OPEN POST: The Sunday Roast featuring Carnacki, the Ghost Finder!

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There's a helluva job title, eh?

Consulting Detective Sherlock Holmes has inspired a myriad of imitators, but among them Carnacki stands out as both a highly effective literary character AND the one most likely to really piss off Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle didn't like it when people didn't take woo-woo seriously; he was very into woo-woo, was old Sir A.

William Hope Hodgson, the author who created Carnacki, was not, and insisted on bring a lens of pure, relentless logic to the supernatural. The only difference between him and skeptics is that, for the purposes of his fiction, he assumed the supernatural to  be real, and to be governed by laws only too poorly understood by the mainstream, and even by spiritualists, whom he considered sentimental, maudlin, and tacky. 

Carnacki, though, was a ghost detective. 

Oh, he wasn't a ghost himself, though had he ever been real he might be one right now. No, nor was he like those modern paranormal "researchers" whose investigations consist largely of walking around green-litten, empty houses, stage-whispering, "Bro, did you see that??? No indeed; nothing so uncouth.

Carnacki was the first ghost buster!

The Idler

 What a jaunty-looking fellow! In contrast to the latter-day ghost busters, Carnacki was an elegant gentleman residing on the inexpressibly posh Cheyne Walk in London. How posh? Keith Richards lives at #3. George Eliot used to live next door. POSH. 

Carnacki was also an extremely confirmed bachelor. Each story is framed by him inviting a group of younger men over to dinner. "Come at 7:30. Come hungry." And they do, because they know there will be great food and drink and tobacco, and truly epic stories to be had. Of anything more, it would be unseemly to speculate. 

But there are never any women in these stories, except as tiresome accessories.  

In any case, if you lived in late Victorian/early Edwardian England and had a ghost of the troublesome, rather than the picturesque, kind, you'd call Carnacki, and he'd come hauling all the latest scientific gear like the electric pentacle (you think I'm kidding? I'm not kidding) like a true steampunk spiritwhacker, and he'd zap that pesky ghost back to Kingdom Come. 

Then he'd go home and tell his fanboys all about it over dinner. 

I, as a woman, would never have been invited to these dinners, but you, as a mysterious entity on the internet (surely the electric pentacle is online? that's what the Dark Web is for, right?) might make the grade as an audience member for the inevitable podcast. 

Or you can just read the entire book right cheer.