num_pages: 265
description: This agency stands flat-footed on the ground Sherlock Holmes famously remarked. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply. And despite the fact that his creator was a spiritualist Holmes was basically correct that a detective (whether genuine or fictional) bases his or her investigation on material evidence. And yet the occult detective story (as well as its cousin the psychic detective story) has been an important sub-genre of detective fiction. A claim can be made that the first occult sleuth was Dr. Martin Hesselius who recounts his investigations in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanus In a Glass Darkly (1872) but the five stories were originally independent with Hesselius added as a framing device for book publication. A stronger case can be made for K[ate] and Hesketh Prichards Ghosts Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low (1899) in which Flaxman Low investigates haunted houses. The Prichards book was followed by stories featuring other investigations into the occult. Most important were Algernon Blackwoods John Silence Physician Extraordinary (1908) and William Hope Hodgsons Carnacki The Ghost-Finder (1913).Among the finest stories that combine the occult with human crimes are F. Tennyson Jesses tales of Solange Fontaine who is able to sense the presence of evil and to act on that sense; she has an extraordinarily delicate mechanism for becoming aware of evil where blunter-natured people do not feel it till too late.
language: None
title: The Compleat Adventures of Solange Fontaine
publisher: Battered Silicon