Supernatural Sherlocks: Stories from the Golden Age of the Occult Detective

The ghost of a poor Afghan returns to haunt the doctor who once amputated his hand. A mysterious and malignant force inhabits a room in an ancestral home and attacks all who sleep in it. A man who desecrates an Indian temple is transformed into a ravening beast. A castle in the Tyrol is the setting for an aristocratic murderer’s apparent resurrection. In the stories in this collection, horrors from beyond the grave and other dimensions visit the everyday world and demand to be investigated. The Sherlocks of the supernatural—from William Hope Hodgson’s "Thomas Carnacki, the Ghost Finder," to Alice and Claude Askew’s "Aylmer Vance"—are those courageous souls who risk their lives and their sanity to pursue the truth about ghosts, ghouls, and things that go bump in the night. The period between 1890 and 1930 was a Golden Age for the occult detective. Famous authors like Kipling and Conan Doyle wrote stories about them, as did less familiar writers such as the occultist and magician Dion Fortune and Henry S. Whitehead, a friend of H. P. Lovecraft and fellow-contributor to the pulp magazines of the period. Nick Rennison has chosen 15 tales from that era to raise the hair and chill the spines of modern readers.