The Ghost Slayers - Mike Ashley (ed)

 Thrilling tales of occult detection...  Yes!   Ghost-finders - my absolute fave.   And favourite amongst them, John Silence and Thomas Carnacki, both prominent in this compilation of classics by Mike Ashley for the British Library.   My second faves, Aylmer Vance and Flaxman Low, both appear, too.   The Silence and the Carnacki were both familiar to me - Blackwood and William Hope Hodgson both only wrote one collection each and I have long had both - but I was reminded how superior Blackwood was with Ashley's choice of 'A Psychic Invasion.'   Sadly, 'The Searcher of the End House' is to my mind one of the lesser Carnacki tales.

New to me were the tales by Bertram Atkey, Dion Fortune, Moray Dalton, Gordon Hillman and Joseph Payne Brennan.   The latter two were especially effective.   'Forgotten Harbour' (1931) by Hillman is a tale of spooky doings at a fog-bound lighthouse, absolutely dripping with menace.   Brennan's story, 'In Death as in Life' is by far the most recent of the tales, dating only from 1963, but his ghostfinder, Lucius Leffing, is a Victorian out of his time, and the ghost when it manifests is literally dripping, truly horrible, and squishy.   Brennan's real stroke of genius is to make himself Leffing's Dr Watson.

A fantastic collection, essential for any fan of the sub-genre.

Aylmer Vance, Ghost-Seer - Alice and Claude Askew

All literary collaborations seem odd in the age of the single author, but no collaboration has been as unusual or as productive as that of the Askews. They were astonishingly prolific over a short period - up to ninety novels in a 13-year period, glamorous (both born into money) and brave. The last characteristic warrants a sentence all its own. In a forgotten niche of World War 1 they volunteered to the cause of Serbia (also interesting because a lot of British lesbians enlisted as men in the Serbian army) and died when their ship was torpedoed by a U-boat in 1917.

Aylmer Vance was their attempt to cash in on the short-lived psychic detective fad of the pre-war period, kicked off by Hodgson's Carnacki and Blackwood's Dr John Silence. The stories appeared in a weekly story magazine and there are only eight of them. Do not be fooled in this respect. No amount of re-titling can increase the number and "Alymer Vance and the Vampire" is one of them.

The stories are narrated by Vance's amanuensis Dexter, a barrister. Unlike Dr Watson, Dexter has a gift which makes him useful to Vance. He is clairvoyant. Vance is posh, with a country manor and a Mayfair flat. He is a bachelor though, cunningly, this seems to be because he is in love with a Georgian ghost. There is also a rather clever continuity device. Vance and Dexter get to know one another on a fishing holiday, and only after Dexter has demonstrated his clairvoyance does Vance ask him to move in with him and become his investigative assistant. Where Carnacki devotes himself to debunking sham ghosts and Silence is preoccupied with natural forces, Vance favours the historical. When not busy ghost-seeing he travels the world visiting archaeological digs. Thus the first story, 'The Invader', is about a Celtic warrior princess. 'The Stranger' is, quite frankly, a god. The best Carnacki stories are the ones in which the ghost is genuine, whereas with Vance it's the other way round. 'The Indissoluble Bond' is an a awful title but it is a cracking story featuring a burst of Chopin's Funeral March at a wedding.

Only 8 stories means that the collection only lasts 120 pages, which isn't enough. On the other hand, they are all high quality and brilliantly written.