The career of a writer is usually driven by commercial success. What writer would choose to compose unsellable works if they knew they could sell another? Take Philip Fredrick Faust for instance. Have you ever read any of his poetry? Probably not, but you might have read his Westerns under the pen name Max Brand. Faust made so much money from his Westerns he could afford a villa in Italy where he wrote his forgettable poems. There are exceptions of course. James Branch Cabell comes to mind, writing his urbane Fantasies when some other form of writing certainly would have paid better. Usually, the writer follows the money…
Another example of this is a surprising occult detective writer, namely Conrad Richter. Probably best remembered for The Light in the Forest (1953), he won a Pulitzer for The Town in 1951. He sold regularly to the Saturday Evening Post, Liberty and other high-paying slicks. So why should such a writer go slumming in the Pulps with an occult detective? Everybody starts somewhere.
One of Richter’s earliest horror tales (really more of a suspense tale) was “The Head of the House” in the horror anthology The Grim 13 (1917). By 1931 he was publishing in Ghost Stories, one of the few rivals of Weird Tales. The magazine published 64 issues between 1926 and 1932. The contents of the magazine were more restrictive than WT, publishing only stories about ghosts. Still, this allowed for occult detectives to go toe-to-toe with the specters, publishing writers such as E. and H. Heron to Victor Rousseau.
Conrad Richter’s contribution to Ghost Stories was small, only two stories. “The Toad-Man Spectre” (Ghost Stories, June 1931) and “Monster of the Dark Places” (Ghost Stories, December 1931/January 1932). In “the Toad-Man Spectre” we meet our detectives, Matson Bell, also known as the Ghost Cop, and his Watson, Harper, bored with inactivity when Mr. Wilder appears. The house agent is being tormented by a frog-eyed spectre who reeks of ether. Bell explores the dark Horrow House and discovers the truth behind the family fortune. His specialized equipment is little more than a flashlight and a rubber hammer. “Monster of the Dark Places” takes the investigators to place where no light is visible, a coal mine.
Richter, like so many before and after him, is obviously inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Bell is thin and energetic and Harper armed with the required Watsonian pistol. The choice of Bell as a last name is also a nod to Dr. Joseph Bell, who Arthur Conan Doyle served as clerk and inspired many aspects of Sherlock’s methods and personality.
That Richter did not continue the series may fall to Ghost Stories ending publication in 1932 but there were plenty of Pulps including Weird Tales that might have taken the series on. I suspect he found less fantastic fare more to his liking publishing in Complete Stories, Blue Book and Short Stories before moving onto the slicks. His venture into the occult detective field was brief but an interesting footnote in the annals of the ghost detectives.
