Sax Rohmer (born Arthur Sarsfield Ward) will be remembered forever as the creator of Dr. Fu Manchu, and the sub-genre of the suspense field that later would give us James Bond. It is a lesser known creation of the same man who holds the dubious reputation of ghost-breaker. (Though Fu uses many arcane and bizarre methods to kill people, he is never truly “supernatural”.)
Sax Rohmer was the perfect writer to create a ghost-breaking detective. His immense knowledge of the occult supplied him with numerous devices and atmospheric touches. Rohmer published The Romance of Sorcery (1914), a detailed history of occult matters. The three Fu Manchu novels that predate The Dream-Detective gave him considerable practice at “weird suspense” story-telling.
Perhaps the most important detail about Rohmer’s life was that he had, like Blackwood before him, engaged in true ghost-breaking activities. In Master of Villainy (1972) Cay Van Ash and Elizabeth Sax Rohmer (Rohmer’s wife) give a biased account of the author’s life which is fascinating , if at times, less than critical. Chapter Seven “The Phantom Dog” tells how the Rohmers went to Peel Castle in Douglas, Isle of Mann and heard the phantom hound. Rohmer wrote a fictional account of the incident himself in 1912 in a story called “The Phantom Hound of Holm Peel”. Both he and his wife claimed to be psychic and used ouija boards and other occult paraphernelia.
His ghost-breaking hero is Moris Klaw. Klaw appeared in ten stories, collected in one volume. The Dream-Detective (1920) has had several edition. The stories in this book were written for The New Magazine seven years earlier, but collected in the first British edition in 1920. It was later released in America in 1925 with an additional story, “The Chord in G”.
Moris Klaw is descended from John Silence and Carnacki, being the elder statesman of the profession of ghost-breakers. A Scotland Yard Man tells us of Klaw: “He’s an antique dealer or something of the kind; got a ramshackle old place by Wapping Old Stairs—sort of a cross between Jamrach’s and a rag shop. He’s lately been hanging about the Central Criminal Court a lot. Seems to fancy his luck as an amateur investigator. He’s certainly smart… but cranky.” We also hear; “…no two of his acquaintances agree upon the point of Moris Klaw’s actual identity and personality. He was a master of disguise; and the grand secret of his life was one which he jealously guarded from all.” Other surprises reveal: “Did you not know that he was once a famous swordsman?”
As The Scotland Yard Man says, Klaw is an amateur investigator, working when he likes. “Where a case did not touch his peculiar interest, appeals to Moris Klaw fell upon deaf ears. However dastardly a crime, if its details were of the sordid sort, he shrank within his Wapping curio-shop… ‘Of what use …are my acute psychic sensibilities to detect who it is with a chopper that has brained some unhappy washerwoman?’” Klaw’s biographer admits “…in justice to the remarkable person whom it is my priviledge to present to you in these papers, I must add that monetary considerations seemingly found no place in Klaw’s philosophy.”
Like Holmes and John Silence before him, Moris Klaw is eccentric and striking in appearance:
Shortly afterwards entered a strange figure. It was that of a tall man, who stooped; so that his apparent height was diminished. A very old man who carried his many years lightly, or a younger man prematurely aged. None could say which. His skin had the hue of dirty vellum, and his hair, his shaggy brows, his scanty beard were so toneless as to defy classification in terms of colour. He wore an archaic brown bowler, smart, gold-rimmed pince-nez and a black silk muffler. A long, caped black cloak completely enveloped the stooping figure; from beneath its mud-spattered edge peeped long-toed continental boots.
To add to his eccentric appearance, strange habits, like this Roman custom: He “…took out the scent-spray without which he never travels. He played the contents upon his high, yellow forehead—filling the air with the refreshing odour of verbena.”
Moris Klaw’s establishment is located in a seedy part of London, places which Sax Rohmer had a good working knowledge:
One turns down a narrow court, with a blank wall on the right and a nailed-up doorway and boarded-up window on the left. Through the cracks of the latter boarding, the inquiring visitor may catch a glimpse, beyond a cavernous place which once was some kind of warehouse, of Old Thames tiding muddily.
The court is a cul de sac. The shop of Moris Klaw occupies the blind end. Some broken marble pedestals stand upon the footway, among seatless chairs, dilapidated chests and a litter of books, stuffed birds, cameos, ink-stands, swords, lamps and other unclassifiable rubbish. A black doorway yawns amid the litter…All about moved rustling suggestions of animal activity. The indescribable odour of old furniture assailed our nostrils together with an equally indescribable smell of avian, reptilian, and rodent life.
To top off this gloomy locale, Moris Klaw keeps a parrot who cries when customers enter, “Moris Klaw! Moris Klaw! The devil’s come for you!”
Behind this store front are two other rooms. Behind a book-lined office is a large area used as a study, library, laboratory and warehouse. It is here that cooking and sleeping take place for the inhabitants. The other room sits behind an inner door: “…a dainty white room, an amazing apartment indeed, a true Parisian boudoir. The air was heavy with the scent of roses for bowls of white and pink roses were everywhere…” This room belongs to Klaw’s daughter and number one aid, Isis.
Klaw’s primary assistant whose “…accent was certainly French…her voice, her entire person, as certainly charming…”, she is beautiful, she is also stylish: “From her small hat, with its flamingo-like plume, to her dainty shoes, she was redolent of the Rue de la Paix. She wore an amazingly daring toilette; I can only term it a study in flame-tones. A less beautiful woman could never have essayed such a scheme; but this superb brunette, with her great flashing eyes and taunting smile had the lithe carriage of a Cleopatra, the indescribable diablerie of a ghaziyeh.”
His other helper is William, a “ramshackle man with a rosy nose” who watches the shop whenever Klaw takes up a case. William is over-fond of ale. In “The Headless Mummies” the villain drugs the watchful William with opium in his brew.
Another confidente is the narrator and editor of the stories, Klaw’s Watson, Searles (Rohmer’s foil). This young Englishman is largely invisible, though it is through his eyes that we see each case being set up. Like Watson, he admits he always goes armed whenever he is on a case with Klaw. Often the police, or Coram the museum curator, come to Searles as contact to Moris Klaw. In J. Sheridan Le Fanu-style, he also introduces those stories that have been grafted into the series, with editor’s notes.
The other regular in the cast is Inspector Grimsby of Scotland Yard, who pulls in Searles and then Klaw when a case stumps him. Like Holmes’ Lestrade he is not above taking credit from the eccentric detective.
Grimsby is a man who will go far. He is the youngest detective-inspector in the service, and he has that priceless gift—the art of using other people for the furtherance of his own ends. I do not intend this criticism unkindly. Grimsby does nothing dishonorable and sekks to rob no man of the credit that may be due. There is nothing underhand about Grimsby, but he is exceedingly diplomatic. He imparts official secrets to me with an ingenuousness entirely disarming—but always for reasons of his own.
Klaw possesses many weird devices and theories that traditional detectives do not. “…the man whose proceedings savoured so much of charlatanry, but whom I knew for one of the foremost criminologist of the world…” Klaw explains: “One who dies the violent death has, at the end, a strong mental emotion—an etheric storm. The air—the atmosphere—retains imprints of that storm.” To capture this atmosphere, Klaw uses the psychic photograph. “If I spend a night here—upon the very spot of floor where poor Conway fell—I could from the surrounding atmosphere (it is a sensitive plate) recover a picture of the thing in his mind…at the last!” To do this Klaw must rest on an “odically sterilised” cushion of red velvet, stimulated by coffee. “It enhances the inner perception, when green tea is not obtainable.” Aiding him in this, Klaw possesses the weird ability to sleep instantly.
Another is the “The Cycle of Crime” in which the crime’s atmosphere will cause events to repeat themselves, even on the same date, centuries later. “…The Cycle of Crime is as inevitable and immutable as the cycle of the ages. Man’s will has no power to check it.” Klaw admits to being the author of one book on occult subjects, Psychic Angles. In this book he puts forth the idea that ghosts, like crimes and thoughts, always haunt places in the same way, generation after generation. “It dealt with the subject of ghosts from quite a new standpoint, and incidentally revealed its anonymous author as one conversant apparently with the history of every haunted house in Europe.” In his unpublished archives are innumerable records of the histories of objects and places. “It contained obscure works on criminology; it contained catalogues of every relic known to European collectors with elaborate histories of the same. What else it contained I am unable to say, for the dazzling Isis Klaw was a jealous librarian.”
THE CASES OF MORIS KLAW
“The Tragedies in the Greek Room” (All-Story/Cavalier Weekly, February 13, 1915) is a clever locked room mystery with enough supernatural gilding to distract the reader from the true answer. Two night watchmen are attacked when an ethereal woman appears and opens the glass case holding the Athenian Harp. Klaw, using his psychic photographs, discovers that Coram, the museum curator’s daughter, Hilda, who has been studying over-hard for her music exams, has been sleep-walking into the museum, above which she and her father live. The death result when the watchmen return the harp to its case. The instrument is not Athenian, but a device of the Borgia, with poison needle and all.
“The Potsherd of Anubis” (All-Story/Cavalier Weekly, February 27, 1915) is a story that has obviously been grafted into the series. The plot concerns an archaeologist, Halesowen, who has stolen a pot shard from a competitor. The man and his friends fall under the spell of a Dr. Zeda who possesses the rest of the Pot of Anubis. Zeda holds a series of seances which end with a beautiful Egyptian spirit appearing. The lights go out and shard and mystery man have disappeared. Later in an epilogue it is revealed that Dr. Zeda was Moris Klaw and the apparition his beautiful daughter, Isis. Klaw justifies his deception by reminding Halesowen that he had stolen the fragment in the first place, from a friend of Klaw’s.
“The Crusader’s Ax” tells of a Jew (stereotypically portrayed by Rohmer) named Heidelberger who is murdered by a gigantic battle ax. Klaw travels to the castle where he died to clear an ex-employee of the charge. Klaw barely exerts any effort to explain that the man was killed by accident, knocking the ax free during a shuffle with the heir of the castle returned. The racism in this story is typical of Rohmer and the age in which it was written. Twenty years later, Dennis Wheatley, with his Niels Orson stories, would still be using similar language.
“The Ivory Statue” (All-Story/Cavalier Weekly, March 13, 1915) concerns an artist who guards his latest creation, a human-sized statue draped in an Egyptian girdle. The sculptor Paxton leaves his studio for thirty seconds to find the statue has been stolen off its throne. Using the odic photograph, Klaw leads his companions to the Frenchman and the artist’s model who stole the statue, by replacing it with the model herself, who walked out while Paxton was distracted.
“The Blue Rajah” (All-Story/Cavalier Weekly, March 27, 1915) is another locked-room mystery. A giant diamond is stolen in a room filled with men. The only strange event in a voice that cries out from the window. Using the odic photograph, Klaw sees into the thief’s mind at the time of the robbery. Two clues come from the exercise: a beautiful woman and a parrot in a cage needing peanuts. Klaw sets up one of the men Gautami Chinje, the representative of the Gaekwar of Nizam, in whose apartment they find the girl and the parrot. Chinje kills himself before he can be arrested. Klaw explains that the diamond was thrown through a small hole to the woman in the hall. The thief had used the parrot for practice, throwing it peanuts until he could toss twelve nuts through the bars of the cage without missing.
The five stories that comprise the first half of the book are largely locked-room mysteries, of the type that would be popularized by John Dickson Carr’s Gideon Fell, a decade later. The four remaining stories are more supernatural in tone though still within the boundaries of the explainable. For actual supernatural fare, Searles, the narrator, advises us to read Klaw’s own book, Psychic Angles.
“The Whispering Poplars” features an American policeman, Haufman, injured in a gun battle with a powerful gang of Mexicans. The Haufman family rents a house in London called The Grove. Klaw knows the place as The Park, a house with an evil reputation. The pyschic detective is called in when the Haufmans begin to hear voices in the night. Klaw sets a trap and kills the Mexican bandit, Corpus Chris, come to England to kidnap Haufman’s daughter. Miss Isis Klaw does not appear in this tale, away to her clothiers in Paris.
“The Headless Mummies” is about a madman who cuts the heads off of mummies. Klaw tracks him from the house of the collector Mark Pettigrew to his own collection and finally to Coram and the Menzies Museum from “The Tragedies in the Greek Room”. Klaw sets a trap which snares the first victim, Pettigrew. As Moris knows from reading in the arcane volume The Book of the Lamps, Pettigrew is not insane but seeks the secret of a power above kings, contained within the mummy of the last priest of Pankaur. The collector is too late. Klaw has already found the manuscript, and will not tell of the secrets it holds.
“The Haunting of Grange” is another haunted house story. This time Sir James Leyland has recently inherited a baroncy and home of his late Uncle. Unfortunately the Grange is haunted by a new ghost, not the phantom knight seen by generations, but a new shrieking fiend. Klaw attempts to make an odic photograph but is woken when Isis screams for his safety. Moris declares the house too dangerous and the Leyland entourage moves everyone to Friars House, a nearby Friary. Klaw and Searles find a secret Jacobite room behind the Grange’s chimney but the detective does not spring his trap for the haunter yet. Only after a second odic photograph, made while everyone is locked up at Friars House, does Klaw reveal that Clement Leyland, the baronet’s cousin, has set a death trap for the heir, in a secret doorway leading down into darkness. Clement runs when Klaw mentions the seventh step. Searles asks after what the significance of it is. “But there is no seventh step—only the mouth of a well!” This story is perhaps the best example of a “Scooby Doo” mystery as popularized repeatedly by that cartoon forty years later.
“The Veil of Isis” is an anomoly in this collection. There is no mystery, only a weird exercise in Klaw’s pet theories. This story also comes closest to being an actual horror story. Klaw, Searles and a Dr. Ralph Fairbank are invited to join the Egyptologist Otter Brearley and his sister, Ailsa in performing a lost, ancient ceremony to contact the goddess, Isis. Brearley has built a duplicate ceremonial chamber and must perform the rite on that particular evening. The ceremony creates a “thought-thing”, a manifestation of the group mind, that invades the mind of Ailsa, s’ who becomes Isis. To look at the goddess is death, and the young doctor, who is in love with the sister, looks upon her. He does not die though, for his love for Ailsa is stronger. It does leave him with a mark on his forehead, the sign of Isis. Dr. Klaw’s daughter of the same name does not appear in this story.
“The Chord in G”, (found only in the US edition of 1925), features Grimsby bringing Klaw in on the murder of Pyke Webley, an artist who had been strangled most ruthlessly. Klaw sleeps for two hours at the scene of the crime but does not offer Scotland Yard any advice. Later at a house party, Klaw meets the popular musician, Skobolov, a Russian. The man writes strangely wonderful music but does not publish any of it. Only he will perform it. Klaw invites Skobolov to play his “Prelude” again at his place. Since the pianist has taken a shine to Klaw’s daughter, Isis, he agrees. It is there that Grimsby tries to arrest him. The Russian attacks him, using his huge hands to strangle him. Klaw performs some kind of jujitsu on the pianist, saving the policeman’s life. Skobolov dashes through a window and falls to his death. Klaw reveals he knew Skobolov was the killer because when he slept at the murder scene he had heard the Chord for G Minor, a spot on the piano most people can’t reach. Only a man with huge hands like Skobolov can, explaining why he never published his music, being too hard for most people to play.
Moris Klaw ends his career much as he started, in his old shop in Wapping Old Stairs, with his beautiful daughter and his drunken helper. The reader who expects real monsters will leave feeling disappointed, while those who love a fair-play mystery will also be non-plussed, for Rohmer’s stories are a weird blend of the two, neither real horror story nor a straight detective story with all the clues. This last category is the closer of the two, but since Klaw’s methods involve the magic rabbit of the “odic photograph” and other cheats, the mystery critic will unlikely to over look this. Searles sums up Klaw’s tales thus: “Since Moris Klaw’s methods were, if not supernatural, at any rate supernormal, I have been asked if he ever, to my knowledge, inquired into a case…which fell strictly within the province of the occult…Those who are curious upon the point cannot do better than consult the remarkable work by Moris Klaw entitled Psychic Angles.” Alas, the reader can not do this. What tales this book would tell!
