Haunting horrors: ghostly detection

In honour of the Halloween season, I’ve published two short stories, a detective story and a mystery, that feature the prospect—or maybe fact…?—of supernatural intervention: Supper at the Bryn Ddu, and Researcher Wanted. Both are available now on Kindle Unlimited, or for purchase. Check them out… if you dare!

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Within the detective fiction genre, there are many sub-genres, from the cosy mystery’s familiar busybody to the child detective to the hard-boiled variety. One of these that stretches the confines of the genre itself is the occult detective. Given that we allow the detective genre to be defined in large part by the claims to rationality made by Sherlock Holmes, the occult detective can either be a sceptic rooting out the prosaic causes of apparently supernatural events, such as Holmes himself in The Hound of the Baskervilles, or a challenge to the detective’s ability to define, explain, and ultimately control.

In my countdown to The Meinir Davies Casebook publication, I included two different occult/supernatural detectives from around the turn of the century, Flaxman Low, from the 1890s, and Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, from the 1910s, but such themes have a much longer pedigree. Occult detective fiction is often traced back to the 1850s and Harry Escott, who features in only two stories and so doesn’t quite make it to a series!

Is simply investigating a ghost enough, though? The line between ghost story and occult detective fiction can be murky. Ghost stories often feature an element of finding out what the haunting entity wants and helping to dispel it, analogous to the worldly detective tracing the whys and wherefores of a criminal enterprise and, ideally, delivering justice. At what point does it cease to matter whether the forces persecuting you are ghostly or worldly? As in The Hound of the Baskervilles or Sheridan Le Fanu’s Green Tea, the problem is the problem, regardless of the cause.

Perhaps this is why the ghostly continues to intersect so regularly with both modern and historical detective fiction, such as in Faith Martin’s Murder by Candlelight, which I’ve just reviewed, wherein a man who’s recently published a book touring haunted places becomes a hear-and-now detective, and The Hotel by Louise Mumford, which I’ll be reviewing soon. This is particularly true in TV series, such as series like The Frankenstein Chronicles, The X-Files, extraordinary sidekick series like Medium and Psych, or the recent Wednesday. The supernatural elements offer both a distinguishing feature and a broader set of tools with which to solve crimes.

In The Meinir Davies Casebook, I didn’t set out to write a ghostly mystery, but did want to allude to the proliferation of these sorts of stories from the nineteenth century onwards. So the casebook includes a dopplegänger (‘The Case on Christmas Steps’), a disturbing burial (‘The Vicar’s Conundrum’), and a haunted medium overcome at a séance (‘The Case of the Ivory Skull’). But in honour of the Halloween season, I’ve published two short stories, a detective story and a mystery, that feature the prospect—or maybe fact…?—of supernatural intervention: Supper at the Bryn Ddu, and Researcher Wanted. Check them out… if you dare!