Flaxman Low: Occult Detective (MIT Press / Radium Age)

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.

E. and H. Heron was a collective pseudonym used by the English writers Hesketh Prichard (1876–1922) and his mother, Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard (1851–1935). “Hex” was an explorer, cricketer, naturalist, soldier, and travel writer. Kate, also an intrepid globetrotter, voyaged with her son to many remote locations; Rio Caterina, in Patagonia, is named after her. In addition to creating Flaxman Low, one of the first modern occult detectives in fiction, the duo wrote stories about Captain Rallywood and Don Q.

Alexander B. Joy earned a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Legend of the River King.