A Master of Mysteries
John Bell earns his living by explaining the inexplicable. A professional exposer of ghosts, he takes cases that look like the work of vengeful spirits or ancient curses, then dismantles them piece by piece to reveal the human fraud or physical cause underneath. Written by L. T. Meade with Robert Eustace, a physician who supplied the scientific mechanics, this 1898 collection first ran in Cassell’s Magazine and gathers six episodic tales, among them the deaths in the Felwyn Tunnel, a family curse in “The Warder of the Door,” and an idol that appears to speak in “How Siva Spoke.” Every case sits where detective fiction meets the Victorian ghost story, yet Bell never meets a real haunting, only a clever crime. Readers who like their mysteries rational but eerie will find in him an early model of the sceptical investigator.
