Carnacki, The Ghost-Finder [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION With the success of the Sherlock Holmes stories, published in die Strand magazine in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the floodgates were opened to admit a wave of similar sleuths, independent fellows whose help was sought by desperate chents who were getting no satisfaction from the official police to help unravel a mystery. It will be remembered that Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was a fascinating, idiosyncratic individual with a remarkable facility for solving crimes by the techniques of observation and deduction. The many other fictional detectives who followed him on to the scene were also very clever at getting to the heart of a puzzle and rounding up the culprit in their own distinctive way and, like Holmes, they each possessed some unique characteristic which made them stand out from the crowd of other investigators. For example there was Ernest Bramah's Max Carrados, who carried out his detective work in a world of darkness because he was completely blind. And then there was M. P. Shiel's Prince Zaleski, an exiled Russian nobleman living in exotic apartments in London. Influenced by drugs, Zaleski solved cases by means of his strongly developed intuition, combined with his extraordinary powers of concentration and inductive reasoning. And then there was the occult detective or psychic sleuth. Car-nacki is one of this breed, but he cannot claim to be the first. Some would give this honour to Dr Martin Hesselius, created by the master Irish ghost-story writer Sheridan Le Fanu; but he is kept off stage for most of the action in the few stories in which he appears. In essence, Le Fanu used him as a framing device and he does not actively investigate the strange happenings. A more satisfactory candidate is Flaxman Low, created by E. & H. Heron, pseudonyms for the soldier and sportsman Hesketh Pritchard and his mother Kate. This detective's adventures in various haunted houses in the late nineteenth century were first chronicled in Pearson's Magazine in 1898-9.