Flaxman Low: Occult Detective

The weird--and weirdly delightful--adventures of fiction's first occult detective.

Flaxman Low, literature's first professional, full-time "occult detective"--that is, an intrepid investigator who deploys the scientific method when tackling paranormal phenomena--appeared in a dozen stories first published from 1898-1899. His creators, the mother-and-son team Kate O'Brien Ryall Prichard and Hesketh "Hex" Prichard (who published as "E. and H. Heron"), endowed the Oxford-trained psychologist with the bravery and acumen to tackle every sort of adversary from ghosts, mummies, and vampires to a mushroom mannequin. Both less credulous and less cynical than earlier fictional investigators of the spirit world, Low always triumphs in the end . . . but not before scientifically demonstrating that even the most outré incidents and situations can't hold a candle to the bizarre capacities of the human mind.