Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story

The Haunted Text

M. Cook

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137294883
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137294890
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story is a lively series of case studies celebrating the close relationship between detective fiction and the ghost story. It features many of the most famous authors from both genres including Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, M. R. James and Tony Hillerman.

1

Detecting the Ghost

We must never assume that which is incapable of proof. (G. H. Lewes (1817–78), The Physiology of Common Life (1859))

The scene that greets Watson on his return to Baker Street at the start of ‘The Naval Treaty’ (1893) captures the essence of the emerging detective story in the fin de siècle:

Holmes was seated at his side-table clad in his dressing-gown and working hard over a chemical investigation. A large curved retort was boiling furiously in the bluish flame of a Bunsen burner, and the distilled drops were condensing into a two-litre measure ... He dipped into this bottle or that, drawing out a few drops of each with his glass pipette, and finally brought a test-tube containing a solution over to the table. In his right hand he had a slip of litmus-paper.

‘You come at a crisis, Watson,’ said he. ‘If this paper remains blue, all is well. If it turns red, it means a man’s life.’ He dipped it into the test-tube, and it flushed at once into a dull dirty crimson. ‘Hum! I thought as much!’ he cried.¹

Not only did the Sherlock Holmes stories spark a phenomenal rise in the popularity of detective fiction, but they caught the zeitgeist by exhibiting distinct modernist tendencies. The fact that Holmes turns part of his consulting rooms into a laboratory and solves crimes through the medium of science would be perfectly understandable to the majority of Conan Doyle’s readership. After all, science was truth; more and more, it was becoming associated with solutions to the intractable problems of the world, it enabled that which was hidden to be seen, and that which was unknown to be recognized. This was the age of steam, of the discoveries of Marie Curie, of Edison and Bell; it is not surprising, therefore, that a genre which mirrored the actions of science became the popular literature of the time and Holmes, as Samuel Hynes has said, ‘was the apotheosis of late-Victorian materialism: a brilliant, confident, scientific know-it-all, continuously sought after by persons with problems [ ... ] and always able to provide them with rational solutions.’²

Such was the challenge laid down to other popular genres, not least the ghost story, to respond in an age when more and more the veil was being lifted on age-old mysteries. The response was a new kind of story featuring the psychic detective, which built on the ties that already existed between the two genres, as Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert have observed:

[ ... ] It was not uncommon for elements of the mystery story and tale of detection – the sowing of clues, criminous motivation, final explication – to be combined with a supernatural denouement – as in Wilkie Collins’s ‘Mrs. Zant and the Ghost’ (1885) or M. R. James’s ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ (1904), in which the unravelling of clues in true Holmesian style leads the curious Mr. Somerton to the hidden treasure and its terrifying guardian. Such fusion produced another sub-genre, the story of psychic detection, with sleuths such as E. and H. Heron’s Flaxman Low, Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, and W. Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki pitting their wits against a variety of supernatural opponents. The close relationship between the ghost story and tales of mystery and detection is emphasized by the satisfying fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective of them all, also wrote supernatural stories [ ... ]³

The immediate precursor of this psychic detection was Sheridan Le Fanu’s, Dr. Martin Hesselius, a physician with an interest in the occult. He appears in a collection of five short stories under the title In a Glass Darkly, first published in 1872, the year before Le Fanu’s death. The stories are presented as selections from the posthumous papers of the occult detective Dr. Martin Hesselius, who only appears in the first story, ‘Green Tea’. The second, ‘The Watcher’, and third, ‘Mr. Justice Harbottle’, are revised versions of previously published stories; of the last two, ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’, is not a ghost story, but an adventure mystery, and the fifth, the celebrated vampire story, ‘Carmilla’, are long enough to be called novellas. In truth this collection is an artifice; Le Fanu created Hesselius as a framing device to make the collection appear homogenous, so each story has an introduction purporting to be by him, tacked on to the original text.

Although In a Glass Darkly does not contain that element of detection which marks out later texts, it does introduce into the prologue of the supernatural tale an objective element of scientific inquiry:

In a rough way, we may reduce all similar cases to three distinct classes. They are founded on the primary distinction between the subjective and the objective. Of those whose senses are alleged to be subject to supernatural impressions – some are simply visionaries, and propagate the illusions of which they complain, from diseased brain or nerves. Others are unquestionably, infested by, as we term them, spiritual agencies, exterior to themselves. Others, again, owe their sufferings to a mixed condition. The interior sense, it is true, is opened; but it has been and continues open by the action of disease.⁴

The ‘inner sense’ referred to by Le Fanu is the inner eye; the theory being that for most of the time human beings perceive the world through the outer eye, so that the predominant experience is the external environment which surrounds us. If, however, the inner eye is opened, this allows visions of a spiritual world denied by conventional consciousness so that all manner of apparitions are experienced. These ideas originate from Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–772), a Swedish scientist, philosopher and theologian and, supposedly, a Christian mystic, whose ideas were a significant influence on Le Fanu’s writing. Although Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist, he also experienced dreams and visions. This culminated in a ‘spiritual awakening’, in which he received the revelation that he was appointed by the Lord to write Arcana Cœlestia (The Heavenly Doctrine, 1749) to reform Christianity. According to the Arcana Cœlestia, the Lord had opened Swedenborg’s spiritual eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell and talk with angels, demons and other spirits. In ‘Green Tea’, Hesselius believes that the catalyst for the unleashing of the monkey which terrorizes Jennings is the green tea he takes regularly unsealing his ‘inner eye’ and opening the way to the haunting. Swedenborg’s book is even cited on the power of demons:

When man’s interior sight is opened, which is that of his spirit, then there appear the things of another life, which cannot possibly be made visible to the bodily sight.

By the internal sight it has been granted me to see things that are in the other life, more clearly than I see those that are in the world. From these considerations, it is evident that external vision exists from internal vision, and this from a vision still more interior, and so on.⁵

Despite these tales lacking the essence of detection, they are an important step on the road to the work of the Herons, Blackwood and Hodgson. They establish that the source of these psychic disturbances in ghost stories lies in the functioning of the mind and, crucially, that this is a measurable phenomenon which science is capable of monitoring.

If the Hesselius tales were essentially ghost fiction with a dash of pseudo-scientific thought, then the arrival of the Flaxman Low stories saw a genuine fusion between the detective story and supernatural fiction. They were the product of Hesketh V. Prichard and his mother, Kate, under the pseudonyms E. and H. Heron, and first published in Pearson’s Magazine between 1898 and 1899. Later in 1899, a book version of the collected tales emerged. Flaxman Low is an example of the Corinthian male figure featured strongly in fin de siècle popular fiction; as Anthea Trodd has observed, ‘this was a period when the voice of the masculine ruling class was particularly dominant in the culture’.⁶ In this respect, he mirrors the image of Holmes as both a man of action and one capable of profound rational thought. When Low is introduced in the first story, ‘The Story of the Spaniards, Hammersmith’, it is as a psychic researcher and detective, but we are left in no doubt as to his all-round calibre, too; a man who is ‘scholarly’ and ‘athletic’ and who had distinguished himself in both fields at Oxford.⁷ The introduction to the stories has already prepared us for the character of Low; he is the ‘first student’ in the study of psychology to tackle ‘the elucidation of so-called supernatural problems on the lines of natural law.’⁸ Low’s advice to his friend at the beginning of the case might be the prescription for a detective story, ‘ ... Suppose we deal with this affair as it stands, on similar lines, I mean on prosaic, rational lines, as we should deal with a purely human mystery.’⁹ A plea which is echoed by Holmes’s own reproof to Watson in ‘The Abbey Grange’ (1904):

Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations. You slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy in order to dwell upon sensational details which may excite but cannot possibly instruct the reader.¹⁰

When Low arrives, he has pointedly come from a case in Vienna, a reminder that this was the era when the ‘psychic’ sciences were emerging. Freud himself struggled for much of his life to gain recognition for psychoanalysis, and Low moves to justify the fledgling study of psychic research by endowing it with a respectable provenance and a venerable heritage; ‘psychology is unfortunately a science with a future but without a past, or more probably it is a lost science of the ancients.’¹¹

Low is called in by his friend Houston to investigate a haunting at a house called The Spaniards, which the latter has inherited. The house was built by a former inhabitant of the West Indies called Van Nuysen, who had later married Houston’s great Aunt. Although the two had been estranged Houston’s aunt had returned to live with Van Nuysen as his health declined, but she was mysteriously found dead in bed one morning. Shortly afterwards, Van Nuysen himself disappeared. Since then, successive tenants have reported a bladder-like apparition haunting the house, particularly in the room where Houston’s aunt slept. Low proceeds to solve the case, using the methods he has laid out. He occupies the haunted room and is nearly smothered by the hideous ghost but escapes with valuable empirical evidence as to its likely cause. Low reasons that Van Nuysen contracted leprosy in the West Indies murdered Houston’s aunt and lived as a recluse until he died of the disease. The bladder was one of his feet contorted by the disease, swathed in linen. Low suggests that the reason the ghost walks is that the body is still on the premises – the house is demolished, and the skeleton of a leper is found.

The fin de siècle was also a time when interest in the occult and the supernatural was increasing fuelled by the exotic stories and practices from all parts of the empire. Not all of this attention was positive, however, and fear of foreigners was rife. The idea of the retributive ghost as a metaphor for empire and the threat from overseas is one to which we shall return. So, ‘The Story of The Spaniards’ addresses both these concerns by virtue of the fact that the Van Nuysen’s leprosy, the cause of all his subsequent woes, originates from the West Indies. The form of the detective story narrative with its formulaic structure of crime – investigation – solution seemed the ideal place in which to submit the irrational to the rational rigours of a genre where explanation was the very key. This produces a text where problems are resolved by the apparent logic of ‘psychological’ rationale. One of the recurring features of the psychic detective’s craft as represented by the Herons, Blackwood and Hodgson was an attempt to explain the mysteries of the supernatural world by association with an analytical approach. Despite being called ‘ghost stories’, the Low stories invariably involve a crime, usually murder, which requires a solution; so the mechanism of the detective story remains intact until the dénouement. But what do we make of Low’s aping of the detective art? Sarah Crofton has suggested that Low’s deductions have a fatal flaw:

There is a deliberate anticlimactic irony to this resolution. By excavating the body to prove his leper hypothesis, Low ends the haunting. Yet the skeleton, for all its scientific ticket, can prove nothing of the crimes that took place in the house. Neither Low’s near death at the hands of a ghost, nor the murder of Mrs. Van Nuysen, which Low believes is the root of the mystery, can be reconstructed from Van Nuysen’s skeleton alone.¹²

Placing the ghost story within the detective narrative will lead inevitably to a hiatus in the chain of inference, because the possibility that supernatural fiction could construct such a flawless chain of logic is negligible. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes memorably states:

From a drop of water [ ... ] a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link if it [ ... ] By a man’s finger nails, by his coat sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuffs – by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.¹³

Holmes here articulates one of the cornerstones of the classic detective narrative: the backward progression of logic from effect to cause. What the detective universe asserts is that all problems can be explained by the solution of a chain of clues which lead back to the original crime; this relies on the tangible presence of such a trail, which can always be read.

As Dupin says in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, when attempting to read the clues left by the intruder, ‘I proceeded to think thus – a posteriori.’¹⁴ In the Flaxman Low stories, however, the same construction produces a very different modus operandi; as Crofton suggests, the process involves a leap which is unaided by the chain of clues as they stand. To infer a homicidal spectre from a diseased skeleton without any confirmatory evidence clearly indicates the play of licence. Not that such hypotheses are absent in detective fiction, but they are invariably charged with the burden of proof. An example of this staple of the genre occurs at the end of ‘The Murders in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Detecting the Ghost
• 2 Decoding the Past: Narrative and Inquiry in ‘The Musgrave Ritual’ and ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’
• 3 Out of the Past: Retribution and Conan Doyle’s Double Narratives
• 4 ‘That Forbidding Moor’: The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Ghost Story?
• 5 Agatha Christie’s Harlequinade: The ‘Bi-Part’ Soul of the Detective
• 6 Golden Age Gothic: John Dickson Carr’s Locked Room
• 7 Rebus’s Edinburgh Palimpsest: The Spirits of the Place
• 8 Susan Hill’s Lost Hearts: The Woman in Black and the Serrailler Novels
• 9 Tony Hillerman’s Cultural Metaphysics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography and Suggested Reading
• Index