Flaxman Low: Occult Detective - E. and E. Heron ****

It's an easy assumption (which I made) that this book is fantasy as it involves a ghost hunter, but I'm calling it SF, as at the time of publication at the end of the nineteenth century, the Society for Psychical Research was treating such phenomena as a subject of scientific investigation, and there has been plenty of SF where the 'science' has been anything but correct.

This is part of MIT Press's Radium Age series, which brings back titles from the period when science fiction was just starting to emerge. Often writing from this period was stodgy and no longer easy to read: arguably with little other entertainment available in the home, there was far less need for good writing than is the case now. But short stories of the period can often work better - think how well, for instance, the Sherlock Holmes stories hold up. Although the Herons (in reality mother and son team, the bizarrely named Kate O'Brien Ryall Pritchard and Hesketh Hesketh-Pritchard) aren't up to Conan Doyle's standards, they do a reasonable job of making the work of their hero, Flaxman Low passable.

The stories are suitably gothic - quite often the apparitions are able to physically interact with their surroundings, causing harm or even death. We also get a few more corporeal investigations with some of the horror classics such as mummies and vampires, and even a fungal foe. Flaxman Low is that new contribution to the scientific world, a psychologist, and his role seems mainly to assess in an objective fashion the psychology of the spirit - why it is doing the nasty business it is. The only problem with this approach is that, unlike, say, the puzzles solved by Holmes, Low can rarely offer a solution, merely an explanation, which gives the stories less punch. There is, however, one magnificent piece of advice. A character heads to get a medic. The doctor turns out to be 'a big, powerful Irishman, rather the worse for liquor, but with the deep eye and square jaw that indicates ability.' So next time you are concerned about your medical treatment, just check the eye and jaw of the physician.

I must, say I don't understand why the illustrator seems to have portrayed Low on the cover as something close to a 1920s or 30s German army officer - the style is totally inappropriate for something set (and written) in the 1890s, but I presume it's down to a look the whole series uses. In fact, given radium wasn't isolated until 1910, it's arguable this isn't a radium age set of stories, any more than, say, the H. G. Wells classics like War of the Worlds, The Time Machine or First Men in the Moon could be attributed to that period.

All in all, for someone who enjoys very much the tales of Conan Doyle and his contemporaries, along with the better early science fiction, despite the sometimes lacklustre endings of the stories, I was really glad to have read this contribution to the series. Fun stuff.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here