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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Alexander B. Joy
1-800-contacts. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Alexander B. Joy, who has done a very interesting project that we're going to talk about. Now, technically speaking, Lex, who is joining me today, has not quite written the book we're going to be discussing. The book is titled Flaxman Low Occult Detective, and it was originally written. Well, it's a whole bunch of short stories. So they were originally written by authors who used the name E and H. Haron. Two authors. We're going to talk about that. And these books were published quite a long time ago. We're talking, like, literally a hundred years ago. So they've been out of print a while. And that's what makes this reissue from MIT Press in 2026 so interesting because we get to see, literally, like, we get to go back in time to what kind of popular fiction was decades and decades ago. And with the help of Lex, who's here to join me on the podcast and also provides a very useful analysis in the book, contextualize these stories as well so that we can not just go back in time in and of itself. But also kind of understand that time travel process more effectively. So Lex, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about this project and these stories.
- [02:45]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.
- [02:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and then tell us why you decided to take on this project?
- [02:54]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Sure. Well, I hold a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I'm also the author of the monograph Legend of the River King, which is available from Boss Fight Books. There are two reasons why I took on this project, and the first is just enthusiasm. I have a love for old and unduly forgotten books like Flaxman Lowe. The public domain is a world wonder in my opinion, and I'm always digging through it in search of interesting material materials to write about or riff on or adapt. I first encountered Flaxman Lowe after seeing him mentioned in an article by Claire Clark in the Conversation about Sherlock Holmes or post Sherlock Holmes Mystery Stories, and I've been a fan of his ever since. But the second reason I wanted to work with Flaxman Lowe was essentially economic in that I wanted to make him affordable in print so unlike more readily available public domain works like, say, Jane Austen's Corpus, for example, which you can find everywhere. Still, Flaxman Lowe's Adventure adventures were ripe for republishing. When I first pitched the volume, there was only one edition of his Collected Stories and it was long out of print and not in wide circulation than any other form. The only way you could find him in print was through a handful of self published print on demand editions of predictably spurious quality. But these recreated an erroneously titled book called Flaxman Occult Psychologist Collected Stories, which only had six of the 12 stories that exist. The closest analog to a complete ebook edition was a PDF scan of an original copy of the stories that the British Museum held, and surviving physical copies of that book were staggeringly expensive. Two separate booksellers priced that at US$4,500, which, hold on back of the envelope math is what £3,400 give or take. Just completely inaccessible to people who wanted a reputable printed version. So that situation represented a significant gap in the public domain publishing landscape, which the MIT press agreed needed filling. Hmm.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Always intriguing to understand how these sorts of revival projects sort of come to be given then the length of time between when these were initially published and kind of these reasons that made you want to revive it now. What do you hope readers today Take from this.
- [05:10]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Well, first and foremost, I simply hope that readers enjoy the stories. I think Flaxman Lowe's adventures are tremendously fun. Reads, really like for them to return to the popular imagination. But secondarily, and I guess the more scholarly interest is, I'd like readers to come away with an appreciation for early psychological science, which is the scientific context for many of these stories. Nowadays, we take the tenets of psychology for granted. For instance, it's obvious to us now that physical changes in the brain or its chemistry are what govern certain aspects of the mind and body. But, you know, a century ago, all that had to be hypothesized and proven. So the Flaxman Low stories give us a sense of the promise and possibility that people ascribe to that science in its earliest iterations, which is fascinating to uncover.
- [05:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yes, there is a lot of interesting stories here, and interesting sort of science, I suppose, too. I mean, science. Some of it in quotes, some of it not. I think we'll probably get into that, but I want to establish some kind of foundational facts. So I mentioned a little bit earlier, kind of when these were published. Can we talk more about sort of when and where these first came into being?
- [06:18]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
So the Flaxman Low stories were first published as two separate series in Pearson's Magazine. The first series came out in 1898, and the second was in 1899 later on. All 12 of those stories were collected in book form in 1899, and that collection was called Ghosts Being the Experiences of Flaxman Lowe. And that is the physical copy that I was alluding to earlier.
- [06:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Got it. Okay. That's helpful to understand. And that's, of course, this is, as I mentioned, sort of lots of short stories. Right. So can you. I mean, obviously, I don't want you to, like, give away all of them here. Right. But maybe give us a sense of what was so intriguing to you about one of them.
- [06:58]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Right, right. So they're all fundamentally mystery stories, so I don't want to spoil the payoff. But the gist of each story is Flaxman Low is presented with a case that involves some kind of haunting or unexplained phenomenon, and then he goes and confronts it along the lines of psychological science. So I can provide this setup for one of my favorites, which is one of the Wilder Tales. It's called the Story of the Gray House, and it concerns Lowe's investigations of a house that has been abandoned after a series of inexplicable deaths there. And these deaths occurred not just by strangulation, but by hanging. It's very creepy, but no nooses were ever found at the site and no culprit was ever identified. As a consequence, people are afraid of this place. The house and its estate have gone feral due to neglect. No one's willing to work there, and its gardens of exotic plants have overgrown and taken over the place. Its surroundings have devolved into swampland due to the damp climate, and it's just become this deeply adventurous site. So the premise of the story is distressing enough, but it's attached to this picturesque nightmare setting that's vaguely reminiscent of Jeff Vandermeer's Area X. It's glorious. It feels very modern, even though it was written 100 years some odd years ago.
- [08:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm glad you said creepy that it wasn't just me that found that particular story like, yikes. But definitely keeps you engaged, right? And keep keeps reading. So let's get into a bit about kind of how these stories came to be. I mentioned at the beginning that the authors are E and H. Heron, or at least that's what readers at the time would have seen. Who wrote these stories?
- [08:32]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Okay, so E and H. Herron were the pseudonyms for a mother son writing team. The authors were Kate o', Brien Pritchard and Hesketh. Hesketh, Pritchard. Their exact division of labor is disputed. There's one science fiction and fantasy scholar, Everett F. Bleiler, who says Hesketh was the major partner in their collaborations. If you go toward secondary sources from the era where they were written, there's a writer named Eric Parker who wrote a memoir about Hesketh in 1924, and he hinted that Kate exerted directorial influence, where Hesketh may have done some of the physical writing, but all the ideas were from her. And Hesketh himself gives Kate considerable deference. In a Pearson's introduction to his work in 1903 for a different story entirely, he says, I owe everything to my mother. She has helped me with all that I have written, and without her I should probably have written nothing. So this is up for grabs. The series overall can probably be attributed more or less equally to both Pritchards. Just because the ideas seem to be from both of them, the question of who's actually writing them is up for grabs. My gut feeling, and let me stress this is a gut feeling I've not really conducted the rigorous linguistic analyses necessary to prove it, is that it seems to me a single Pritchard probably took the lead in writing each story after consultation with the Other, and this is mostly just based on stylistic differences I've noticed in the stories, such as how and where quotations or dashes are integrated, the kinds of little choices that suggest a different taste at work, but not a different directorial sensibility.
- [10:10]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's interesting. That's exactly the sort of thing that I imagine Someone with a PhD in Comparative Literature has had training to sort of take note of and think about. And of course, that's almost certainly what it is, right? There's no. So few questions of authorship or history or anything are kind of definitively black or white, one or the other. But kind of these, like. Let's think about how this might have overlapped a bit, tends to be where things go. Besides then writing these stories, what else were these authors up to? Were they kind of off by themselves, writing these things in isolation? Were they engaged with other famous writers at the time?
- [10:43]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Yes, for engagement. And as for what they were getting up to, the Pritchards were extremely interesting people. You know, the kinds of towering figures that only centuries past seemed to have produced. Like Hesketh, for example. He didn't live very long, but in his brief life he played cricket at a professional level. He overhauled the standard training regimen for British army snipers. His contemporaries said he might have been the best shot in all of England. And he traveled the world as a newspaper correspondent. His mother, Kate, was the daughter of a notable military family. She was also a great traveler herself. She did join Hesketh on many of his newspaper assignments. And in fact, she was so well traveled that the Rio Catarina in what is now Argentina's Parque Nacional los Glaciares is named after her. In terms of some of the other stuff they did, the Pritchards wrote a bunch of popular, well received novels and stories of various levels of pulpiness and literary merit. They have one called A modern mercenary from 1898. They have the Chronicles of Don Q in 1904. And in 1909 they wrote Don Q's Love Story. And that one's of particular interest because it would be Adapted later in 1925 into the Douglas Fairbanks vehicle Don Q, Son of Zorro. In terms of the people or their literary milieu, they were pretty well acquainted with many major figures of their day. The names that'll stand up for most people are that they knew J.M. barrie of Peter Pan fame and Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame and others. And all these people were reading one another. In fact, the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, who wrote in Patagonia, suggested that Hesketh Pritchard's 1902 travelogue through the Heart of Patagonia, which was very widely read. Quote seems to have been an ingredient of Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which is a 1912 proto science fiction novel also available through MIT Press.
- [12:32]
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- [14:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so I'm really glad you mentioned Sherlock Holmes, because I, like many readers, I think the whole point of the project was not particularly familiar with Flaxman Lowe before I came across this book, but obviously many of us know Sherlock Holmes. And so when I saw the subtitle Occult Detective, I was like, okay, what's the overlap here? Right? Who is Flaxman Lowe as a character? How is he different or similar to Sherlock Holmes when we're talking mystery books of this era?
- [14:31]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Flaxman Lowe is actually a pseudonym. The Pritchards love pseudonyms. We learned early on he's the pseudonym for a gentlemanly, athletic psychological researcher who specializes in ghosts and the paranormal, and his Whole deal is that beleaguered petitioners will seek him out to diagnose all kinds of odd and interesting occurrences. And he acts like a scientific exorcist of sorts. He'll investigate and he'll sometimes eradicate these seemingly supernatural and mystical phenomena. But of course, it's only after he establishes a scientific basis for their occurrence. It's not just that he identifies. There is a ghost, he identifies why they're probably there. And now he's interesting as a literary event because he represents the first truly modern occult detective. And the occult detective is an archetypal weird fiction figure, the kind of person who confronts the strange and bizarre and investigates them. But what makes Low interesting is that up until low, occult mysteries either reject the paranormal outright or else they embrace a paranormal that's completely untethered from any kind of physical law. So, for example, to go back to Sherlock Holmes, he never entertains supernatural prospects. For example, in the Sussex vampire, which is 1924 story of his, he has the quip where he says, the world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply. So these don't figure into Conan Doyle. Later on, there's some stories involving a detective named John Bell, who's a creation of L.T. mead and John Eustace. He appears in the 1896 story collection a Master of Mysteries, and John Bell offers an example of ghost themed mysteries, but his quests are explicitly about disproving the supernatural. These are all hallucinations or charlatans at work in his world. And Sheridan Le Fanu has a character named Dr. Heselius from the 1872 collection in a Glass Darkly. And he's a paranormal researcher, but the causes and cures he turns up are typically fantastical. And also he's more of a loose framing device than an active investigator. He's not very heavily involved in his stories. So what distinguishes Lowe from the conventional detectives like the Sherlock Holmes of the world and the credulous proto occult detectives alike, and really what makes him a pioneer for later works like Algernon Blackwood's John Silence or William Hope Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki, is that he's willing to ascribe supernatural occurrences to physical psychological causes and therefore to consider such causes fair game as possible solutions to a number of mysteries.
- [17:02]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Mm, okay. This is very helpful to differentiate and sort of place Flaxman Lowe, amongst other key characters at the time. Was he a popular character? Were these stories, did they work not just amongst kind of other authors, but to the general public?
- [17:18]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Well, the stories were well received as Far as I can tell, I mean, they were successful enough to merit a bound collection. And where the series ends, this doesn't really spoil anything, but it does leave open the possibility of further adventures, as if the Pritchards intended to do more with him, or at least wanted to, you know, make that option available later on.
- [17:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, so that's definitely useful to know. And obviously today we're familiar with all sorts of series and kind of leaving things open. So interesting to see that that technique was being used at the time too. And we mentioned sort of science, what we would still consider science and what we today might put science in scare quotes was a lot of kind of what was going on then. And that's part of what's happening with Flaxman Low. Right. Like what was happening in sort of wider society that made these stories of interest to audiences.
- [18:08]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Sure. We can kind of confront this from two prongs. There's the question of what's going on in popular culture and then what's going on in science. So the popular culture thing is that Flaxman Lowe was one of many fictional detectives who was pushed into print to fill the Sherlock shaped void that Conan Doyle opened after the final problem, an 1893 story where he ostensibly killed off Sherlock Holmes. Clare Clark has actually written about this glut of post Sherlock fiction. She has a great article called Beyond Sherlock Holmes five Victorian Detective Stories. You should read from the conversation in 2021. Highly recommend it. Lowe is among the detectives she lists, so in part he existed because there's no more Sherlock Holmes. And people were very hungry for serial mysteries, or not serial mysteries. I apologize. Just Prince mysteries with recurring characters to read. So that at least is his pop culture context, but his sci fi context, like I mentioned earlier, is that psychological science is just starting to come into its own. We're starting to see it as, rather than a branch of philosophy, a form of scientific inquiry. So part of this gets captured in the way that the stories were published. They had a sort of unique metaphysical presentation in their initial print run, where Pearsons billed Lowe's adventures as real ghost stories. And to lend credence to the investigations, each story was accompanied by actual photographs of the haunted houses. Almost all the stories are centered around particular locations rather than entities. So all these were supposedly photographed. And this packaging is interesting because it speaks to the hopes that were underpinning the late Victorian context of psychological science. And that's simply if science could more clearly understand the mind and brain, then souls and spirits, artifacts of the brain's Formerly nebulous mechanisms that we really didn't have a good explanation for might likewise evolve from myth into fact. We haven't necessarily gotten there yet, but that was one of the things that was hoped for at the time. And the Flaxman Low stories kind of speak to this desire. Ghosts have physical causes, so as a result we might be able to infer that there is life after death because the brain is still working in interesting, mysterious ways.
- [20:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Intriguing, okay, that's definitely an odd, I suppose, development, I guess, in people's belief and how that does and doesn't interact with science. But also, as you mentioned, sort of photography and kind of the way these stories are sold, which is intriguing too. And obviously you've already mentioned ways in which these stories were not just popular at the time, but influen other writers. Do you have any more examples you want to tell us about?
- [20:48]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
These are more of a feeling than a strict one to one correspondence, but the Pritchards kind of put together a proof of concept as to how effectively you can meld horror, mystery and sci fi. So the formula they come up with you can detect in The American writer H.P. lovecraft and some of his stories, or Thomas Ligotti. And in terms of the low figure himself, he works from psychologically oriented methods and he's insatiably curious rather than just about eliminating possibilities. So in this approach, this posture kind of makes him a precursor to investigators like G.K. chesterton's father Brown, for example, who is assiduously against all supernatural solutions. But his methods are more about figuring out who has the mindset or capacity to do certain things. He has a psychological approach. Or similarly, Fox Mulder of the American series the X Files. Right. I want to believe the thought that there are strange things out there, but they all do have explanations.
- [21:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is interesting to again see the kind of placement of Flaxman Low amongst other characters. Is there anything further you hope readers will discover in these stories? Or anything that jumped out at you that maybe you didn't know about? Like, did you know all these stories when you put them together? Or did you get to sort of go, oh wait, that was such a fun element of it, or anything you're hoping readers might discover along those lines?
- [22:14]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Well, to answer your construction question, I'd read all these stories long before I pitched the volume to mit. I had encountered that British Museum PDF and read through it in about a day and a half. I just devoured it. They were so much fun. So I guess in the sense of reader discovery, I just hope that they enjoy the stories. What's fun for me about these stories is the premises are deeply inventive and deeply strange, but as a result of that, they still feel fun and fresh, even though they were written over a century ago. And that is remarkable to me that I don't really know what to credit this to either, because they have not been in the popular consciousness. Those stories haven't had a chance to permeate the sci fi space. So maybe it's just rediscovering something. Or maybe in fact they are that creative and, you know, people just haven't stumbled across these same kinds of stories before. But I hope readers have a deeper appreciation for the skill of the Pritchards or the herons and just a chance to interact with yesteryear's sci fi and see how fun it can still be.
- [23:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think that's a great thing for people to discover from the book and obviously from the other books in this Radium Age series, and a good place as well to end our discussion on the book. So I just have a final question of what you might be working on now that this is out in the world.
- [23:38]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Sure. Well, my next books are still in the proposal stage, but I'm hoping I can write one about James Will's 1933 film rendition of the Invisible Man. Because speaking of texts that are still astonishingly fun and relevant many, many years later, I find the Invisible man extremely relevant in our modern age of mass surveillance and its unending erosion of privacy. So the movie actually reads to me as a really prescient allegory of the mindset and machinery of the surveillance state. I'm aiming to investigate the film's attitudes towards the psychology and philosophy of being watched or going unseen, specifically through its title character, who presents or represents different anxieties as both an agent and an object of surveillance.
- [24:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, well, that definitely sounds pretty relevant, so best of luck putting those proposals together. And of course, while you are doing that, listeners can dive into the world of Flaxman Low with the book titled Flaxman A Cult Detective, originally written by Ian H. Haron and reissued by MIT Press in 2026 as part of the Radium Age series. With the expertise of Dr. Alexander B. Joy, who we've had the pleasure of joining us on the podcast. Lex, thank you so much again for telling us about your work.
- [24:48]
Dr. Alexander B. Joy
Thank you for having me.
- [24:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's been a pleasure.
- [25:03]
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