Spoiler Alert: this piece will reveal the solution to both a story and a TV episode discussed.
Tough guy private eyes are not known for their adventures amongst the weird world of gypsies and psychics. As detectives, they are the hard-hitting, fact-based heroes who use their guns to speak for them. They would never encounter a Sussex Vampire or a Hound of the Baskervilles. The closest Philip Marlowe ever got to the outré was mentioning The King in Yellow in a story of the same name. Sadly, the Yellow Sign and the hideously wrapped priests of Leng have no part in the tale. Private eyes are strictly rational, if rowdy.
Despite this rationality, the detective genre as a whole is a close cousin to the tale of horror, going back to Sheridan le Fanu and Edgar Allan Poe and then back to the Gothics that spawned both genres. Every so often you find the suggestion of the supernatural slipping into more modern tales. In the Golden Age, writers like Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr spiced up a locked room or an impossible murder with the hint that the killing was committed by Satan or witches. After World War II, this kind of thing became the domain of the comic books and the cartoons.
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