Sherlock Holmes Parodies
Every time you turn around someone comes out with their own Sherlock Holmes novel these days. But almost from the very beginning other writers have Read More
Category: Occult Detectives
The Gods of East & West
In a previous article I showed how “The Tomb of Sarah” was the inspiration for one of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin stories. Quinn wrote Read More
Doc Savage: The Northerns
Doc Savage novels have the advantage of having a toe in many different genres. This means the story never has to stop in one place. Read More
The Night Gawker
Occult detective spoofs date back to the 1940s with Bob Hope and Paullette Goddard in The Ghostbreakers (1940) and the Universal Abbott and Costello pictures Read More
Pulp Writing: Opening With a Punch
I miss the Pulps. Not for the garish covers featuring aliens molesting sweet-young space maidens. Not for the variety that gave us the brash adventure Read More
The False Monster Tradition
The notion that a monster should prove to be a fraud is a fairly recent idea. The warriors gathered around the scop reciting Beowulf would Read More
Weird Wednesdays: Malcolm M. Ferguson (1919-2011)
I began this piece with one goal in mind, to find a latter day Lovecraftian tribute, preferably one that others had missed. That’s not what Read More
It’s Okay…I’m a Doctor!
The non-comic reading world got an introduction to mystical superheroes with Doctor Strange (2016) starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Now part of the Infinity War movies, little Read More
William Hope Hodgson: The Bottleneck
Horror writers use many techniques to heighten the terror in their work. One of my favorites is the bottleneck. As with traffic jams, the bottleneck Read More
The Case of the Coptic Priest
How do you create an Occult Detective in the last half of the 20th century? Edward D. Hoch found an old solution to a new Read More