In our last post, “Three Famous Fakes” we featured Arthur Conan Doyle, Grant Allen and Agatha Christie. This one offers three more ghosts that prove to be more down-to-earth. Between 1893 and 1913, ghostbreakers flourished. As the idea of an investigator of the Occult began to wane, the great loss of World War I brought the ghost-chasers back. Arthur Conan Doyle, the master of the Gothic mystery himself, turned to Spiritualism after the Great War.
Like the previous post, this one is filled with fakes. Since the days of Flaxman Low (1898-1899), occult detectives could play both sides of the street. The spirits might prove to be real or not. You had to read the whole story to find out. There is not much of that here. These are all established Mystery writers who never indulged in the Carnackian Complex (as I call it). The ghosts or other supernatural elements will prove fake every time. I hope this doesn’t disappoint you too much. The fun is in seeing how well the Mystery writer uses these Gothic touches to distract you from the clues. As in a good Sherlock Holmes tale, no real ghost need apply.
Martin Hewitt
“The Case of the Ward Lane Tabernacle” (The Windsor Magazine, June 1896) by Arthur Morrison, collected in The Adventures of Martin Hewitt (1896). This one has only the slightest of supernatural connections. A cranky old woman, who owns a snuff box supposedly carved from wood from Noah’s Ark, is pursued by a cult of crazies. Hewitt looks into things but Mrs. Mallett is kidnapped. Her house is burgled twice. He finds her in the “Tabernacle” of the church of five believers. Having rescued her, he reveals the cultists, led by the greengrocer son of Mrs. Mallett’s old servant, don’t want her snuff box but a seal stolen from her attic trunk. Hewitt explains that references to the seal were “the holy relic” and such. Mrs. Mallet had assumed they wanted the snuff box.
Now I could have passed on this one, but I didn’t for two reasons. the first, is that I like the Martin Hewitt stories, the best of the Rivals of Sherlock (as Hugh Greene names them). That being said, they are good puzzle stories but they lack the “shilling shocker” qualities that Arthur Conan Doyle brought to Holmes and Watson and most of his stories. ACD loved a good Gothic thrill (a phantom hound or a poisonous snake!) in a way that Arthur Morrison obviously did not. Doyle would have given us more chills and thrills (as he does in A Study in Scarlet or “The Five Orange Pips”.)
The second reason, and the more important, is that this tale of a strange church with a wacky religion that includes women on the Moon, is an earlier descendant of those that would populate G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories like “The Eye of Apollo” or “The Oracle of the Dog”. Without Martin Hewitt, we might not have had these.
John Bell
“The Mystery of the Felwyn Tunnel” (Cassell’s Family Magazine, August 1897) by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, collected in A Master of Mysteries (1898). John Bell, the Ghost-Exposer, is hired to look into the death of Pritchard at a remote railroad switch station. Wynne, the rival of the man for the hand of the flirty Lucy Ray, has been arrested. The railway agent, Bainbridge, who hires Bell, thinks the man innocent. As Bell and Bainbridge arrive, they learn another man has been killed as well. Bell is joined by an inspector Henderson. The two men take up watch at the spooky tunnel. Henderson tells Bell that the locals think the place haunted. The inspector falls asleep and Bell watches on his own.
The next morning Bell notices the signal light has gone out. He goes alone to relight it but has Henderson’s promise to come if he calls out. Bell tries to light the lamp but the match goes out. He stumbles, succumbing to some terrible spirit. He wakes to find Henderson has dragged him to safety. The ghost detective believes he has the answer now. He shows Henderson where a pocket of gas has been escaping. The mystery is solved and Wynne proven innocent.
There is one interesting connections with this tale. I assume the inspiration is the classic Charles Dickens ghost story “The Signal-man”. The locations are very similar. Of course, Meade and Eustace have come up with a rational explanation. This one also suggests the Flaxman Low stories that are only a year away in which the haunted houses are proven infested by mold or some other natural element.
Captain Meldrum
Thanks to the Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia for the images.
“The Fiend of the Cooperage” (The Manchester Weekly Times, October 1, 1897) by Arthur Conan Doyle was collected in Round the Fire Stories (1908). This is a fine example of the seeming supernatural by the author of Sherlock Holmes. Four years after Holmes and Moriarty tumble down the Reichenbach Falls, Doyle proved he still had it.
The ship Gamecock arrives on an island with a problem. Their cooperage is haunted. The man who stays in the building overnight is dead in the morning , his ribs crushed. When they track the real cause down, they find:
A huge black tree trunk was coming down the river, its broad glistening back just lapped by the water. And in front of it–about three feet in front–arching upwards like the figure-head of a ship, there hung a dreadful face, swaying slowly from side to side. It was flattened, malignant, as large as a small beer-barrel, of a faded fungoid colour, but the neck which supported it was mottled with a dull yellow and black. As it flew past the Gamecock in the swirl of the waters I saw two immense coils roll up out of some great hollow in the tree, and the villainous head rose suddenly to the height of eight or ten feet, looking with dull, skin-covered eyes at the yacht. An instant later the tree had shot past us and was plunging with its horrible passenger towards the Atlantic.
The ghost proves to be a python that flees the hut.The world may be safe from ghosts but it still has snakes.
This one feels like it was inspired by the old Gothic tale “The Anaconda” (1808) by M. G. Lewis. I don’t know if Doyle actually read it, but the description of the snake in such horrific terms feels similar. Lewis’s snake is even more of a terror than Doyle’s. The entire Anaconda movie franchise is descended from stories like these.
Conclusion
The master of the fake ghost Mystery in the Golden Age was not Agatha Christie, though she did write several. It was John Dickson Carr, the American who spent much of his time in England. Carr’s detectives: Dr. Gideon Fell, Sir Henry Merrivale, Colonel Marsh and the earlier, Henri Bencolin, all encounter crimes that appear to be supernatural but aren’t. Carr didn’t just use Horror to distract but to add a real sense of fun as well. He specialized in the Locked Room Mystery, one in which the clues are so baffling, only the supernatural could explain them.
Carr would be the Golden Age writer to carry the tradition on into mainstream Mystery. In the Pulps, this job fell to two Carnackians. The first was J. U. Giesy and Junius B. Smith’s Semi-Dual who was found in the Munsey soft weeklies from 1912 to 1931. Semi-Dual had thirty-four cases in those years. Not all had a ghost behind them. Until Weird Tales appeared, the name Semi-Dual meant “occult detective”.
That all changed in October of 1925 with the first appearance of Jules de Grandin in “Horror on the Links” (a title cribbed from Agatha). De Grandin’s cases most often find ghosts and boogies behind them, but not always. A story like “The Great God Pan” (Machen this time) has a charlatan, but no ancient gods. De Grandin had ninety-three tales in “The Unique Magazine”, a record for Pulp ghostbreakers.
