The 1930’s was the last great period of Spiritualism in Britain and America. Houdini and other defrauders were busy debunking the phonies and relegating the spiritualists to the sideshows of the carnivals. World War Two and an increasing love of technology would soon spawn the hard-core ranks of scientists and engineers. There were still writers who dwelt in that world of Blavatsky and Ouspensky and believed in the spirit world, bringing that conviction to their work. Algernon Blackwood was perhaps the most famous. Dennis Wheatley, who would gain fame as a writer of spy thrillers, was another-like Agatha Christie-who only dabbled at the art of the occult investigator.
Enter Neils Orson
Wheatley’s entry into the world of the occult detective is Neils Orsen, who resembles Chesterton’s Father Brown physically: “…Neils Orsen was small and lightly built, with transparently pale skin and large, luminous blue eyes. His domed head with a high intelligent brow and mass of soft fair hair appeared too large for his diminutive body.” Orsen is also described as “frail”, “gnome-like” and to have “…enormous pale-blue eyes like those of a Siamese cat…” He has long, slender fingers and is a tea-totaller. Though physically small, Orsen says in the face of evil: “… while if it really is an entity from the ‘Outer Circle’ I’m far more capable of dealing with such things than the toughest policeman in New York.” This power may come from his being the seventh son of a seventh son. And like Van Helsing and Jules DeGrandin, he occasionally makes errors in his English, being a foreigner. Orsen’s English is almost accentless but he occasional mixes up a popular expression.
Following in Holmes’ shoes, Orsen has his Watson, Bruce Hemmingway, “… six-feet-two, with thick black hair and a strong handsome face, … an astute hard-headed, international lawyer, whose firm had offices in London, Paris and New York…” An idealized version of Wheatley himself, Bruce is “… a normal practical person …” Of his companion’s mysterious nature, this latter-day Watson admits “…Neils himself gives me the creeps at times.” Orsen’s other ally is a Siamese cat named Pãst, who like John Silence’s cat, is used to detect the presence of other-worldly forces.
Neils Orsen appears in only four short stories, though the author had originally planned on twelve in a separate volume. The Ghost Hunter stories were collected in Gunmen, Gallants and Ghosts, in 1942, a hodge-podge book that was published with the aim of keeping Wheatley’s name before the public while he served his country in the Ministry of Information. According to Wheatley’s introduction and story prefaces, Orsen is based on a real person:”For the purpose of the stories I called him Neils Orsen but his real name was Henry Dewhirst and any charm both of appearance and character which I may have succeeded in giving to Neils Orsen is derived from my memories of his wise and greatly gifted original.”
Wheatley tells of his experiences with Dewhurst in his youth:
I visited Dewhirst some five or six times between 1928 and 1932 and I think the professional procedure of this great occultist is worthy of record. He always told his visitors that, if they wished to send their friends to see him, such friends should ring up and ask for an appointment without mentioning their own names or that of their introducer. In this way he covered himself from any suggestion that he had found out by normal means about the prospective client before his first visit.
The Methods of a Master
Unlike Orsen, Dewhirst did not investigate ‘haunted houses’ or use the gadgets of the occult detective. Wheatley explains Dewhirst’s methods:
“…for his work he used neither crystal, cards, tea-leaves nor any other aids to focusing the subconscious which are normally necessary to less gifted practitioners of the secret arts. When I arrived he sat me down in an armchair on one side of the fireplace…and taking the chair opposite began to talk in a swift, rambling monologue; having told me that I was not to reply to any questions he might put to me. Such questions as he did ask he answered himself immediately afterwards…
Wheatley describes himself as “While no means a seeker-out of ‘fortune’ tellers I have, like most people, consulted quite a number in my time…but I have never found another who could foretell the future except in, possibly lucky, generalisations…I believe seers such as Dewhirst to be very rare beings…” So, it becomes obvious that while Wheatley was not an active investigator himself, like Algernon Blackwood and Sax Rohmer, he was a believer in psychic phenomenon, and it is from this grounding that he created Neils Orsen.
By comparison, Orsen is much more the offspring of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, with his vague hints at the “Great Depths”, the “Outer Circle”, “Ab-human Forces” and “Saati manifestations”, his being “equipped with talismans of proved power against the evils that affect the spirit.” These include such Stokerian items as garlic and the Holy Cross. But like his predecessors, Orsen uses strange equipment, built by himself especially for the work. The cameras with the string trigger “…but their process, Orsen’s invention, was a mystery to him. Neils explained them only by saying that their plates were abnormally sensitive. He said the same thing of his sound-recorder, an instrument like a miniature dictaphone.”
Armed with these tools and his cat, Pãst, Neils Orsen and Bruce Hemmingway tackle four cases. Wheatley, like Hodgson, does not make all the specters real. In his introduction he offers,: “With the idea of giving variety to this series I decided that some of Neils’s cases should prove to be genuine hauntings and that the others should turn out to be fakes arranged by people who had some axe to grind and therefore be capable of a natural explanation ascertainable by normal detection methods…When you have read enough of each case to be as fully informed of the situation as Neils, it may give you additional amusement to lay aside the book for a moment and see if you can guess if he is up against a fake or a real haunting, before reading the denouement.” This Ellery Queenian gimmick places Wheatley into the camp of the Mystery writers.
The Cases of Neils Orson
The first of these is “The Case of the Thing That Whimpered”. Bruce meets Orsen for the first time while traveling to America on a ship. While on board the two become friends and Bruce invites Neils to stay at his father’s estate. We get a small glimpse of Bruce’s love of information when he reads a newspaper that features a kidnapped girl. The senior Hemmingway asks the detective to solve a mysterious affair in a new warehouse he has rented. Three men have been mysteriously and brutally assaulted while on night watch duty. The only clue is a supernatural whining cry. Orsen and his young friend stay a night in the warehouse, discovering a trapdoor and the source of the sound, the kidnapped girl. Orsen’s first case proves to be “some form of trickery produced for a specific purpose”.
In “The Case of the Long-Dead Lord” is a re-write. Originally a story without Orsen, Wheatley admits in his introduction, “the yarn owes much more to my wife than to myself. It was she who originally gave me the plot and put into the story all the nice touches of local colour…”(p. 64) Mrs. Wheatley based some of the story on her own creepy bicycling experiences near Castle Stuart where she “…pedalled with the fury of near-panic to escape the almost tangible and sinister influence which emanates from that ancient ruin.”
Bruce and Neils go to Scotland, where Arkon Clyde and his daughter Fiona, friends of the Hemmingways, have rented an old Scottish manor. Arkon is a distracted scholar and notices nothing unusual. It is Fiona who is haunted by something in her room. Orsen sleeps there but neither he or Past the cat sense anything. Fiona continues to fall deeper and deeper into a gloomy state, a fey existence that leads her to an open pit in the manor’s ruins. Orsen discovers the history of the castle in the nick of time. It is haunted by the paramour of a past mistress of the castle, Fiona, brutally murdered by the lord. Bruce runs to the ruins, fighting spirit forces, to pull Fiona from the brink of the pit.
“The Case of the Red-Headed Woman” is in the author’s opinion, the best of the Orsen saga and he is probably right. In this story he combined the fake with the fantastic. Based on an actual apartment in South Kensington “…that remained tenantless for several years because such a succession of suicides occurred…”, Wheatley creates an intriguing explanation for the deaths. He admits in real life that “No such explanations was ever forthcoming to my knowledge…”
Bruce brings Neils in after his firm rents an apartment to two newly-wed friends, Peter and Pauline Wembley. The apartment is the scene of three suicides and several frightened tenants. Orsen places his cameras while the newly-weds are on their honeymoon, only to find they have been called back on the night of the haunting. Bruce and Neils barge in on the couple, keeping Peter up well past his bedtime. When he is ready to evict the duo there is a scream from the bathroom. Pauline has been attacked by the haunter.
Next day, Neils explains after an examination of the bathroom and its secret staircase to the apartment above and the photographic plates of his cameras. The first victim, the red-headed French woman, Victorine Daubert, was murdered by her lover, Arnold Robertson, who lived in the apartment above. Later, after taking her apartment in remorse, Robertson killed himself. The first two deaths were not supernatural. But after his death, Robertson haunted the bathroom, especially attacking women with red hair, like the final victim, Mrs. Matheson.
A Career Cut Short
“The Case of the Haunted Chateau” is interesting in that it is the only story firmly planted in time by its historical references. The tale is set in 1940, when America is still neutral in the Second World War. Bruce and Neils go to the Front to help a friend of Orsen’s, General Hayes. A French chateau where the British have set up a radio station is haunted by something that attacks the soldiers hands and feet. One man is killed in the bathroom of the creepy place.
The two ghost hunters stay the night. Orsen draws a pentagram on the bathroom floor, to protect them from any Saati manifestations. It is while they are inside the circle that Bruce’s hand is attacked. Neils believes he has trapped the demon inside the pentagram with them. They flee, but return the next day with the soldiers. Orsen has solved the case. In the icehouse near the chateau they find a dead German spy, who Orsen has electrocuted with his own devilish equipment, electric stubs used to shock people, making them believe they have been attacked by ghosts.
“The Haunted Chateau” seems the least interesting of the four stories. The current anti-Nazi sentiments seem uneven compared with the rest of the tales. Gentle, understanding Orsen stoops to killing a man just because he is German. The use of the pentagram is interesting, for it is the only typical occult devise Orsen uses in the stories, though he does nothing with it that Hodgson hadn’t with Carnacki.
So, ends the career of Neils Orsen, after only four cases, half of which prove to be real and the other half fakes. What Wheatley would have done next he does not say. He never returns to the character after the War. Like many writers of the 30’s and 40’s, the occult detective may have seemed old fashioned, a creature of an age that had closed with the defeat of Hitler.
