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Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes

Edited by

J.R. Campbell & Charles Prepolec

E-Book Edition

Published by

EDGE Science Fiction and

Fantasy Publishing

An Imprint of

HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.

CALGARY

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Ghosts May Apply

David Stuart Davies

Arthur Conan Doyle was an accomplished practitioner of the supernatural tale and created some classic narratives in the genre. ‘The Ring of Thoth’, for example, was very influential within the realm of mummy stories. The idea of an ancient Egyptian achieving immortality and the setting of a museum after closing time became the essential ingredients of the 1932 movie, The Mummy, starring a very desiccated Boris Karloff. Other Doylean horror gems include ‘The Brazilian Cat’, ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’, ‘The Leather Funnel’ and ‘The Nightmare Room’, to name a few — stories which are particularly chilling and memorable.

It must therefore have been a little frustrating for Doyle not to be able to involve his detective hero Sherlock Holmes in this mysterious and frightening world. What exciting scenes, puzzling scenarios and scary moments he could have created if he had allowed himself this guilty pleasure. But he had established Sherlock Holmes as a purely rational detective investigating real crimes with logical solutions. He knew that he would be weakening Holmes’ appeal and powers if he involved him with ghosts and other creatures from beyond the grave where logicality had no foothold. As Holmes memorably observed in ‘The Sussex Vampire’, ‘This Agency stands flat-footed upon the ground and there it must remain. This world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.’

Nevertheless, Doyle did tease his readers with suggestions of supernatural interventions in two of Holmes’ cases. In the aforementioned ‘The Sussex Vampire’ it was implied that a bloodsucking fiend was at work in the Ferguson household; and in The Hound of the Baskervilles, for some time the reader is unsure whether the phantom beast of the title really does exist. Even at the climax of the novel, when the hound finally makes its appearance — ‘Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame’ — we are still not absolutely certain that the thing is of flesh and blood and not a spectre from the pit. It is only when the creature howls with pain after Holmes has shot it several times that we are assured that the beast is mortal.

Despite these deceptive forays into the realms of the unknown Doyle actually stopped short of presenting the Great Detective with a real supernatural mystery. Other writers, perhaps seeing a niche gap in the market, took advantage of Doyle’s reticence and around the end of the nineteenth century there was a rack of ghost detectives materializing in print. 1898 saw the first appearance of Flaxman Low in Pearson’s Magazine. Low was a sleuth cast clearly in the Holmes mould: clever, well read, possessing strong deductive powers with the ability to discern clues where others failed to do so. The marked difference between Low and his Baker Street counterpart was that he specialized in solving problems of a supernatural nature. Low was the joint creation of Kate Prichard and her son Hesketh who published the tales under the pen name of E. and H. Heron. Hesketh was a friend and admirer of Conan Doyle and the Holmes influence on the stories is marked, especially in the two final cases where Low encounters the Moriarty-like figure of Kalmarkane. This collection brings Low and Holmes together as an intriguing