was reprinted in several ghost story collections including Strange Secrets (1889).

Grant Allen

Doyle wasn’t the only one to present fake mediums/cat burglars. Grant Allen, the Canadian-born author (known as “the busiest man in England”) created the clever Colonel Clay in a series that would be collected as The Africian Millionaire (1897). The stories first appeared in The Strand Magazine. The opener was “The Case of the Mexican Seer” (The Strand, June 1896). Colonel Clay, it should be noted, was the first of the gentlemen cracksmen. He pre-dates Raffles (by Doyle’s brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung),  Arsene Lupin (by French author, Maurice Le Blanc), and Leslie Charteris’s Simon Templar, all more famous today. Like these three, Clay is a master of disguise and thrills to evading the police and scamming rich blowhards. His malleable face (augmented with putty and make-up) allows him to look like anyone. The Pulps’ The Avenger, Richard Benson, will borrow this talent.

Their targets are men like Sir Charles Vandrift. The story is narrated by Vandrift’s brother-in-law and secretary, Seymour Wilbraham Wentworth. The two are in Monte Carlo to gamble without their wives. Through an acquaintance, Madame Picardet, the men learn of a medium who has thrilled all the ladies. Sir Charles, being the bombastic sort, likes to debunk mediums. He has the man invited over without revealing who he is.

The medium is a Spanish American:

…I found the Seer a very remarkable and interesting person. He stood about Sir Charles’s own height, but was slimmer and straighter, with an aquiline nose, strangely piercing eyes, very large black pupils, and a finely-chiselled close-shaven face, like the bust of Antinous in our hall in Mayfair. What gave him his most characteristic touch, however, was his odd head of hair, curly and wavy like Paderewski’s, standing out in a halo round his high white forehead and his delicate profile. I could see at a glance why he succeeded so well in impressing women ; he had the look of a poet, a singer, a prophet.

Senor Antonio Herrera is the medium’s name. He is a kind of Svengali. He fascinates the small crowd by divining names and the numbers on a pound note. But Sir Charles is not impressed until Herrera offers to read the crumpled note in his jacket pocket. Vandrift declines as it is of a compromising nature. The medium then offers to have Sir Charles write his name in green ink, burn the paper and then have it appear in blood on Herrera’s arm. The millionaire is reluctant for he doesn’t like signing things wily-nily, but since the paper is burned right after he agrees. The medium reveals the very signature on his arm in red. Vandrift is unable to explain the trick so he derails any further performance. The party becomes drinks and cigars, with Senor Herrera chatting with the ladies.

Later the next day Wentworth meets Madame Picardet as she is leaving Monte Carlo. She claims she has sucked Nice dry and will go to Italy. The secretary wonders when he sees her headed for the train station and Paris.

Thus the events seems to be at an end until Wentworth goes to reconcile the chequebook. There is a withdrawal for five thousand pounds that seems in error. Sir Charles realizes that the cheque is good, being the signature he signed at the party. He has been scammed. He goes to the police and the commissioner tells him he has been taken in by the infamous Colonel Clay. The policeman offers to look into it, to at least explain how it was done, for no one has ever arrested Clay.

Another day Sir Charles and Wentworth hear the explanation of how Clay pulled off the con. First, he identifies that Madame Picardet was his accomplice. She was the one who led the men to the medium in the first place. The card he signed had an opening where it would put the signature on a cheque. Madame Picardet had found out Vandrift’s bank and procured cheques from there. The police commissioner declares he would be the smartest policeman in Europe if he could catch Clay. Vandrift decides he will do it. Thus the series continues with Clay repeatedly taking the millionaire’s money.

All the Clay stories appeared in The Africian Millionaire (1897).

Agatha Christie

“The Mystery of the Blue Jar” by Agatha Christie (The Grand Magazine, July 1924) is a more modern example of the same kind of tale. Jack is a golfer who keeps hearing a woman’s voice scream “Murder–help! Murder!” This leads him to a pretty French girl, Mademoiselle Felise Marchaud, and a medium named Lavington, Doctor of the Soul. When a dream and a painting of a blue jar appear, they convince Jack that he must get the jar in question from his rich uncle if they are going to solve the occult puzzle. Of course, it is a scam and they abscond with the expensive blue item.  I wrote about this story and Christie’s supernatural appearing stories at length here.

It isn’t unusual to find Christie using the Grant Allen pattern as she grew up reading Doyle, Allen and Chesterton’s Father Brown. “The Mystery of the Blue Jar” was in The Hound of Death (1933), a collection that has both supernatural and supernatural-appearing stories in it. These are early tales more influenced by the Horror fiction she read as a girl. Not surprising, it is my favorite Christie book. As with so much Christie, this story was filmed in 1987.

Conclusion

Whether you like these Three Famous Fakes as Mystery tales or as ghostbreaker tales is largely a matter of taste. Genres today are far more rigid than they were in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Readers of long ago didn’t have Harry Houdini, Scooby-Doo and John Dickson Carr rattling around in their heads. The whole thing seems pretty dated by today’s standards. But there are exceptions. After all the X-Files and Buffy the Vampire-Slayer, the TV show, Evil, did a great job of threading real with unreal so that at times you don’t know if there are actual monsters or not. What is delusion? What is real? This Carnackian (another adjective for you!) approach makes the whole thing brilliant.

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