This post is brought to you by Strange Detectives, a collection of investigations by Victorian, Edwardian and Pulp era detectives. The game is afoot and that foot has claws and tentacles. Follow the clues to the monsters that lurk behind the cases of these occult detectives.
Among the top ranks of ghostbreakers is John Bell. A Master of Mysteries (1898) by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace was a link in the chain between the pseudo-supernatural stories of Sherlock Holmes and the more often actual supernatural stories of Flaxman Low. John Bell was that detective who took on ghostly cases but ultimately proved them earthly enough. This was stated in the opening of the series with: “…I propose in these pages to relate the histories of certain queer events, enveloped at first in mystery, and apparently dark with portent, but, nevertheless, when grappled with in the true spirit of science, capable of explanation.” This is the authors promising that these tales are closer to Holmes than the ghosts of J. Sheridan Le Fanu.
L. T. Meade was a successful writer of girl’s novels and romance tales. She produced a number of thrillers and mysteries in collaboration with male authors including Dr. Clifford Halifax and Robert Eustace, both medical men. Eustace and Meade produced her greatest works: Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1896), The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1899) and The Sorceress of the Strand (1902). The other is this collection about John Bell, an early ghostbreaker of false ghosts who originally appeared as individual stories in Cassell’s Family Magazine.
John Bell shares his last name with the man who inspired Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Joseph Bell. Arthur Conan Doyle was Bell’s clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary where he observed his superior use his clever techniques. Bell worked occasionally with police on cases including the Jack the Ripper murders. Who better to lend his name to an investigator who proves “That No Ghosts Need Apply!”
“The Mystery of the Circular Chamber” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, June 1897) begins with Bell arriving for an appointment with an old friend, Edgcombe, a lawyer. The solicitor wants to hire Bell to look into the recent death of an artist named Wentworth, who was about to inherit a fortune. The painter spent a night in the supposedly haunted Castle Inn and died. The autopsy could find no reason for his death and declared it “syncope”, a term reserved for unknown cause of death. Bell duplicates Wentworth’s movements, first staying in Harthurst, where he hears rumors about the death and the haunting of the Castle Inn. He arrives to find the place run-down and the staff unfriendly. He insists on staying the night even though the granddaughter, Liz, who behaved like a madwoman at the inquest, warns him off. Bell spends the first night in the room, which turns out to be circular in shape. Nothing happens to him despite staying awake all night. Bell drops some hints that he suspects the owners, after being warned off from the old mill wheel. The second night, Bell falls asleep despite trying not to. He awakens to find himself spinning. The entire room is turning quicker and quicker. He attempts to jump off several times and finally manages to find a perch near the door. The owner of the inn comes in, expecting him to be dead, Bell jumps on him ties him up. Going into the house, he finds Liz has locked Granny up in the pantry. The police are brought in but the three innkeepers have fled.
Meade and Eustace aren’t the first to use killer furniture in a supposed ghost story. Wilkie Collins did it forty-five years earlier in “A Terribly Strange Bed” (Household Words, April 24, 1852) and collected in After Dark (1856). (It was used again in Uncle Z by Greville Phillimore (1881) and for ‘The Inn of the Two Witches’ (1913) by Joseph Conrad. There is another but more of that later….) In Collins’s story, the bed is designed so the canopy descends and smothers its victims. In “The Circular Room” the authors use centrifugal force to create enough G-force to kill their guests. The idea of G-force is far more commonly known nowadays thanks to astronaut movies. It is hard to imagine a millrace generating enough force to kill but it makes a great story. It is a classic ghost story set-up but Bell quickly hints that the answer is more down-to-earth when he notices the drafts in the room and that the bed posts sit in pockets.
“The Warder of the Door” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, July 1897) has Bell invited to the ancestral home of the Clintons. Allen is upset when his father attempts to sabotage his wedding to the charming Phyllis Curzon. He does this because of a family curse that says the eldest son must become the warder of the door for a chamber holding a strange coffin that nobody can find. Bell and Allen find this chamber after Allen has a dream. By pressing the eyes of a figure on the fireplace, a secret staircase opens to the chamber below. Past a door sits the coffin. Bell experiments with the door by moving the box to the space outside the room. When he does this, the door can’t be closed. They return the coffin to the chamber then find themselves locked it. The two men will surely starve to death, and Allen loses his sanity for a moment and attacks Bell. The detective notices that both men’s watches have stopped. He goes to the coffin and tears into it. Inside there is no body but a pile of black ore. These rocks are magnetic, causing the watches to stop. The door houses a metal plate, making it stay shut. Bell opens the door easily once he understands and the Clinton Family Curse is ended. Allen marries Phyllis and all ends well.
“The Warder of the Door” is the most anthologized of the John Bell stories. Collections featuring ghostbreakers, if they include Bell, usually use this story. I suspect this may be because the story works on certain Gothic tropes that are well known. (The hidden room, the family curse, etc.) Personally, I think “The Circular Chamber” is a better told story.
“The Mystery of Felwyn Tunnel” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, August 1897) I have written about this story before. It features a play on Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-Man” and the idea of a haunted railway tunnel. Go here to unravel the mystery of the killer tunnel.
“The Eight-Mile Lock” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, September 1897) begins like a standard Mystery with Bell invited to a boating party where Lady Radsdale’s diamond bracelet is stolen. The police find no clue but Bell suspects one of the partiers, a man named Vyner. Bell gets called away to another matter. He receives a letter from Lord Radsdale to come back and solve the diamond theft case. Bell is boating through a lock when he runs into an old acquaintance, Jimmy the lock keeper. The old man wants Bell’s help because he heard a ghostly voice the night before and is losing his mind. Bell agrees to stay the night and goes to bed. Jimmy wakes him when the mysterious caller is heard again. Bell, armed with a hooked pole, goes after the ghostly speaker. He strikes it on the head, which proves to be a helmet. The two struggle. Bell punches him in the heart and ends the fight. It is Vyner. Bell sends Jimmy for a doctor. Vyner admits his crimes. He is a forger who has taken five thousand pounds from Lord Radsdale. The lord would not lend him five grand so he could legitimize the theft, so Vyner steals the diamonds, throwing them in the river. Using a submarine and diving equipment, he goes to retrieve them. His lamp doesn’t work so he has to try again the next night. Bell returns the diamonds but Radsdale doesn’t prosecute the forger but chooses to reforms him.
Jimmy mentions another case in passing, one involving the Manor House ghost. This is a classic ghostbreaker trick. Sherlock Holmes started it with mention of the Giant Rat of Sumatra. Carnacki would also mentions other cases we don’t have stories for. Meade and Eustace are building the same kind of back story for Bell.
“How Siva Spoke” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, October 1897) has Bell called in by a physician, Laurier, who wants a second opinion on a case of dementia. Edward Thesiger is a wealthy man who made his fortune in India. He became a Brahmin while away in foreign parts. Thesiger stole a wooden idol of Siva, which he worships. He holds seances in the room with the idol. Despite his religious beliefs, the man is sane enough. (The authors, through Bell, give a topical condemnation of Spiritualism, which was all the rage in the 1890s.)
Things changed when Thesiger began to hear Siva talking to him in Hindustanee, telling him to adorn the idol with gems. Bell learns most of this from Thesiger’s nephew, Jasper Bagwell. There is also the niece, Helen, who refuses to leave the house when Jasper tells her that Siva has been demanding that Edward kill her. Bell smells a rat and learns that Jasper is the one trying to get his uncle sent to an asylum. He has also forced Helen to accept his marriage proposal. Following the money, Jasper stands to cash in when the old man is gone.
But Bell has to prove foul play. He does this after examining the statue and the strange room it sits in. He detects that sounds made near the swan sculpture sound like they are coming from the idol. He has the gardener turn off the water that flows from the swan’s head and finds that a man can use the water pipe to send voices into the idol chamber. He sets up a trap to catch Jasper. When the man is revealed as a fraudster, his uncle sends him away, never to return. He does speak to Bell, telling him he knew about the odd sound in the room because he had visited the house as a child.
The basic set-up of the evil idol would resurface in the Pulps, especially in the fiction of Seabury Quinn. He would use this same plot, with a real haunted idol, in “The Stone Idol” (The Thrill Book, May 1, 1919) and “Gods of East and West” (Weird Tales, January 1928). I have to admit Quinn’s real idols are more fun.
“To Prove an Alibi” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, November 1897) has Bell on a sea cruise where he meets Arthur Cressley, late of Australia. The slight young man has made his fortune down under and plans to refurbish the old family home, Cressley Hall in Derbyshire. On board, Bell sees Cressley spending time with another passenger, a bullish looking man named Wickham. The detective is suspicious of the man and warns Cressley not to speak of his plans for a gold mine back in Australia. We also learn that Cressley Hall has an evil reputation. The turret room is the location of several family deaths, leading to legends of a curse. Cressley plans to take up the room. Bell promises to join him at the hall but has business in London first. A telegram sends him to Liverpool and the rooms of Murdock, the estate agent. The man is sick, lying in bed, moaning. Bell is in a hurry to get the last train. While Mrs. Murdock looks for documents, Bell touches Murdock’s forehead and finds it a wax dummy. Wickham is also at the Murdocks. He fetches a cab for Bell, which drives to the wrong station on purpose, making him miss the last train.
The detective is not to be stopped. He hires a coach with arrangements for fresh horses along the way. At the last station, he finds his horses have been cancelled by a telegram sent by Wickham. Borrowing horses from a neighbor, the coach arrives at Cressley Hall at two in the morning. After rousing two servants, Bell finally gets to the turret room in time to save Arthur. Just like the killer bed in “A Terribly Strange Bed”, the top of the four poster has descended to suffocate the man. Bell is in time, saving him. Arthur recounts how Murdock had appeared in his room before the mattress covered him. The wax figure had been used to create an alibi for the murderer. The bad guys are rounded up and the conspiracy to take over Cressley’s mine is revealed all the way back to Australia.
There’s that same killer bed again. Meade and Eustace don’t even go out of their way to dress it up differently. The trope of the cursed family turret is used well in “The Room in the Tower” by E. F. Benson (Pall Mall Magazine, January 1912) in a vampire tale while “Vampire Tower” (Detective Tales, October 1935) by John Dickson Carr does in a Mystery tale.
“The Secret of Emu Plain” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, December 1898) is an unusual addition to the John Bell saga. The story appeared in Cassell’s a year after the last story and wasn’t included in the original A Master of Mysteries. Unlike the other tales, this one did not offer an ending but had a contest for readers to solve the case that Bell mentioned in another story as the one he couldn’t solve. Ten prizes of one guinea were offered.
Bell is in Australia and decides to go to the wedding of an old friend, Rosamund Dale. On the coach ride to her sheep station, the detective observes the vast sandy waste known as the Emu Plain. After arriving at Macdonald’s Station, he sees Rosamund, who is worried because the groom hasn’t shown up. Frank Goodwin doesn’t show and the guests talk about the legends that haunt Emu Plain. There is talk of the Bunyip, the Australian bogeyman. Uncle Jim rides off to look for Frank. Bell meets more of the party members, including Corry, an Englishman with a bad eye. Bell suspects him immediately.
Jim returns with Frank’s horse. A search party is put together, including Bell, to go look for Frank on Emu Plain. Billy, the Aborigine tracker is frightened but they follow Frank’s trail to Emu Rock, three hundred feet high and unscalable. There are tracks showing a struggle with two other riders. The trail of the two fizzles out. Rosamund is not to be put off. She returns with Bell over several days but no trace of Frank is found. It is when Bell is returning to Brisbane he stops off at Corry’s place and decides to go hunting. He ends up at the rock, gets trapped by a sand storm. He suddenly loses consciousness.
When he wakes, he finds himself on top of Emu Rock. And he isn’t alone. There is a poisonous brown snake, that hisses and threatens to attack him. Bell improvises a weapon with a rock and his belt, killing the snake. He finds Frank’s dead body, throwing it off the rock. He is trapped for two days and thinking of suicide when a rocket flies over and drops a rope. He is saved but has no answers.
Here was where the readers were offered a chance to explain how men were taken to the top of Emu Rock and why. The explanation is given in a few short paragraphs. Corry, a man who worked with military kites, knew how to use the Sirocco winds to lift a man up the height. No real motive is given other than a criminal disposition. Ten people were awarded prizes, though only four of them suggested using kites. Most fell for the idea of a secret tunnel inside the rock.
Conclusion
John Bell’s legacy was to continue in the competitor of Cassell’s, Pearson’s Magazine. Arthur Pearson would take on John Bell and Sherlock Holmes with a dozen stories about Flaxman Low, psychic detective. Low’s solutions vary between actual supernatural and false but he was one of the first famous ghostbreakers after Sherlock. Pearson hired mother and son team, Katherine and Hesketh Prichard to write the series. The editor did not tell them that the stories would appear as “Real Ghost Stories”, reportedly true accounts. The series was so popular that Pearson’s tried again in 1906 with Allen Upward’s The Ghost Hunters. These early occult detectives would inspire many Pulp characters such as Jules de Grandin.
For more December fun…
