OCCULT DETECTIVE QUARTERLY PRESENTS

The magazine Occult Detective Quarterly, “devoted to those intrepid investigators who explore the weird, exotic and bizarre,” is up to its fifth issue as of the time of writing, with an average 100+ pages each time of “strange crimes, where hardened investigators and supernatural sleuths dare the darkness to seek out the truth.” The success of ODQ, as well as the high production values and original artwork of each issue, demonstrate in style that there’s plenty of support and reader buy-in for the whole proposition of the occult detective. The parallel success of Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, Peter Ackroyd’s occult investigation novels, and almost too many other series to count shows that there’s also considerable appetite for occult detection at greater length than ODQ’s preferred 6,000-word upper limit. As co-editor Dave Brzeski reports in the preface, “we already had a good number of excellent stories that broke the 6,000 word barrier by a considerable margin and we really wanted to use them.” Which is where Occult Detective Quarterly Presents comes in.
 
Supported by a Kickstarter which went almost $1,000 above its $2,000 target, Occult Detective Quarterly Presents collects stories submitted to ODQ that ran above its target length, from novelette to full-length novella. The Kickstarter stretch goals enabled artwork for each story, as well as additional material. The final volume runs to a generous 404 pages, with 8 long stories, plus a substantial essay by critic and anthologist Mike Ashley on “the birth of the occult detective in literature, and developments up to the latter part of last century.”
 
Occult Detective Quarterly Presents, as co-editor John Linwood Grant adds in his Foreword, “is open to any interpretation of the occult detective which involves a good story well told.” This is a hybrid genre, as he points out, where “there is no certainty as which element should come first - the occult or the detection - or which should predominate. It’s even been said that the bulk of supernatural stories are occult detective tales in one way or another.” Accordingly, the stories range wide across settings and epochs, from Biblical Palestine to Seventies Harlem, from classic English country house detective territory to the full-on bizarro Pulpworld of Adrian Cole’s novella “At Midnight All the Agents.” As per the Kickstarter terms, each is accompanied by a monochrome plate from a different artist: the stories will have already caught your imagination, but the images are a definite bonus.
 
In a collection of this kind, naturally not all of the stories are going to chime in with a reader’s preferences or elicit their awe. To my mind, the most striking tales, in quality of prose as well as imaginative conception, are those that challenge expectations and push the boundaries of this already pretty amorphous genre. Edward M. Erdelac’s Harlem man[?]hunt “Conquer Comes Correct” is one of the stories that sticks most adhesively in my memory, as does Charles R. Rutledge’s classically flavoured “A Shadow Against the Stars.” Most of the investigators here are already seasoned plumbers of the paranormal, from Willie Meikle’s gritty Scots gumshoe in “Farside” to S.L. Edwards’s father/daughter duo in “Ritual Killings,” but that doesn’t imply any descent into cliche. Some stories are fully tongue-in-cheek, others are as noir and as dark-toned as they come.
 
I won’t comment on whether the longer form truly suits investigative fiction best, but I do know that many of the investigators here are so flavourful and engaging that I hope the authors feature them again in other stories. Today’s crop of occult detectives are on the case, as Occult Detective Quarterly Presents demonstrates, and solving ever more uncanny mysteries in ever more bizarre and fascinating ways.
 
 
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[About the reviewer]
 
Paul StJohn Mackintosh is a Scottish writer of weird and dark fiction, poet, translator and journalist. You can see more of his work at https://www.amazon.com/Paul-St.-John-Mackintosh/e/B00CEH18BM.