Occult Detective | CW Hawes

Weird Fiction and the Occult Detective

The occult detective can be found in all the various categories of horror. Although, I think he is most prominent in ghost stories, creature features, and weird fiction.

We know what ghost stories are, and creature features are pretty much self-explanatory. The story features a monster that must be disposed of.

But what exactly is weird fiction? Recently, I received a story bundle email in which Robert Jeschonek provided an excellent description of weird fiction. He wrote:

Something doesn’t feel quite right. The world around you seems a little…off. Things turn strange and fluid, as if you’re trapped inside a dream…but you aren’t. Something about you might have changed in a fundamental way that you sense but can’t understand.

This is what weird fiction at its best feels like. It’s more about unsettling dread than outright terror. It’s more about the mysterious influence than the in-your-face threat. It’s more about questioning the nature of reality than wondering what’s about to jump out of the shadows at you.

Two occult detectives come to mind who primarily investigate the weird: Flaxman Low and Aylmer Vance.

Flaxman Low was the pseudonym for one of the leading psychologists of the Victorian era, so the story goes, and became the chief occult psychologist of his day. Writing as H. Heron and E. Heron, Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard and his mother, Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard, chronicled a dozen of Flaxman Low’s occult investigations.

The stories are filled with unsettling dread. Things are a little off. Nothing is as it should be. There’s no out and out terror. There’s no gruesome gore splattering your face. You just feel uncomfortable as you follow Low. And when he uncovers the cause of our discomfort, we feel immense relief.

I very much enjoy the Flaxman Low stories. And even though they date from 1898 and 1899, they read well and will definitely make you feel uncomfortable.

The first 6 stories you can get for free from Project Gutenberg Australia. If you want all 12, you can pick them up from Amazon for $1.39, as of this writing. IMO, they are definitely worth reading. And the price is right.

Aylmer Vance was the creation of Alice and Claude Askew. He appeared in 8 spooky occult investigations back in 1914. The tales ooze that feeling of uneasiness, and subtle dread that give a story the spooky creepiness we readers of weird fiction so desire.

I very much like the Aylmer Vance stories, and regret that the Askews only wrote 8 of them. They ended up dying in the war to end all wars, as did so many writers.

The stories are not thrillers. No monsters jump out at you. Their pacing is gentle: the epitome of slowburn storytelling. They are, however, told so well you may find yourself binge reading them.

You can get all the stories in the Black Heath edition on Amazon for only 99¢. Truly a deal.

Weird fiction and the occult detective. A very spooky and unsettling combination indeed.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

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Tales of Terror – Part 3

Halloween is fast approaching and in this final post celebrating Halloween 2021, I offer a few more of my terror-inducing favorites. These are stories by contemporary writers, my peers, so to speak. And these guys set the bar quite high.

Bleak Mathematics

I love the cosmic horror of Brian Fatah Steele. It is some of the most imaginative stuff I’ve read — by any writer.

Steele’s short story collection, Your Arms Around Entropy: And Other Stories, is one of the best collections of the macabre you will ever come across. And the story “Bleak Mathematics” is not only my favorite from the collection, but one of the most memorable stories I’ve read.

Steele is quite easily the inheritor of Lovecraft’s mantle. Pick up a copy of Your Arms Around Entropy and you will never be the same.

A Crow’s Game

There’s weird, and then there’s Andy Graham’s weird. And Andy’s weird is truly terrifying.

A Crow’s Game is part of The Risen World Series and I could have easily picked any of the 4 books, or the entire series for that matter, to spotlight.

A Crow’s Game is somewhat unusual because it has a weird, nonsensically nightmarish quality about it. Dreampunk terror perhaps.

Andy Graham’s stories are crazy scary. They reveal a world that we really don’t want to know exists. A world that for all of our modern finesse we know does exist, lingering in the deepest recesses of our id.

Get A Crow’s Game on Amazon, and be forewarned: it will scare the bejeezus out of you.

Congeal

John F Leonard is a fairly new to me writer, and I’m very glad to have met him. The stories I’ve read thus far put him amongst the top writers of the tale of terror.

Congeal is a story of post-apocalyptic cosmic horror which, should you read at night, you’ll want to make sure all the lights are on.

I look forward to reading more of Leonard’s work, and I hope you join me on the road into terror.

Pick up a copy of Congeal from Amazon.

Tony Price: Confidential

Richard Schwindt’s work is no stranger to this blog. And his occult detective, Tony Price, is perfect for Halloween. Tony is a colorful character with whom you will quickly fall in love.

The three adventures in Tony Price: Confidential are spooky scary creature-features, filled with dark humor, and, well, scary monsters.

I can’t say enough good things about Richard’s writing, so pick up a copy of Tony Price: Confidential on Amazon and give yourself a scare.

01134 and Exit

Crispian Thurlborn is also no stranger to this blog. I admire the craftsmanship of his work, and when he uncorks the terror it’s the kind that sneaks up on you and grabs you after you’ve read the last page.

01134 and Exit are two super spooky tales of terror. Subtle, understated, they will clobber you in the middle of the night, long after you’ve finished reading. Perfect for Halloween, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Both stories are available on Amazon: 01134 and Exit.

There you have them. Wonderful tales of terror to spook out your Halloween. Enjoy!

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

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Tony Price: Confidential

Richard Schwindt’s monster hunting social worker, Tony Price, is one of the most recent additions to the ranks of the occult detective.

He features in 4 novellas:

Scarborough: Confidential

Sioux Lookout: Confidential

Kingston: Confidential

Ottawa: Confidential

The first 3 were collected in Tony Price: Confidential. The fourth novella is a prequel that takes place in Tony’s college days, where he discovers his gift for detecting evil.

Readers of this blog know I’m a big fan of Schwindt’s fiction, and his satires. His writing has gravitas, yet can be tongue in cheek. It is serious, yet laced with humor. It is often weird and spooky and over the top, yet he never loses you. You willingly continue to suspend disbelief, because you just have to see what happens next.

And the Tony Price stories are no different. Monster hunting was never so scary — or so fun.

We read non-fiction to be informed, to learn something. We read fiction primarily to be entertained. To lose ourselves in something not of our humdrum lives. Fiction is escapist entertainment. A good book takes us out of our everyday routine and plunks us down in another world.

Sure, we know we are reading a story, something somebody made up. It is the storyteller’s job to make us think otherwise. To help us make believe the story is true.

Richard Schwindt excels at the art of make believe. The Scarborough, the Sioux Lookout, the Kingston, the Ottawa of Mr Schwindt, while real places, are not the places of this reality. They are make believe.

Yet when he weaves his magic, we willing believe that his made up world is the real world. That is the artistry of a master storyteller at work.

Do you want to fight monsters? Do you want to beat supernatural bullies and make the playground of our world safe again?

Then join forces with Tony Price — monster buster extraordinaire.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

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The Ghostbusting Duo

There’s nothing better than reading a mystery that has a ghost or a monster in it. And that’s essentially what the occult detective genre is. A fusion of the traditional detective whodunit and the horror story.

Now, I will admit my description is a bit of an oversimplification. But for now, let’s run with it.

The prince, if not the king, of the ghostbusters is undoubtedly Jules de Grandin. Only Thomas Carnacki is perhaps more well-known.

Carnacki was the creation William Hope Hodgson. And Carnacki pastiches are almost as numerous as those of Sherlock Holmes. I’ll talk about Carnacki in another post.

Jules de Grandin and his “Watson”, Dr Trowbridge, were the creation of Seabury Quinn. They appeared in 92 stories and 1 novel, in the pages of Weird Tales magazine. From 1925 to 1951, the exploits of this dynamic duo thrilled readers of the Unique Magazine like no other.

GW Thomas, on his now defunct website, archived here, summarized de Grandin in this way:

Jules de Grandin is the master of the outrageous detective genre. Everything about him is over-the-top from his Hercule Poirot moustache to his outbursts of stilted French. De Grandin and his Watson-like companion, Dr. Trowbridge, live in Harrisonville, NJ, a town haunted by monsters, mad scientists and all manner of weird phenomena. As with Carnacki, not all of de Grandin’s adversaries were supernatural. The de Grandin stories appeared only in Weird Tales, where they were the most popular of all characters, beating even Conan the Cimmerian and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.

From what I’ve read, Mr Thomas was spot on. Of all the writers who contributed to Weird Tales, Seabury Quinn was the most popular and, as a result, was paid at a higher rate.

Of all the characters to appear in WT, de Grandin was the most popular. And it was the promise of a serialized Jules de Grandin novel that held off the debt holders from shutting the magazine down in 1931.

Seabury Quinn and Jules de Grandin dominated Weird Tales. Quinn’s only real challenger was Allison V Harding in the 1940s.

Yet, Quinn was unfairly maligned and minimized by the Lovecraft Circle (because HPL didn’t like Quinn’s style and perhaps the fact that he wrote for money) and it has only been within the last dozen or so years that Quinn has come under reassessment. And I’m glad he has, because he was a good writer and should not be forgotten.

What I find interesting is that for all of de Grandin’s popularity, he was the product of having to meet a deadline. Quinn, himself, wrote:

One evening in 1925 I was at that state that every writer knows and dreads; a story was due my publisher, and there didn’t seem to be a plot in the world. Accordingly, with nothing particular in mind, I picked up my pen and — literally making it up as I went along — wrote the first story which appears in this book.

I don’t know what collection of stories GW Thomas got that quote from, but I find it simply delightful. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

I own the 5 volume Nightshade Books edition of The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin. You can, of course, find them on Amazon.

I’ve read over a dozen of the stories and I like them. The fun quotient is high and each story will give you an enchanting hour’s worth of entertainment. What more can you ask from a story?

Should you begin reading the de Grandin tales, and I encourage you to do so, keep in mind they were written for a monthly or bimonthly magazine. The storylines are somewhat formulaic. Certainly written to an established pattern. But then, so were the tales of Sherlock Holmes’ exploits.

I would recommend not reading more than a couple stories at one sitting in order to keep their charm and appeal fresh. Plus, doing so, will give you many, many days and weeks of reading pleasure. And who doesn’t want that?

Seabury Quinn was a superb storyteller. He had over 500 publishing credits during his lifetime, and was himself a magazine editor.

Approaching Quinn as a reader, I can say that he delivers the goods. He succeeds in transporting me to another time and place, and provides the entertainment value I’m looking for.

Approaching Quinn as a writer, I sit at the feet of a master and learn the craft of how to tell a story so that it will move the reader.

Last Christmas, I read Quinn’s Roads (his classic Christmas tale) to my sister and nephew. So captivating was Quinn’s prose that my nephew, at one point, uttered an interjection of awe. If only all of us writers could have that happen!

The occult detective genre is rich with exciting and spooky and chilling stories. The exploits of Jules de Grandin and Dr Trowbridge deliver on all counts.

Comments are always welcome. And until next time, happy reading!

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Investigators of the Paranormal

Fear is one of our oldest emotions — if not the oldest. And fear of the unknown is one of our greatest fears.

I don’t know what I don’t know, and that lack of knowing scares us. It is primal, that fear of the unknown.

Fear, playing on our fears, is the stock in trade of the writer of the macabre. Those spinners of stories that parade our fears before us and scare us to death — and we love it.

For all of our façade of sophistication, biologically speaking we are no different than our ancestors from 300,000 years ago. We may no longer be afraid of thunder and lightning, and we may have outgrown our fear of what’s under our beds — we are, however, still controlled by our fears.

Just look at the nightly news. Listen to David Muir’s tone of voice. He’s playing into our fears. And how often do we say, “I’m afraid…” — no matter the context?

Is it any wonder that the tale of terror, the horror story, has never lost its appeal with readers?

Today, interest in the paranormal — our modern term for what used to be called the supernatural and the occult — is hot. Genre fiction has pretty much a paranormal version of every genre. Some of it’s silly, and some of it is pretty doggone scary.

Paranormal fiction has made quite a few of its writers a boatload of money. And while much of the paranormal genre fiction is formulaic trope-filled tripe, some of it is quite good.

When I conceived of my Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations series, I wanted something that moved in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos and also appealed to viewers of The X-Files.

From comments I’ve received and from the reviews of the books, I believe I’ve succeeded.

What’s more, since his introduction, Pierce Mostyn has been my top selling series. Therefore, it’s only natural to revisit the paranormal as I contemplate starting a new series.

However, I wanted something a bit different from the Cosmic Horror, Cthulhu Mythos, focus of Mostyn. And since my first love as a reader is detective fiction (ever since discovering Nero Wolfe in the early 80s), what would be more natural than to blend detective fiction with the paranormal?

Thank goodness I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The occult detective has a long and time-honored lineage and is alive and well today.

Therefore, my new series, which will most likely debut next year, will be a brother and sister team of occult detectives, or, in contemporary parlance, paranormal investigators.

Taking a page from the exploits of Flaxman Low, Thomas Carnacki, and Jules de Grandin, my investigators will explore those things that go bump in the night and scare the bejeebers out of people.

Haunted houses, demons, assorted monsters, arcane and occult magic. Twisted tales about two normal (well, mostly normal) young adults battling the ageless fears that underlie the veneer of our contemporary scientific sophistication.

As all good occult detectives have done, my hero and heroine will allay our fears of the unknown. Of course, such fears can never truly be put to rest. Can they?

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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A Possible New Series

The Medusa Ritual (Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations, Book 5) is available on Amazon. You can buy the book here.

Books 6, 7, and 8 in the series are written. I’m currently proofreading and line editing Book 6 and typing Book 7, doing an initial line edit while typing the handwritten manuscript.

The Pierce Mostyn series is loads of fun to write, and doing so has introduced me to the fascinating sub-genre of the occult detective.

The occult detective sub-genre has been around since the mid-1800s. Being largely a fusion of the detective story and the Gothic horror tale. It came into being as the form we recognize today through the Flaxman Low stories by E. & E. Heron. They were first published in Pearson’s Magazine in 1898 and 1899.

The most famous occult detectives are probably Thomas Carnacki, created by William Hope Hodgson, and Jules de Grandin, created by Seabury Quinn.

I very much like detective mysteries, and I very much like supernatural horror — which makes the occult detective pretty close to perfection.

For some time now, simmering on the back burner, has been a contemporary occult detective series of my own. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I’m getting there.

The series would be something of a companion piece for Pierce Mostyn — readers of one series crossing over and reading the other. At least I hope they will!

There will be more on this in the coming months, as I get additional details of this new fictional world established.

If you haven’t tried Pierce Mostyn, take a peek. The series is on Amazon. Mostyn won’t bite, but the monsters might!

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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Pierce Mostyn – Paranormal Investigator

Pierce Mostyn fighting inter-dimensional beings. Photo from a secret OUP file.

The other week I ran across a magazine called The Occult Detective Quarterly. Since the occult detective is a relatively new interest of mine, I loaded a couple issues onto my iPad for a read.

I’m about halfway through the first issue and I can honestly give the zine a big thumbs up! I hope they get the money they need to publish issues 5 and 6.

The occult detective has a long and venerable history. I outlined a bit of that history in a previous post. I also noted that it was Seabury Quinn’s occult detective, Jules de Grandin, that saved Weird Tales magazine from going under very early in its history.

Today I’d like to focus attention on my own occult, or paranormal, investigator creation: Pierce Mostyn and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena.

I’m a fan of the Cthulhu Mythos, vampires, werewolves, re-animated corpses (whether they be creations of Dr Frankenstein, Herbert West, mummies, or old-fashioned zombies and zuvembies), and, of course, ghosts. Pretty much anything supernatural gets my vote, and even a few things that aren’t exactly supernatural but can be classed as weird.

Pierce Mostyn, paranormal investigator extraordinaire, and the Office of Unidentified Phenomena, led by uber-mysterious Dr Rafe Bardon, are America’s ultra-secret fighters whose mission is to stop and destroy those things it is best for us not to know they exist.

In Nightmare in Agate Bay, Mostyn and his team meet an off-shoot of the Esoteric Order of Dagon in backwater Agate Bay, Minnesota. Which Order was the same mysterious cult that plagued poor Innsmouth. We meet fish people and a shoggoth. Some of our favorite paranormals.

Mostyn’s next adventure, Stairway to Hell, takes him and his team to the subterranean world of K’n-yan. Where we find a super-race of fickle and sadistic beings, who just so happen to be worshippers of Cthulhu and his buddies.

In K’n-yan, while trying to find a way to escape, Mostyn encounters the beautiful and seductive H’tha-dub, who gives him a Faustian choice that could save his team and at the same time destroy his budding romance with team member Dotty Kemper. Duty or love, that is Mostyn’s choice. The choice should be easy. But is it?

We all know that while Cthulhu is a pretty gargantuan bad guy, he isn’t the only monster on the block. In Terror in the Shadows, Mostyn and his team encounter a family that has degenerated beyond the classification of human. A family that has undergone reverse evolution. The classic term for such a being is abhuman. And Mostyn encounters lots of them in the hills of Appalachia. For their part, the abhumans recognize a good protein source when they see one.

And if the monsters of natural degeneration aren’t enough, there’s Van Dyne’s Vampires — the product of modern science and the laboratory. Mostyn and team must face hordes of these lab-cultured demons who’d just as soon chomp your liver as suck your blood.

Evil never rests. After all, if it did, what would we paranormal writers write about? Which brings me to the upcoming Pierce Mostyn paranormal investigation: The Medusa Ritual. As an experiment, I intend to serialize the working draft of this short novel here on the website prior to its publication in book form this summer. But more on the serialized novel and The Medusa Ritual in the next couple weeks.

The first Pierce Mostyn investigation went public a year ago. And in the 12 months since I’ve had great fun getting to know the central gang: Mostyn himself, Dr Dotty Kemper, Willie Lee Baker, DC Jones, Helene Dubreuil, Dr Rafe Bardon, and the newest addition, Kymbra NicAskill.

I encourage you to take a look at my interpretation of the occult detective. You’ll find everything you love about the paranormal and good stories in the Pierce Mostyn Paranormal Investigations. There be monsters here!

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy reading!

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