The Supernatural in Detective Fiction

Masterarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades

eines Master of Arts (MA)

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von

Jana SIRANKO

am Institut für Anglistik

Begutachter(in): O.Univ.-Prof. Mag.art. Dr.phil. Werner Wolf

Graz, 2016
Table of contents

0. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 1

1. THE SUPERNATURAL AS A SOCIO-CULTURAL AND LITERARY CATEGORY........ 8

1.1. DEFINING THE SUPERNATURAL ............................................................................................. 8

1.2. ATTITUDES TO THE SUPERNATURAL .................................................................................... 10
1.3. THE SUPERNATURAL IN LITERATURE: FUNCTIONS .............................................................. 16

2. SUPERNATURAL AND DETECTIVE STORIES – TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN?:

POPULAR LITERATURE, GENERIC CONVENTIONS ................................................................ 19

2.1. POPULAR LITERATURE AND CULTURE ................................................................................. 19

2.2. THE MYSTERY FORMULA OF POPULAR LITERATURE .......................................................... 22
2.3. DETECTIVE STORIES AS EPISTEMOLOGICAL ALLEGORIES ................................................... 24

3. OVERVIEW OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN DETECTIVE FICTION AND

METHODOLOGY FOR ANALYSIS .................................................................................................... 29

3.1. THE SHADOW SIDE OF DETECTIVE FICTION: AN OVERVIEW OF THE SUPERNATURAL IN

DETECTIVE STORIES .......................................................................................................................... 29
3.2. METHODOLOGY AND CLASSIFICATION FOR ANALYSING THE SUPERNATURAL IN DETECTIVE
FICTION ............................................................................................................................................. 43

4. THE IMPLIED EPISTEMOLOGICAL WORLDVIEWS OF DETECTIVE FICTION

STORIES DEALING WITH THE SUPERNATURAL: CASE STUDY ......................................... 46

4.1. THE SUPERNATURAL AS ILLUSION IN AGATHA CHRISTIE’S THE PALE HORSE (1961) ......... 46
4.1.1. Characteristics and Aspects of the Imagined Supernatural in The Pale Horse ............... 51
4.1.2. The Detectives and Their Method of Approaching the Supernatural in The Pale Horse 52
4.1.3. The Implied Worldview and Functions of the Supernatural in The Pale Horse .............. 55
4.2. THE SUPERNATURAL AS FACT IN BEN AARONOVITCH’S THE RIVERS OF LONDON (2011) ... 57
4.2.1. Characteristic and Aspects of the Supernatural in The Rivers of London...................... 59
4.2.2. The Detectives and Their Method of Approaching the Supernatural in The Rivers of
London ......................................................................................................................................... 62
4.2.3. The Implied Worldview and Functions of the Supernatural in The Rivers of London ... 65
4.3. THE SUPERNATURAL AS ONTOLOGICALLY UNDETERMINABLE IN TONY HILLERMAN’S THE
BLESSING WAY (1970) ........................................................................................................................ 68
4.3.1. Characteristics and Aspects of the Supernatural in The Blessing Way .......................... 71
 4.3.2. The Detective and His Method of Approaching the Supernatural in The Blessing Way 73
4.3.3. The Implied Worldview and Cultural Functions of the Supernatural in The Blessing
Way………………. ...................................................................................................................... 75

5. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................. 78

6. REFERENCES.................................................................................................................................. 82

Table of Tables

Table 1: Functions of the supernatural in literature ............................................................................. 16

Table 2: Components of the epistemological allegory in detective fiction............................................ 25

Table of Figures

Figure 1: Map of the interrelations between detective stories and culture ........................................... 27
Figure 2: The ontological status of the supernatural in (detective) stories .......................................... 44
0. Introduction

The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning
the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic séances, crystal-gazing, and the
like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if
he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics,
he is defeated ab initio.
―S.S. Van Dine (Willard Huntigton Wright), Rule 8 from “20 Rules on Writing Detective Fiction”
(1928/46: 190)

When we think of a detective, we usually imagine a Sherlock Holmes or a Hercule Poirot, an

eccentric bachelor solving problems and puzzles by means of his 1 superior intellect and a firm
refusal to believe in superstition or chance. In effect, we see an image of a detective created by
the ‘Golden Age’ writers who for the most part followed a set of specific rules of writing
detective stories, like the one cited above2.

In fact, the past few decades have seen a steady proliferation and mainstreaming of this kind of
detective stories, which makes an exploration of the phenomenon timely and relevant for
contemporary literary studies.

As all narratives, detective fiction provides “miniature models of the world which, although
partial and reductive, provide insight into possible ways of making sense of reality” (Wolf 2008:
165). Detective fiction texts therefore have the “ability to illustrate or concretise worldviews”
(ibid.: 166). The term ‘worldview’
can be defined as any system of meaning, be it of commonsensical, religious, philosophical,
political, ideological or scientific nature, that seeks to provide answers to basic and general
questions bearing on human existence in addition to addressing further, more particular
issues. (ibid.: 170)

The model of the world provided by classical detective fiction is one where gaining knowledge
of, and control over, the world through rational means is possible, if difficult and requiring
special qualities on the part of the ‘seeker of knowledge’ – the detective.

1
The gender bias is intentional, since the prototypical detective is male, even though detective literature has come
to feature many well-known female detectives.
2
The “20 Rules” of writing clue-puzzle detective stories were written in the so-called Golden Age of detective
fiction by S.S. Van Dine as a means of providing a framework for authors to devise, in the spirit of ‘fair play’,
detective plots where the reader could pit their wits against that of the detective and thus play the clue-puzzle game
with at least an imagined chance of arriving at the solution of the mystery prior to the denouement.

1
Classical detective fiction invites the reader to participate in a puzzle game under the
assumption that the reader is presented with the same clues as the detective and therefore has
equal chances of solving the puzzle.3 One of the effects of the reader participating in this game
is that everything is questioned4 and anything – within the rules of the game – seems possible.
The seasoned detective fiction reader will question every little detail and look for a deeper
meaning to the characters’ actions and utterances. They will also expect the unexpectable. This
is one of the reasons why detective fiction is so well suited to dealing with one of the basic
question of humanity: the existence (or non-existence) of the supernatural, or rather, its
relevance for solving the ‘mysteries’ of life.5 Another reason is the close connection – to be
explored more fully in Chapter 2 – between detective and Gothic fiction, a genre in which the
supernatural is as firmly embedded as the detective is in detective fiction.

Regardless of the form of detective fiction, whether it be a clue-puzzle, a private eye (also called
‘hard-boiled’) story, a police procedural, a crime thriller or anti-detective fiction, due to the
conventions of the genre the reader will most often not simply follow the story passively, but
ask questions, develop theories and try to answer the basic ‘who?’, ‘why?’ or ‘how?’. The way
these questions are handled by a particular detective story gives us a clue about its implied
worldview: can we gain knowledge from solving a given mystery? Can we control the chaos,
represented by the murder(er), and through what means? In turn, this gives us a clue to the
worldview of the implied author, even the culture that gave birth to a particular type of story.
As Dennis Porter states:
The importance of popular works resides in their status as meaning-systems that embody
implicit world views. Properly interpreted, therefore, they can provide important clues to the
anxieties and frustrations, aspirations and constraints, experienced by the mass audience that
accounts for their best-seller status. (1981: 1)

3
However, this is rarely the case at a first reading and would greatly diminish, if not annihilate, the appeal of this
type of detective fictions. It is usually only retrospectively that the clues are reconstructible. The premise that the
reader can pitch his/her wits against the detective is based on the concept of the ‘readability of the (fictional)
world,’ where each clue is a sign that can be read and correctly interpreted by both detective and reader. The
detective can be seen as a mise-en-abyme of the reader, who reads a story in which a detective reads a story (cf.
Brunner 2008: 10).
4
Pyrhönen notes how “the various devices – the red herrings, deceptions, and tricks – act as self-focusing appeals
for the reader to assess them from a different, ‘second level’ perspective” (1994: 22) and compares this to Umberto
Eco's notion of “semiotic or critical level of explanation” (Eco 1990 quoted in ibid.).
5
It must be noted that not all detective fiction readers are interested in solving puzzles and not all detective fiction
presents the reader with a puzzle, though there is always a process of detection and this includes the search for
knowledge, if not “who”, then “why” or “how”.

2
It will be interesting to see what we can learn about the implied worldview of particular
detective stories based on how they deal with the supernatural and apply this to the more general
framework of culture. It is undeniable that popular fiction reflects the beliefs of popular culture
(cf. Cawelti 1976; Knight 1980). The supernatural seems to be just another face of the
irrational, the frightening Other that perhaps all, but certainly Western cultures over the past
few centuries have attempted to contain and control with varying means, among others through
literature. These attempts at control may either seek to reassure us of an inherently moral and
ordered universe or instead confront us with our fears in ways that are less reassuring and thus
warn us against disregarding social laws and morals.

Before we embark on the quest of determining the implied worldview of that rare and
extraordinary type of detective stories featuring the supernatural, however, two issues must be
addressed and both concern the definition of the two key terms of the topic: ‘supernatural’ and
‘detective fiction’. The supernatural is essentially something which belongs to the realm above
– or rather beyond – the natural world and which violates commonly recognized laws of nature,
and is defined and explored more fully in Chapter one. Secondly, an important distinction must
be made and an explanation given concerning the main subject of inquiry, namely detective
fiction. ‘Detective fiction’ has for many critics become an inadequate term for the genre and
has recently been replaced by ‘crime fiction’6. The latter is very useful when one attempts to
gain a broader perspective of crime fiction, of which detective fiction is only a part, yet the
terms are by no means interchangeable. Crime fiction includes works that do not qualify as
detective stories at all. Spy stories, fiction based on actual crime, stories focusing on the
criminal, and other instances of crime fiction where detection is not central to the plot and there
is no room for the reader to guess at the identity of the criminal or the motives and manner of
their crime(s).7 Such stories do not necessarily foreground the seeking of knowledge, neither in
their plot nor in their implied worldviews. Since the most fascinating implications of the
supernatural in detective fiction are embedded in the question of what can and what cannot be
known, for the purpose of this paper I will focus on what I understand by the term ‘detective

6
Recently authors have come to prefer the term ‘crime fiction’ when discussing the genre, with the explanation
that other terms (‘detective fiction’ and ‘mystery fiction’ being among the most popular) are too exclusive, since
not all works of crime feature a detective or a mystery, whereas there is always a crime (or the appearance of one)
(cf. Knight 2004: xii).
7
There is no doubt that the supernatural features highly in crime fiction – from Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge
tragedies to the Gothic there are ample instances where the supernatural plays a pivotal role and does not constitute
the same level of intrusion and disruption as it does in detective fiction.

3
fiction’, namely (crime) fiction8 which focuses on the detective as a distinct personality with a
specific method of detection and on the investigation process.9

Another necessary specification concerns the cultural/ethnic background of detective fiction

works. In certain critical approaches the distinction between individual detective fictions on a
national level makes sense. Detective fiction stories from various parts of the world exhibit
differing characteristics, in accordance with the culture that produced them (we shall see how
important the question of ethnicity and culture can be in Hillerman’s Native American detective
novels, for example). If we restrict ourselves to detective fiction written in the English language,
there is British, US-American and detective fiction in English outside the United States and
Britain. Though certain types of detective fiction are perceived as more British (e. g. the clue-
puzzle) and others as more American (e. g. private-eye story), there are certainly American
clue-puzzles and British private-eye stories as well. For the purpose of this paper it makes sense
to consider detective fiction as an “Anglo-American entity” (Knight 2004: xiv), because
regardless of where certain subgenres may have originated, they are now almost equally present
both in England and in the United States. Throughout the text the term ‘detective fiction’ will
be used in this sense, denoting ‘Anglo-American’ detective fiction, unless otherwise noted. In
this way I hope to sidestep the necessity of dealing with complex socio-cultural issues of
individual countries in more detail, for such a detailed analysis would warrant a separate critical
work, and instead focus on the English-speaking Western cultural background10.

A popular cliché of detective fiction criticism is a defence of the study of a genre that has in
previous times been looked upon as ‘popular’, possessing only entertainment value, and
therefore being unworthy of any serious critical attention. Recent criticism has acknowledged
that the differentiation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ (popular) literature is an artificial and arguably

8
In fact not all detective fiction features an actual crime. Usually though, there is at least the assumption or
appearance of one, even if the explanation of the mystery turns out to be non-crime related. Detective stories that
do not feature a crime are extremely rare, however, and do not constitute an essential part of the genre.
9
A concise and useful definition of detective fiction is provided by John Scaggs:
A type of fiction centred around the investigation of a crime that focuses attention on the method of detection by
structuring the story around a mystery that appears insoluble through normal investigative methods. For this reason
it is also known as mystery fiction. Detective fiction, by focusing on the method of detection, simultaneously focuses
attention on the figure of the methodical detective: that is, the detective who follows a particular method. (2005: 144)
10
Peter Jan Margry (2012: 283) notes a potentially significant difference in American and Western-European
culture in relation to religion and spirituality, where the United States are seen as “religious” compared to the
“secular” and “unchurched” Western Europe. However, this difference does not seem to matter to a degree where
it would make sense to split the literary analysis according to the two continents.

4
obsolete concept, but even though postmodernism has contributed a lot towards levelling this
distinction, the latter still exists and continues to be a meaningful category for literary analysis
(cf. Chapter 2). In fact, even within the realm of contemporary literary criticism there remains
the perceived necessity to affirm the relevance of detective fiction (as a popular literary genre)
criticism by pointing to the analytical value of the genre. As Heta Pyrhönen writes in Murder
from an Academic Angle: Introduction to the Study of the Detective Narrative (1994), an
overview of detective fiction criticism, the study of detective fiction has become legitimate ever
since the structuralists chose the genre as a prime example of narratology, thus giving it a
“privileged status […][which] derives from the almost uncanny suitability of the genre for
illustrating and highlighting the basic tenets of many major contemporary theoretical
approaches” (Pyrhönen 1994: 6). According to Pyrhönen,
[o]n the whole, one can discern two main strands within the various approaches to detective
fiction: “internally oriented” criticism, analyzing an author, subgenre, or the entire genre, to
answer questions that the object of study raises (e.g., the ethics of the detective narrative), and
“externally oriented” criticism, which uses detective fiction to elucidate some larger theoretical
principles (e.g., the relationship of detective fiction to cultural development). The boundaries
between these two classes are flexible[.] (ibid.: 7)

This paper will pass back and forth though these boundaries, attempting both to describe the
ways the supernatural enters detective fiction and to show how the treatment of the supernatural
in detective literature reflects the changes in ontological and epistemological beliefs and
attitudes of a particular culture.

Chapter 1 will provide a definition and overview of as well as popular attitudes to the
supernatural, showing how attitudes to the supernatural changed with the shift from the
premodern to the modern (post-Enlightenment) episteme, and will explore the literary and
social/cultural functions of the supernatural in literature.

Chapter 2 will establish the parallels and differences between supernatural and detective stories
as literary formulas, starting by elucidating the cultural functions of popular literature and the
concept of formula fiction (in particular the mystery formula) and its usefulness for the analysis
of the supernatural in detective fiction, and will also elucidate the approach to studying
detective stories as epistemological allegories (cf. Brunner 2008).

5
Chapter 3 will explain the detective genre’s ambiguous relationship with the supernatural and
the occult; and it will trace ‘intrusions’ of the supernatural upon the genre through history11,
beginning with the emergence of the detective in the nineteenth century and the close link
between detective and Gothic fiction, providing insight into the dual nature of the detective who
acts as a link, a catalyst, between the rational and irrational forces behind detective fiction. For
this part of my work, Maurizio Ascari’s A Counter-History of Crime Fiction (2007) has been
of invaluable use. Ascari presents a critical survey that “does not aim to study the nineteenth-
century development of mainstream detective fiction, but rather to map those hybrid zones
where its conventions mingle with those of sensation fiction and the ghost story, or else are
conflated with the discourses of pseudo-sciences” (2007: xif). His survey, which deals almost
exclusively with the 19th century subgenre of occult detective fiction, what he calls the
“sensational lineage” (2007: 1) of the genre, provides an excellent starting point for my research
of the supernatural in twentieth and twenty-first century detective fiction. At the end of Chapter
3, a possible methodology for analysing the supernatural in detective fiction will be presented,
using as its basis the classification employed by Tzvetan Todorov (1970/73) in his study of the
fantastic (with caveats).

After briefly explaining the choice of works analysed, Chapter 4 will provide an in-depth
analysis and discussion of the implied worldview of three detective fiction novels featuring the
supernatural. The analysis and discussion will be ordered according to the classification
proposed in the section on methodology from Chapter 3 and will begin with the supernatural as
illusion in Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse (1961); continue with the supernatural as a fact in
Ben Aaronovitch’s The Rivers of London (2011); and conclude with the supernatural as
ontologically undeterminable in Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way (1970).

In conclusion I hope to answer the following questions, among other: Is the supernatural a
meaningful literary category when analysing detective fiction? Once the supernatural enters the
detective narrative, in what ways does it influence the plot and how it its inherent enigma
resolved? How does the supernatural in detective fiction correlate to the contemporary Western
cultural worldview(s) – can we infer a renewed sacralisation of the secularised Western world?

11
Since I am unable to accumulate all the works of detective fiction which feature the supernatural, this will by no
means be a comprehensive study, but I will attempt to provide a general overview.

6
When I began writing about the supernatural in detective fiction, I felt overwhelmed by all the
works which have not found a place in my research. Some of them are undoubtedly considered
‘classics’, others new, but as it remains impossible to include all detective fiction works dealing
with the supernatural in my thesis, I find solace in Todorov’s reflection that the scientific
method enables us to deduce facts and form a hypothesis based on a limited number of texts
and then verify that hypothesis by applying it to further texts (cf. 1970/74: 4).

7
1. The Supernatural as a Socio-Cultural and Literary Category

[The supernatural has been] one of man’s most universal interests – or preoccupations, or
obsessions – from his primitive, prehistoric days to this not-so-skeptical age.
―Hill/Williams (1965/89:27)

1.1. Defining the Supernatural

Generally, the term ‘supernatural’ is defined as “[b]elonging to the realm or state above this
world or this present life; pertaining to a higher world or state of existence” (cf. Simpson, ed.
1989), according to The Oxford English Dictionary. In everyday speech, ‘supernatural’ refers
to “anything that stretches or breaks or otherwise violates what we commonly think of as the
laws of nature—the normal, accepted, natural processes and phenomena of day-to-day living”
(Hill/Williams 1965/89: 16). Occasionally we come across other near-synonyms12 of
‘supernatural’, namely ‘occult’13, ‘paranormal’14, ’preternatural’15 and, especially in connection
with Gothic fiction, the ‘numinous’16. In my discussions of the supernatural, I will use the term
to denote anything which transcends or violates the laws of nature as determined by
contemporary Western science and experienced by individuals of Western culture on an
everyday basis, making a distinction between belief in the supernatural (including traditional
religious belief) and supernatural occurrences (occurrences which defy a scientifically
grounded, ‘natural’ explanation).

12
I have generally retained the various terms used by other authors when referring to their research, otherwise
preferring the term ‘supernatural’.
13
OED defines the term ‘occult’ as “[n]ot apprehended, or not apprehensible by the mind; beyond the range of
understanding or of ordinary knowledge; recondite, mysterious” (cf. Simpson, ed. 1989).
14
In the OED, the term ‘paranormal’ is “applied to observed phenomena or powers which are presumed to operate
according to natural laws beyond or outside those considered normal or known” (cf. Simpson, ed. 1989).
15
According to the OED, the term ‘preternatural’ (also ‘praeternatural’) denotes “that [which] is out of the ordinary
course of nature; beyond, surpassing, or differing from what is natural; non-natural; formerly = abnormal,
exceptional, unusual; sometimes = unnatural” (cf. Simpson, ed. 1989). Del George makes an important distinction
within the term ‘preternatural’: “Something preternatural can be either supernormal or supernatural; Dupin is a
supernormal character” (2001: 78).
16
S.L. Varnado describes the numinous as “the very essence of the supernatural tale[,] […] an affective state in
which the percipient – through feelings of awe, mystery and fascination – becomes aware of an objective spiritual
presence” (1987, cited in Del George 2001: 70).

8
In its origin the word ‘supernatural’ is closely associated with God17 – according to Robert
Bartlett, the term was first used by Thomas Aquinas in his discussion of the Creation, where he
states that woman was produced from the rib of man “through supernatural power (per virtutem
supernaturalem)” (Aquinas18 cited in Bartlett 2008: 13). Since ‘Nature’ was considered as a
positive and normative concept, God’s works could not be classified as “contrary to nature”
(Bartlett 2008: 27) and indeed God was identified as “‘first nature (prima natura)’ and hence
his deeds were pre-eminently ‘natural’” (ibid.). Positively connotated supernatural aspects of
traditional religion (angels, God’s healing powers, miracles) are usually omitted from the
discussion of the supernatural. The supernatural most frequently discussed is that which is
contrary to God, whether it be demons (fallen angels who had rebelled against God’s authority)
or unorthodox religious beliefs, i. e. superstitions as the Other of received religion.

According to Hill and Williams, we can distinguish two aspects of the supernatural:
supernatural powers and supernatural beings.
The supernatural powers are those that people have believed, throughout history, that they
possessed in themselves or could be given or could learn (as initiates into a kind of religio-
mystic awareness)—powers by which they could acquire hidden knowledge and could achieve
some non-physical control over physical nature. They are usually all lumped together under the
general term “magic” (or sometimes, confusingly, “witchcraft”). […] The supernatural beings
are those that, again throughout history, people have believed to inhabit darkness and the night,
and that generally have inspired both fear and fascination in their believers. These are the ghosts,
spirits, demons, and devils; the blood-sucking vampires, werewolves, and other evil and
terrifying inhuman monsters. Add to these the human beings—the magicians and the witches,
the mediums and the ghost hunters, the devil worshipers and the cultists[.] (1965/89: 17)

While not qualifying supernatural powers as ‘good’ or ‘evil’, the supernatural beings Hill and
Williams list are exclusively evil and terrifying. Yet there is no reason not to include positively
and/or neutrally construed beings in this category, like angels, spirit guides, unicorns, good
fairies, elemental spirits and the like.

To the two aspects of the supernatural mentioned by Hill/Williams (the powers, the beings) we
can add a third aspect, namely the supernatural as a plane of existence, “an environment,

17
Hill and Williams similarly point out that “[it is] clear that all supernatural belief derives from a view of the
world that is basically religious” (1965/89: 16) and Margry even uses ‘religion’ as an umbrella term denoting the
“notions and ideas that human beings have regarding their experience of the sacred or the supernatural in order to
give meaning to life and to gain access to transformative powers that may influence their existential
condition[,][…] what the self experiences as transcendental” (2012: 282, cf. also Margry 2008: 17). This definition
includes traditional religion as well as what is commonly deemed superstition.
18
Bartlett does not list the original year of Aquinas’ writings, the edition he refers to was published in 1980 (see
References).

9
comingled with the natural environment, though usually inaccessible to physical senses” (Del
George 2001:3) which is “basic and encompassing reality itself” (Cavaliero 1995: 17), “[t]he
other world of the supernatural [which is] by definition […] inherent (if not in its totality) in
the natural world” (Del George 2001: xii). Due to this inherence there is a certain level of
verisimilitude19 in the depiction of this other world in literature, not only in the representation
of settings, objects and characters, but also of beliefs (cf. ibid.).

It would be moot to attempt a discussion of whether any aspect of the supernatural is, in fact,
‘real’, as the ontological status of the supernatural is not relevant for the discussion thereof in
fiction. Rather, as Cavaliero points out, “it will be more to the point to ask whether the
supernatural is a meaningful category in our contemporary critical discourse” (1995: 244), to
which I hope this paper will provide an affirmative answer.

1.2. Attitudes to the Supernatural

There are different ways of perceiving the supernatural, two of which are pertinent to my
research: the supernatural as either the paranormal (an extension of physical reality) or the
mystical20 (to be contemplated and visioned instead of speculated about)(cf. Cavaliero
1995: 19ff). While the paranormal is in itself natural and operates according to specific rules
which can be learned and followed and which enable humans to attain a measure of control
over the supernatural, the supernatural as the mystical is beyond both nature and human
understanding (and control).

While discussing the supernatural, we must keep in mind “the instability of the term
‘supernatural’, which conjures different meanings and responses depending on the historical

19
This verisimilitude also creates the necessary conditions for the reader to “willingly suspend his/her disbelief”
when encountering the supernatural in literature; it plays an important part in creating the atmosphere of tension,
uncertainty and fear, as the supernatural element intrudes upon familiar surroundings. Briggs distinguishes
two main ways in which the ghost story writer may evoke the recognizable world, and these can be used separately
or in conjunction. He may either re-create the common fictive world of ordinary – usually middle-class – life, or he
may use a strange and intimidating setting, which is nevertheless naturalistically described. […] Familiar
surroundings create an illusion of security, while unfamiliar scenes can suggest the immanence or proximity of
spiritual powers. A tension between the known and the unknown, security and exposure, the familiar and the strange,
scepticism and credulity, must always be maintained. (1977: 18f)
20
The term that Cavaliero (1995) actually uses is ‘mystery’, however, since the term ‘mystery’ is widely used in
the discussion of detective fiction in way that has no link to the supernatural (e. g. mystery fiction, solving the
mystery, etc.), I have opted to choose the term ‘mystical’ instead, which is much more closely related to the
supernatural (in the sense of ‘spiritual’ and ‘occult’; cf. Simpson 1989).

10
context of its use” (Del George 2001: 5). The ontological status of and approaches to the
supernatural have changed significantly through the ages. When discussing attitudes to the
supernatural, Del George distinguishes two major approaches: the premodern and the modern21
episteme22 (cf. 2001: xiii) – a distinction which makes sense, although we need to keep in mind
that those are simply two ends of a continuum of attitudes to the supernatural. While the
premodern episteme is governed by the “law of authority”, which deems the supernatural more
real and more powerful than the natural, the modern episteme is governed by “the law of
science” in the nineteenth century and by “the law of total fiction” in the twentieth (cf. ibid.)23.
The law of science conflates the natural and the real and locates the supernatural in the human
imagination24, whereas under the law of total fiction both the supernatural and the natural lose
their status as real – this category has characteristics associated with postmodernism (cf. ibid.).

In line with the major epistemological shifts, the belief in spirits underwent significant changes.
In medieval times, spirits, both angelic and demonic, completed ‘the ladder and scale of
creatures’ in a hierarchical and magical world (cf. Briggs 1977: 29). At the end of the sixteenth
century when Protestantism firmly supplanted Catholicism as the official culture of Britain,
saintly miracles were rejected and the existence of Purgatory, the supposed home of walking
spirits, was repudiated and with it the belief in ghosts as such (cf. ibid.: 28). Any spirits which
might appear were deemed to be demonic in origin.
Apart from their doubtful theological standing, ghosts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
were well-attested and recognized as phenomena. They occasioned comparatively little surprise,
and the question of their existence did not, as it might today, arouse widespread interest, except
at the level of theological controversy. If spirits appeared, they did so in accordance with certain
acknowledged laws, most commonly because they had certain functions to fulfil which, it was
supposed, they alone could carry out. (ibid.: 29)

21
For the purposes of this argument Del George defines modern as “simply the consciousness of being modern.
The self-proclaimed ‘modern’ attempt to correct the errors of ‘primitive’ thought or ‘superstition’ flares up most
intensely after the Enlightenment; and, on into the twentieth century, when critics refer to themselves and their age
as ‘modern’, they invoke a similar set of associations: science, progress, materialism, psychology” (2001: xii).
22
Del George uses Foucault's definition of ‘episteme’: “the epistemological field […] in which knowledge,
envisaged apart from all criteria having reference to its rational value or to its objective forms, grounds its positivity
and thereby manifests a history which is not that of its growing perfection, but rather of its conditions of possibility”
(Foucault 1966/94 cited in Del George 2001: xv).
23
In some ways, the premodern law of authority continues to be perpetuated, as can be seen in the perceived
necessity of any research to at least briefly mention the most important existing authorities, several of whom are
invoked unquestioningly (e. g. Derrida, Butler, Deleuze and the like).
24
Instead of being understood as an external and objective reality, in modern times the supernatural is rather seen
as “imaginary and interior phenomena projected by the self and in its own image” (Del George 2001: xiii).

11
Ghosts continued to be widely accepted at a popular level and occasioned no great interest in
themselves; stories about them focused on why they had come rather than on the mere fact of
their existence (cf. ibid.).

The rise of a materialistic, scientific and rational culture, as well as a general move into city life
and industrial mass society in the latter half of the eighteenth century caused a general cultural
ambivalence in the field under discussion (cf. Bloom 1999: 317). Spiritual beliefs of all kind
came under attack and the responses to the ensuing crisis of faith were various and ambivalent.
Sociologist Max Weber coined the term “disenchantment of the world” (cf. Bartlett 2008: 32f),
or in the German original “die Entzauberung der Welt”, which literally means “taking the magic
out of the world” and describes “what [Weber] saw as the special path the West had taken,
marked by the growing dominance of rationalism and an increasingly instrumental attitude to
the natural world” (ibid.: 32).

The certainties of religion were being replaced by “the compensating certainties of science”
(Briggs 1977: 19). Bernard Lightman calls this the “secularization thesis”, according to which
from the Enlightenment25 onwards, science gradually but surely supplanted religion and the
occult as the ultimate authority for understanding the natural world (cf. Smajić 2010: 137). This
is not to say that religiosity as such disappeared; it did, however, move into the realm of the
personal (cf. Margry 2012). Also, as with any broader cultural shift, there was (and still is) a lot
of overlap of the two epistemes and attempts were made to forge the old beliefs with the new
into a meaningful whole. Del George mentions
an elegiac strain in the modern episteme. […] According to [M.H.]Abrams, the Romantics
“undertook to save the overview of human history and destiny, the experiential paradigms, and
the cardinal values of their religious heritage, by reconstructing them in a way that would make
them intellectually acceptable, as well as emotionally pertinent, for the time being,” which was
the Era of Enlightenment. (Abrams 1971, cited in Del George 2001: 63)

Furthermore,
a scientifically informed natural theology flourished in the nineteenth century, and many of the
prominent scientific naturalists of the period were agnostics, not hostile to religion but rather
advocating a separation of spheres. Moreover, […] nineteenth-century science opened up new
paths into the occult by virtue of its explorations of objects and phenomena that elude the limited
register of the bodily senses – the invisible, unseen world surrounding us, whose properties we

25
In the Age of Enlightenment, which was established in European thought from the death of Descartes in 1650
through the death of Hume in 1776, the mechanistic Newtonian model became an overriding metaphor, and
scientific experimentation founded on empiricism became the basis for philosophical self-confidence (cf. Lavine
1984, cited in Hoppenstand 1987: 109); radical Enlightenment “rejected the existence of God and praised the
freedom of the autonomous self” (Margry 2012: 277).

12
 cannot directly observe and measure, but about which we can make strong, seemingly
incontrovertible inferences. Spiritualist claims about ghosts, for instance, suddenly seemed more
credible, and hopes about a future life compatible with, and supported by, scientific theories in
the fields of optics, thermodynamics, and mathematics. (Smajić 2010: 137)

In fact any evidence of the possible existence of ghosts now aroused intense speculation and
often prompted serious scientific investigation (cf. Briggs 1977: 31).

Paradoxically then, in the nineteenth century the development of science helped revive popular
beliefs26 (cf. Ascari 2007: 77). Both Edgar Alan Poe and Franz Anton Mesmer27 were masters
at reinventing the supernatural to suit modern sensibilities. “Between the two, miraculous
healing, exorcism, out-of-body experiences, haunting, and resurrection were presented in such
a way that they could not be rejected—at least not by the common person—as ‘superstitious’”
(Del George 2001: 74). Poe’s Gothic stories helped establish the modern tradition of
“supernatural horror” and made the two terms, ‘supernatural’ and ‘horror’, (almost)
synonymous (cf. ibid.: 7, 9). As a consequence, the positive connotations of the supernatural
were largely suppressed. Instead of being seen as reassuringly meaningful (cf. ibid.: 4), within
the modern episteme the supernatural is recognized as fearful and dangerous (as the Other of
the dominant worldview), “but it also has the subtler, yet ultimately almost comforting
implication that, in a world increasingly dominated by science and scientists, there are still more
things than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (Briggs 1977: 54). With proof of the afterlife being
foremost in people’s minds, the nature of spirits changed dramatically;
the new ghosts were essentially urban products, possessing little raison d’être beyond the mere
ability to communicate. They were invoked primarily in order that their messages might prove
the existence of the spirit world – they had no further social functions. They no longer
represented the vital links of a stable community with its dead, as ghosts had once done.
(ibid.: 52f)

The difference in attitude to the supernatural in the premodern and modern epistemes is
profound: “[a] world without the supernatural – at least in its beneficent possibilities – is fearful

26
This phenomenon is not limited to the nineteenth century; contemporary science, especially modern quantum
physics, moves far from the visible world into empirically unobservable realms and is furthermore marked by “the
abandonment of naїve realism, the loss of picturability, and the recognition of the involvement of the observer”
(Smajić 2010: 146).
27
Mesmer was an Austrian physician who popularized the doctrine or system “according to which a hypnotic state,
usually accompanied by insensibility to pain and muscular rigidity, can be induced by an influence (at first known
as ‘animal magnetism’ [– a fluid which flows throughout the universe, connecting all bodies (cf. Del George
2001:73)]) exercised by an operator over the will and nervous system of the patient” (cf. Simpson, ed. 1989).
Although Mesmer was discredited by the professional community during his lifetime, his doctrine continued on
as a fad for many years after his death and spawned a word still widely used today, namely ‘mesmerizing’ (cf. Del
George 2001: 73).

13
in premodern supernatural stories; a world with the supernatural – imagined entirely in its
maleficent possibilities – is fearful in modern fantastic fiction” (Del George 2001: 27).

One crucial aspect of the premodern attitude to the supernatural is the concept of divine
detection. “[I]n the Middle Ages – according to popular belief – the primary agent of detection
was divine providence. People believed that God, being inherently just, could not tolerate crime
going unpunished. [...][T]he idea of divine detection was coherent with the ideological
framework of Christianity which conceived truth as the fruit of revelation rather than as the
result of a process” (Ascari 2007: 19). Supernatural entities were believed to ensure the
detection of notably murder – the capital sin (cf. ibid.: 18). This concept did not vanish
immediately with the advent of the modern episteme. The transition from divine to scientific
detection involved a long experimental phase, “when both patterns did not simply vie for
supremacy, but often combined to create effects of tension and surprise” (ibid.: 65). Esoteric
and pseudo-scientific forms of inquiry reflected the public’s new-found interest in spiritualism
in the nineteenth century. “Since at the origin of the spiritualist vogue for séances and mediums
there is a ghost denouncing his own murder, one can surmise that this new belief in
communication with the spirits helped to revive the old paradigm of supernatural detection”
(ibid.: 57f, cf. ‘occult detective fiction’ on p. 36f of this paper). Eventually, following the failure
of science to provide proof of the afterlife, the idea of supernatural detection tapered off until
the next major revival, the New Age movement28 in the 1960s and 70s and its belief in the
occult.

The continuous resurfacing of the supernatural despite all scientific rebuttals and lack of proof
shows its immense cultural importance. “[T]he supernatural is doing very well for itself in the
20th century—as it always has done. So we naturally ask: why? And, equally naturally, we turn
to psychology for a few answers—to find, of course, that some of the most widely accepted and
frequently cited of these answers are those offered by Freud” (Hill/Williams 1965/89: 22).

In his essay on the uncanny, “Das Unheimliche”29, Freud complains:

28
The New Age movement is not a unified movement and the more correct term would be New Religious
Movements (although some critics argue that the two are distinct and different from each other, cf. Heelas 1996: 9).
This revival of alternative religious beliefs originates in the counter-culture of the 1960s and these beliefs have
since entered the mainstream of cultural thought and debate, becoming commonplace instead of ridiculed (cf.
Partridge 2004: 51)
29
Freud defines the uncanny (das Unheimliche) as
14
 Es scheint, daß wir alle in unserer individuellen Entwicklung eine diesem Animismus der
Primitiven entsprechende Phase durchgemacht haben, daß sie bei keinem von uns abgelaufen
ist, ohne noch äußerungsfähige Reste und Spuren zu hinterlassen, und daß alles, was uns heute
als “unheimlich” erscheint, die Bedingung erfüllt, daß es an diese Reste animistischer
Seelentätigkeit rührt und sie zur Äußerung anregt. (1919/online)

In essence, we may all still carry within us the vestiges of animistic belief which can be
reactivated in certain circumstances, particularly when we find ourselves in situations that lack
an obvious rational explanation30. In part, this might also explain why most people are able to
set aside their 20th-century scepticism and accept the apparently impossible premises on which
stories of the supernatural are built (cf. Hill/Williams 1965/89: 20).31

The other meaningful explanation of the phenomenon is provided by genre theory, which
explains genres as cognitive frameworks according to which the reader accommodates textual
information to particular ‘models of the world’ (Weltmodellen), a process called ‘naturalization’
(cf. Neumann/Nünning 2007: 45):
Demzufolge bemühen sich Leser darum, die Fremdheit von Texten zu reduzieren und neuartige
Phänomene an bestehende kognitive Strukturen anzupassen[.][…] Bei diesem Prozess der

etwas wiederkehrendes Verdrängtes [...]. Diese Art des Ängstlichen wäre eben das Unheimliche und dabei muß es
gleichgültig sein, ob es ursprünglich selbst ängstlich war oder von einem anderen Affekt getragen. Zweitens, wenn
dies wirklich die geheime Natur des Unheimlichen ist, so verstehen wir, daß der Sprachgebrauch das Heimliche in
seinen Gegensatz, das Unheimliche übergehen läßt, denn dies Unheimliche ist wirklich nichts Neues oder Fremdes,
sondern etwas dem Seelenleben von alters her Vertrautes, das ihm nur durch den Prozeß der Verdrängung entfremdet
worden ist. (1919/online)
30
Or, as Margry points out, when we encounter situations that are or seem beyond our control. According to
Margry, the existential self of the “common Westerner” turns to religion (i. e. the transcendental) when necessary
(in difference to members of certain other cultures whose lives are more intrinsically laced with religion and
religious feeling and are thus never ‘turned away’ therefrom); “when unhappiness, loneliness, problems, and
untreatable diseases or mental illnesses impinge upon daily life, people’s perceptions change and they tend to feel
some kind of religious need” (2012: 278).
31
Inquiring into the possible psychological functions served by the paranormal, Harvey J. Irwin has foregrounded
the
basic human psychological need for a sense of understanding life events. An assurance of order and meaning in the
physical and social world is thought to be essential for emotional security and psychological adjustment […].
Traumatic events and anomalous experiences, however, pose a potential threat to a state of assurance, in essence
because they can be taken to imply the world sometimes is uncertain, chaotic, and beyond the individual’s
understanding and mastery. By incorporating a system of paranormal beliefs, the individual has a cognitive
framework for effectively structuring many events and experiences in life so that they appear comprehensible and
thereby able to be mastered, at least intellectually. Under this view, paranormal belief constitutes a cognitive bias
through which reality may be filtered without threatening the individual’s sense of emotional security. In essence,
the way in which paranormal beliefs achieve this effect is by creating an ‘illusion of control’ (Langer 1975) over
events that are anomalous or are in reality not controllable by the individual. (Irwin 2009: 101f; see also Irwin
1993: 26)
According to Todorov, supernatural beings compensate for a deficient causality. While some events in everyday
life can be explained by known causes, other appear to be due to chance; these chance events have an isolated
causality, not linked to other causal series controlling our life (cf. 1970/73: 110). “If, however, instead of accepting
the intervention of chance, we postulate a generalized causality, a necessary relation of all the facts among
themselves [– Todorov terms this ‘pan-determinism’ –], we must admit the intervention of supernatural forces or
beings hitherto unknown to us” (ibid.).

15
 kognitiven Komplexitätsreduktion stellt das Wissen um bestimmte Gattungskonventionen einen
wahrnehmungs- und interpretationsleitenden Rezeptions- bzw. Naturalisierungsrahmen bereit.
(ibid.)

The power of genre is that it makes us believe for the moment of reception all kinds of
impossible phenomena and once the appropriate genre is activated in our mind, the elements
particular to that genre do not occasion surprise nor break the aesthetic illusion.32

1.3. The Supernatural in Literature: Functions

Todorov distinguishes between a “literary function and a social function of the supernatural [in
literature]” (1970/73: 158) and recognizes three literary functions of the supernatural in
literature (cf. ibid.: 162): a pragmatic function33 (the supernatural disturbs, alarms, keeps the
reader in suspense), a semantic function (the supernatural constitutes its own manifestation, it
is an auto-designation) and a syntactical function (the supernatural enters into the development
of the narrative). The table below illustrates Todorov’s classification of the functions of
supernatural in literature to which I have added my own propositions (marked by *), and which
will hopefully make the following explanation easier to follow:

Social/*cultural function Literary function

Pragmatic
Semantic
Syntactical
*Metareferential
Table 1: Functions of the supernatural in literature (*my addition/proposition)

32
Furthermore, as children we learn about the world through fairy-tales which are filled with fantastic and
supernatural elements and therefore we are habituated to setting aside our scepticism and accepting for the time of
reception the ‘naturalised’ rules of a particular miniature model of the world represented by a literary text.
33
The German term “wirkungsästhetisch” would be more suitable in this instance.

16
The pragmatic function of the supernatural in literature is certainly the most obvious of the
three. Although the supernatural lost its intellectual credibility once the ‘law of science’ began
its conquest of Western culture, “its emotional power lived on. Modern authors continued to
make use of the premodern cosmology for poignant or dreadful emotional effects” (Del George
2001: 50). A craving for a sense of the numinous appears to have remained among nineteenth-
century readers (and to an extent has continued to the present day). The syntactical function
provides an interesting field of exploration in terms of what role the supernatural plays in the
story plot.

To Todorov’s three literary functions of the supernatural in literature (the pragmatic, the
semantic and the syntactical) I propose adding a further, metareferential function34, which is
less obvious and has often been completely missed, but might prove of no less importance.
Cavaliero calls the supernatural element in literature
the joker in the pack, its value undetermined. It insists on a corrective to the limitations of
naturalism as commonly understood; it declines to repose either in a simplistic materialism or
in a materialistic ‘spirituality’. Its proffered ‘shared reality’ extends beyond what is normally
accepted as believable: in order to recognize its ‘truth’ we have to envisage a limitation in the
‘not true’ that confers on it its identity as fiction[.] (1995: 13)

Todorov claims that “by the hesitation it engenders, the fantastic questions precisely the
existence of an irreducible opposition between real and unreal” (1970/73: 167). The
intervention of the supernatural element in Western literature since the Enlightenment prompts
the reader to question his or her assumptions about the nature of truth and fiction, it always –
in social life as in narrative – constitutes a break in the system of pre-established rules “and in
doing so finds its justifications” (ibid.: 166).

In its social function, the supernatural in literature may serve as a pretext to describe things that
authors would never have dared mention in realistic terms (cf. Penzold35 quoted in Todorov
1970/73: 158), like incest, homosexuality, necrophilia, excessive sensuality, etc. The function
of the supernatural in that case “is to exempt the text from the action of the law and thereby to
transgress that law” (Todorov 1970/73: 159). However, such a pretext is no longer needed

34
According to Werner Wolf,
[m]etareference […] establishes a secondary reference to texts and media (and related issues) as such by, as it were,
viewing them ‘from the outside’ of a meta-level from whose perspective they are consequently seen as different from
unmediated reality and the content of represented worlds. (2009: 22f)

35
No bibliographical information on Penzold is provided by Todorov.

17
today, as taboos can be dealt with quite openly in literature. Another important social function
of the supernatural is the resistance to materialism and scientific positivism36. Scientific
advances brought both “improving material circumstances and increasing spiritual discomfort”
(Briggs 1977: 24). Ghost stories suggest that scientific explanations, convincing as they may
be, are not necessarily the right ones (cf. Smajić 2010: 55f) – or rather the only ones possible.
According to Briggs, to believe in the existence of ghosts is to believe in a morally ordered
universe. Beneath its more obvious terrors, the ghost story provides reassurance that there is
something beyond and “[m]an [is] not, as he had come to fear, alone in a universe infinitely
older, larger, wilder and less anthropocentric than he had previously supposed” (Briggs
1977: 24).

I propose an extension of Todorov’s social function of the supernatural in literature to the larger
framework of culture as a meaning-making system, postulating that popular literature dealing
with the supernatural creates a particular cultural meaning and thereby performs a specific
cultural function. The cultural functions of popular literature (more specifically, formula
fiction) have first been analysed by John Cawelti and later taken up by other scholars, among
them Gary Hoppenstand, whose positioning of the supernatural and the detective formula on
the opposite ends of the spectrum of mystery fiction will be of particular value for the present
research.

36
A good example thereof is Charles Dickens’ “The Signalman” (1866).

18
2. Supernatural and Detective Stories – Two Sides of the Same
Coin?: Popular Literature, Generic Conventions

2.1. Popular Literature and Culture

In In Search of the Paper Tiger, Hoppenstand defines narrative or ‘story’ as

a communication device that […] ritualizes the unknown into understandable concepts, and it
conceptualizes the understandable into predictable patterns of action. […] The singular ability
of a particular story to unite common experience for a social group, despite the plurality of
individualism, suggests that the more basic the story’s plot, the more predictable its message,
the more fundamental the story’s characters—then, the more successful its function. (1987: 11)

Cawelti describes a work of art as consisting of “a complex of symbols or myths that are
imaginative orderings of experience” (1976: 27). These myths exist within the socioeconomic
ideology of a society and function as a tool of that ideology’s own legitimized creation (cf.
Hoppenstand 1987: 13). According to Richard Slotkin, mythology is “a complex of narratives
that dramatizes a world vision of a culture or a group of people” (1973, cited in ibid.). As myth
is an expression of society, the popular literary formula is an expression of myth and both are
not only intellectual by-products of socialization, but are the means of socialization themselves
(cf. ibid.: 15). “Variations of myth-narrative arise when new stimuli are introduced into the
culture, and refinements of story are performed. Thus, popular stories serve as a textbook of
social norms and expectations” (ibid.).

Formula is one of the leading devices on which myth is employed. Cawelti defines formula as
“a combination or synthesis of a number of specific cultural conventions with a more universal
story form or archetype37. It is also similar in many ways to the traditional literary conception
of a genre” (1976: 6). Cawelti sees two properties as essential for formula fiction:
standardization or convention, which establishes a common ground between writers and
audiences, and invention – the ability to give new vitality to stereotypes and the capacity to
invent new touches of plot or setting that are still within formulaic limits (cf. ibid.: 8ff). This
dialectic of convention and invention is however not particularly novel (having been a crucial

37
Cawelti's definition of ‘archetype’ is rather vague; he sees an archetype as a truly vitalized stereotype which has
transcended its particular cultural moment and has maintained an interest for later generations and other cultures
(cf. 1976: 11).

19
concern of neo-classicist literature) nor is it restricted to popular literature or formula fiction –
rather the dialectic is something essential to genre fiction in general. The question therefore
begs itself, what distinguishes formula fiction from genre fiction?38 A possible answer can be
found in the specific way literary formulas fulfil two basic human psychological needs: first,
the need for intense excitement and interest to get away from the boredom and ennui of the
relatively secure, routine and organized life of the average contemporary American and
Western European, and second, seeking escape from the ultimate insecurities and ambiguities
of everyday life, such as death, the failure of love, the inability to accomplish all desired goals,
the threat of global catastrophe39 (cf. ibid.: 15f). This is generally true of much, if not all,
representational culture, of course. Formula fiction is specific in that it confronts “the ultimate
excitement of love and death” in a conventionalized way, so that our basic sense of security and
order is intensified rather than disrupted (vs. ‘high’ literature which tends to cause the latter by
engaging with and exploring cultural insecurities and ambiguities) (cf. ibid.: 16).

As formulas are cultural products, they in turn presumably have some sort of influence on
culture because they become conventional ways of representing and relating certain images,
symbols, themes, and myths (cf. ibid.: 20). Cawelti suggests four interrelated hypotheses about
the dialectic between formulaic literature and the culture that produces and enjoys it: first,
formula stories affirm existing interests and attitudes by presenting an imaginary world that is
aligned with these interests and attitudes; second, formulas resolve tensions and ambiguities
resulting from the conflicting interests of different groups within the culture or from ambiguous
attitudes toward particular values; third, formulas enable the audience to explore in fantasy the
boundary between the permitted and the forbidden and to experience in a carefully controlled
way the possibility of stepping across this boundary; and fourth, literary formulas assist in the
process of assimilating changes in values to traditional imaginative constructs and thus
contribute to cultural continuity (cf. ibid.: 35f). It is the last two that I feel come into play the

38
‘Genre’ is a problematic concept in academic discussion since it denotes many different things (the three major
literary modes, i. e. poetry, prose and drama; various instantiations of the three major literary modes, like tragedy,
thriller, elegy; various types of text classification (cf. Gymnich/Neumann 2007: 31). Hoppenstand uses the term
genre as the hypercategory of formula and distinguishes three genres (fantasy, mystery, romantic-adventure) with
many different formulas (cf. 1987: 23) and when discussing Hoppenstand’s work, ‘genre’ will be used in this
sense. In the remainder of the thesis, the more common use designating “[a] recurring type or category of text, as
defined by structural, thematic and/or functional criteria” (Duff 2000: xiii) will be applied (e. g. detective fiction
genre).
39
Note the oxymoron; while the reader according to Cawelti wishes to flee the boredom of a secure, routine life,
they at the same time seek an escape from the insecurities and ambiguities of life.

20
most in detective stories featuring the supernatural: firstly, because in contemporary Western
secularized and rationalistic cultures, the supernatural has been banned to the outskirts of the
realm of the real/possible and a discussion of the supernatural as anything other than
superstition and/or delusion is essentially ‘forbidden’ in the discourse of realism and; secondly,
because certain current cultural trends show an increasing de-secularization of society, as well
as a growing pluralization of worldviews as an effect of globalism and the resulting discourse
with cultures which have a markedly different view of the supernatural to our own, one that can
either be seen as threatening (e. g. religious fanaticism with its determinism) or reassuring (e. g.
beliefs about the healing powers of nature or the transformative power of spirituality).

Hoppenstand, however, feels that Cawelti’s hypotheses fail to explore the particulars of formula
construction and formula function in any meaningful way (cf. 1987: 19). In order to elucidate
the mechanisms of formula construction and function, he employs social psychology and
psycho-linguistics. He argues that formula is first and foremost a social tool that enables society
to impose its objective reality on the individual (cf. ibid.) and is not so much fantasy or escapism
as it is “an active and effective method for maintaining the mechanisms of social control”
(ibid.). Formula fiction is also a language system that defines reality and transmits knowledge
over space and time. Through the process of reading, print is translated into meaningful
cognitive understanding (cf. Smith 1978, cited in Hoppenstand 1987: 21). Reading is most
effective when a contextual frame is imposed upon the content; it is an active process and the
greater the amount of knowledge the reader can bring to the text, the greater the meaning the
reader derives.
Formula fiction provides the ability for active reader participation40 since it is part of the
socialization process that defines reality. By its conventional nature, formula fiction reduces
social uncertainty as it offers a predictable story frame, and because of the redundancy of story
motifs in formula fiction, it effectively incorporates prior reader knowledge that facilitates the
communication of that knowledge. (Hoppenstand 1987: 21)

Hoppenstand seems to take a more deterministic view of formula fiction as one which regulates
the creation and perpetuation of cultural meaning. While this regulatory function of popular
literature, the maintaining of the mechanisms of social control and perpetuating particular
dominant worldviews, is indeed important, Hoppenstand only briefly addresses the

40
In fact, all art (and therefore, literature) activates the reader, yet to different degrees – a so-called ‘high-culture’
product arguably requires much more reader activation than popular literature like that of Agatha Christie.

21
transgressions of formulas provided by generic contaminations and hybrids41 like super-
natural/occult detective fiction (cf. Chapter 3.1 below), nor does he seem to recognize the chal-
lenges these hybrids provide to the dominant worldview normally perpetuated by formula
fiction. Indeed his study is mainly focused on establishing a connection between literary studies
and sociology, and as such it provides an excellent starting point for my endeavour to establish
a connection between the increasing body of detective fiction literature dealing with the
supernatural and the recent socio-cultural changes in contemporary Western culture.

2.2. The Mystery Formula of Popular Literature

According to Hoppenstand, the hierarchical structure of the language of formula follows from
its smallest unit, the motif (“the written symbol of an object that functions as a catalyst of a
story” which usually “suggests[s] a complex of meaning and information that transcends the
physical object itself” (1987: 22)), to motif-complexes, sub-formulas, formulas and finally,
genres. Genre is the largest general unit of a collection of formulas. There are three genres in
American (we could probably extend this to Western European literature as well) mass-
mediated popular print fiction: the fantasy genre, the mystery genre and the romantic-adventure
genre (cf. Hoppenstand 1987: 23). This paper deals with the mystery genre of popular fiction,
which is comprised of six formulas – of which two will be of particular interest to us: the
supernatural formula42 (stories which pit man against those forces of the universe which are
beyond his understanding or control) and the detective formula (which includes stories of the
classical, police, hard-boiled and avenger detective heroes)(cf. ibid.: 24).43

Since the mystery genre is “shaded by conflict (between life and death at the most basic level),
its creation and its consumption ultimately reflect an attempt on the part of its producers and its

41
Hoppenstand acknowledges that “[t]he definitions of [...] formula[s] are not static, not set in concrete[,] [t]hey
flex and flow and merge with the boundaries of each other[,]” and in part explains this by the “‘building block’
function of motif complexes[,]” where authors can arrange various such blocks to build a sub-formula story for
the purposes of variation and novelty which determine the economic success of their work (cf. 1987: 33f).
42
Interestingly, Cawelti places the ghost story in a wholly different genre, namely that of alien beings/states. He
justifies this by differentiating between a mystery which has a rational explanation (i. e. mystery formula) and a
mystery which cannot be explained away, instead, it has to be somehow dealt with. According to Cawelti, in the
true mystery formula, a secret, once discovered and explained, is no longer capable of disturbing or troubling us
(cf. 1976: 43). However, Hoppenstand’s scheme seems more useful for the purposes of this thesis.
43
The other four mystery formulas are the fiction (roman) noir formula (contains urban pathos and revenge), the
gangster formula (stories of good and bad organized criminals), the thief formula (tales of good and bad individual
criminals) and the thriller (encompasses political and suspense stories) (cf. Hoppenstand 1987: 24).

22
audience to rationalize on the nature of death and dying and celebrate the rational”
(Hoppenstand 1987: 24). In Gothic fiction (which is a subformula of the supernatural formula)
the supernatural functions both as a world destroying and world-maintaining device: it threatens
the individual with an unpleasant outcome of the death crisis dilemma on one hand, while
encouraging identification with spiritual and/or moral good (like God) on the other – providing
a kind of cultural ‘roadmap’ which directs the individual towards salvation (eternal life)(cf.
ibid.: 43). In the dark fantasy tale, the individual is also pitted against the greater forces of the
cosmos, however here the individual is totally destroyed as a result of their investigations into
the mysteries of life and of the cosmos itself. Ignorance is bliss, while knowledge is damning
(a concept which reminds strongly of the biblical Fall of Man) and the individual is warned
against leaving the confines of society in search of cosmic truth (cf. ibid.: 52f).44

The detective fiction formula, at first glance, might seem the complete opposite of the
supernatural formula. In its basic form, classical detective stories begin with an unsolved crime
and move toward the elucidation of its mystery by rational/empirical means. The crime
symbolizes not only an infraction of the law but a disruption of the normal order of society. The
detective restores order by correctly placing clues, which have been wrenched out of their
proper context, back into their logical position in a sequence of action. A clear and meaningful
order emerges out of seemingly random and chaotic events and once we have arrived at the
detective’s solution, we have arrived at the truth, the single right perspective and ordering of
events (cf. Cawelti 1976: 80-101).

The boundaries between the particular formulas within a genre flex and merge. Even though
supernatural fiction and detective fiction are at the opposite ends of the mystery spectrum, one
can find stories that effectively combine elements of both formulas – in a ghost-detective, for
example (cf. Hoppenstand 1987: 33). We can expect the combination of the supernatural and
detective formulas to feature a detective who is actively involved with supernatural forces
which are usually beyond human understanding and control; and we can expect the detective to
possess some innate personal qualities which make them better equipped to deal with the

44
A prime example of a dark fantasy tale/detective story hybrid is Philip Kerr's Prayer (2014), see p. 41 of this
paper.

23
supernatural than the average individual (in addition to the detective’s personal qualities
required to solve rational mysteries).

On a linear spectrum between the Irrational and the Rational within the mystery genre, the
supernatural story lies closest to the former, while the detective story is closest to the latter. The
difference is marked and crucial for our analysis of the supernatural in detective fiction:
The supernatural formula includes those stories which investigate the relationship between life
and death, and which assume the form of a conflict between human being and nature (or
supernature), with the human being recognizing that the power of nature is far greater. The
protagonist, or hero, of this formula during the course of the conflict is diminished in stature, or
destroyed, and death, as agent of nature, is perceived as, at best, incomprehensible, and, at worst,
dominant. Rational explanations of the individual’s place in his universe are subservient to the
irrational; […] [k]nowledge itself becomes evil, and is of little use against the agents of nature.
This subformula represents the most pessimistic vision of the individual’s relationship with the
unknown. (Hoppenstand 1987: 34)

At the rational end of the mystery genre spectrum is […] the detective formula. Here the mystery
of life and death is fully symbolized as a puzzle, which possesses a solution. The detective hero
is the puzzle-solver who attempts (and succeeds) to dispense rational explanations of irrational
events (i. e., murder and theft). The individual, as detective hero, is in total control of Fate,
justice and even death itself. Though evil exists, it can be controlled, and even be destroyed by
the hero. (ibid.: 36)

Notably, both formulas deal with knowledge and knowing – in other words, with epistemology.
One of the methods for determining the epistemology of a given detective story is to analyse it
as an epistemological allegory (cf. Brunner 2008).

2.3. Detective Stories as Epistemological Allegories

Del George points out that modern Western culture, which believes in cunning but not in
miracles, is not comfortable with mysteries and in this way stands out from the majority of
cultures throughout history and around the world (cf. 2001: 46). “[E]ncountering the
unexpected, particularly if it resists, or appears to resist, explanation, belongs to the most
outstanding and memorable moments of human experience and triggers what has repeatedly
been attributed to narratives in general, namely the urge to make sense of such experience”
(Wolf 2008: 172f). This discomfort with mysteries and the urge to explain them forms the basic
dynamic of detective stories, which can be read as “epistemological allegories” once we assume
a correspondence between the fictional world (the allegorical frame of reference) and reality
(the literal frame of reference), between the detective and his access to the truth about a criminal
case and humankind and access to knowledge in general. […] We can also assume that if the
detective is understood as the equivalent of the human intellect best equipped to access the truth

24
 in our world, it would entail that whichever method he [or she] uses is implied to be the ideal
method one should use to acquire knowledge in reality. (Brunner 2008: 12)

In her diploma thesis titled Analysing Analysis: Detective Stories as Epistemological Allegories
(2008), Carmen Brunner explores the readability (i. e. the ability of ascribing correct meaning
to signs) of the fictional world of the detective story and how it correlates to ideas of the
readability of the world at large in particular historical time periods:
Through the detective’s ascribing of the ‘correct’ meaning to [the] signs [of the ‘hidden story’
of the crime/mystery], the fictional world (ideally) becomes readable. The detective can
therefore be seen as a mise-en-abyme of the reader (who reads a story inside of which a detective
reads a story) which technically is a duplication of the level of cognition. As readers, we observe
the reading process and thus the readability of the world becomes a central issue of detective
fiction. (10)

The components of the epistemological allegory in detective fiction are presented in the table
below, taken from Brunner (2008: 13):

VEHICLE TERTIUM TENOR

The literal basis
Fictional world
Setting of the mystery and
the traces left by it
COMPARATIONIS The allegorical meaning
The semiotic analogy
Reading process ‘Real’ world
Page(s) to be read Area of the world considered

Detective Best equipped reader Ideal intellect

Detective’s companion Only partly literate or Average intellect,

(‘Watson-figure’) illiterate reader (Stand-in for the recipient)

Mystery Disorder, opacity Anything unknown to us

(Crime, often murder) (Effect without visible cause)

Clues, red herrings, testi- Helpful or misleading Anything open to perception

monies, ‘evidence’ semiotic signs

Solution of the mystery Correct meaning of the Specific truth of a given

text mystery

Assumptions underlying the Code, Language Epistemological basis, ‘the

detection method order of things’, general Truth

Table 2: Components of the epistemological allegory in detective fiction (Brunner 2008: 13)

25
If the detective is able to read (i. e. perceive and interpret) the fictional world correctly, then
the story implies a worldview according to which the mysteries of the world are readable,
meaning that some absolute and objective truth exists and knowledge thereof can be acquired
with the right method. Conversely, if the detective is unable to read the fictional world correctly,
either the existence of absolute, objective truth or the (suit)ability of the ideal human intellect
to acquire knowledge thereof, or both, are implicitly questioned. One of the central questions
of Brunner’s thesis is: How readable does the fictional world present itself (cf. ibid: 10)? Or
applied to the present paper: How readable does the supernatural in the fictional world present
itself? And how does the supernatural influence the readability of the fictional world, is the
fictional world more or less readable because of it?

Given that the detective represents the ideal human intellect, the one best equipped to
understand and make sense of the world, it seems possible to draw conclusions about what a
person should be like in order to acquire knowledge and understand the world, based on how
the detective is presented (cf. Brunner 2008: 14f). Here Brunner looks at two areas: the
detective’s skills and interests, and their position in society (whether isolated or integrated, how
they are perceived by others)(cf. ibid: 15). The way the detective is presented is similarly
important for the present analysis of the supernatural in detective fiction, especially considering
questions such as: What skills and interests enable the detective to deal with the enigma of the
supernatural? Is an isolated detective more effective in solving supernatural mysteries than one
socially integrated? Does dealing with the supernatural isolate the detective or connect them
with others? In a footnote to the main text, Brunner mentions:
The Western world has produced three main types of authorities which are believed to be able
to aid humankind in the understanding of the world because they have access to complex
knowledge and general truth; namely the priest, the artist and the scientist. The influence and
prestige of each type varies from period to period. (Brunner 2008: 15, Footnote 26)

While perhaps not crucial to Brunner’s analysis, this insight becomes more central where the
supernatural is involved; the supernatural namely normally falls into the domain of religion
and/or spirituality and has been all but excluded from mainstream science. The classical
detective seems to be a mixture of scientist and artist (most notably Sherlock Holmes) 45, only
occasionally does the detective take on the role of spiritual guide as well (the obvious exception

45
Cawelti also notes that “aesthetic and scientific attitudes toward crime are by no means irreconcilable, since
both depend on a certain detachment from intense moral feeling. On the popular level, the figure of Sherlock
Holmes with his combination of artistic and scientific interests constitutes an imaginative synthesis of aesthetic
intuition and empirical rationalism” (1976: 58).

26
being Father Brown). Will the more scientific classical type of detective be able to deal with
the supernatural as a fact of the textual reality or will a different type of authority need to be
invoked?

In representing humankind’s quest for knowledge, the detection process is situated at the centre
of epistemological allegory in detective fiction (cf. Brunner 2008: 16) and the method of
investigation used by the detective is thus another important indicator of the implied worldview
of a detective story. In detective fiction featuring the supernatural, the prominent question is
how effective the generically established ratiocinative investigation methods are in
investigating mysteries involving the supernatural, providing a clue to whether the supernatural
is something that can ultimately be known or whether it continues to remain a mystery.

In order to recapitulate the principles of analysing detective stories as epistemological allegories

and cultural formulas, the following Figure 1 will serve as a general roadmap:

Figure 1: Map of the interrelations between detective stories and culture

The figure shows how detective stories serve to both represent and reproduce/disseminate
dominant cultural worldviews, as well as how the implied worldview of a particular detective
story can be determined by analysing the latter as an epistemological allegory.

27
Keeping in mind Del George’s distinction of the two major cultural epistemes (the premodern
and the modern) and their laws (the law of authority operating within the premodern episteme;
the law of science and the law of total fiction operating within the modern episteme), we can
assume that the epistemological premises exhibited in detective fiction from various ages will
correspond to this shift in episteme46. The main aim of analysing detective stories as
epistemological allegories is to deduce the “epistemological worldview governing [a] particular
detective story” (Brunner 2008: 10), and one of the essential domains of worldviews is the
possibility of an after-life (cf. Wolf 2008: 170). It seems therefore as if detective stories are
unexpectedly quite well-suited to the exploration of the supernatural, a claim which I believe
the analysis of the chosen works will support – as will the following overview of the
supernatural in detective fiction.

46
Brunner too shows how the epistemology in a particular strand of detective fiction correspond to the “changes
taking place in actual (cultural, philosophical, etc.) history” (2008: 5).

28
3. Overview of the Supernatural in Detective Fiction and
Methodology for Analysis

3.1. The Shadow Side of Detective Fiction: An Overview of the

Supernatural in Detective Stories

“It is hard to believe that it is merely coincidence that the author who perfected the Gothic short
story […] was also a principle founder of the detective tradition in English[,]” Chris Baldick
(1999: 189) points out. At first glance, throwing detective fiction in with the Gothic seems
ludicrous. The former, in its classical form, is a purely ratiocinative genre while the latter is
‘littered’ with ‘irrational elements’, ghosts, ruined castles, evil villains. And yet upon closer
inspection we find that these seeming opposites are a carefully constructed ploy intending to
separate the genres from each other in the minds of readers and critics alike and hide detective
fiction’s ‘infamous’ roots. Early critics – who were notably also writers of detective fiction –
sought to raise the status of the detective genre and make it acceptable for academic study in
times when literary criticism distinguished between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular literature, with
only the former being worthy of serious consideration.47 It was therefore essential to prove that
detective fiction had nothing in common with its shadow self – sensational and Gothic
literature.

The first break from this restrictive approach may have been the shift in focus from detective
to crime fiction. In Bloody Murder (1972), Julian Symons asserts that “the detective story, along
with the police story, the spy story and the thriller […] makes up part of the hybrid creature we
call sensational literature” (Symons 1972/94: 16). Sensationalism is a literary phenomenon
which “was rooted in a wide range of discourses, […] including the gothic, melodrama, the
Newgate novels, the street literature of broadsides and the nascent mass medium of journalism”
(Ascari 2007: 111).

47
The opposition between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, a distinction established in the nineteenth century, was first
bridged by post-modernist writers seeking to define themselves against the Modernist tradition by exploiting its
polar opposite, popular literature (cf. Fiedler 1969/84, “Cross that Border – Close that Gap: Post-Modernism”).
The detective story, due to its highly formalized and rigid nature, was particularly suitable for this endeavour (cf.
Holquist 1971: 147-149).

29
This inclusive and comprehensive approach opened new vistas into the study of detective fic-
tion and fostered analyses like Stefano Tani’s, who in his seminal work The Doomed Detective
(1984) draws parallels between detective fiction and the Gothic through a study of the first
detective stories (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”
(1842) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844)), written by Edgar Allan Poe. According to Tani, it
is possible to
identify two main eighteenth-century literary currents that merge in Poe’s creation and remain
fundamental in every further development in the genre. We may refer to them, broadly, as the
intellectual and the popular impulses as these are reflected, respectively, in works like Voltaire’s
Zadig and the typical Gothic tale, the one generally static, ratiocinative, and philosophical, the
other adventurous, atmospheric, emotionally suspenseful. (1984: 1)

Other critics have also paid tribute to detective fiction’s association with the Gothic. Stephen
Knight writes in Crime Fiction 1800-2000 that Poe’s detective stories “were to bring together
for the first time the Gothic melodrama that had been a major element in early crime fiction
with the concept of a clever explanatory figure” (2004: 25). John Scaggs draws “certain
parallels with the Gothic novel” (2005: 106f) when discussing the crime thriller. Baldick makes
a pertinent observation about the importance of the Gothic for the development of detective
fiction:
The Gothic novel has some importance as a forerunner of modern mystery and crime fiction,
chiefly because it habituated the nineteenth-century reading public to the heightened
manipulation of suspense […] and to the sensational treatment of violent crimes and of the secret
conspiracies involved with them. The missing element is usually that of detective investigation,
for which there is often little scope in Gothic fiction[.] […] Some rudimentary investigation—
in the form of domestic spying—is common in Gothic novels, but is usually restricted by the
enclosed space in which the investigator is permitted to move, and characterized by mistaken
inferences[.] (1999: 189)

The Gothic therefore was an important background to detective fiction – indeed there is a
‘rational’ strand of Gothic fiction which features the ‘supernatural explained’ (as in Ann
Radcliffe’s novels; also termed ‘tales of terror’ (vs. ‘tales of horror’)) – but what is it exactly
that made Poe’s stories so popular that they prompted a whole new genre48? Tani sees the rev-
olutionary achievement of Poe in “his fusion of the rational and the irrational literary currents”
(1984: 4) and in his formalizing of “the conflict between irrational and rational forces wherein
the latter is always the winner, exorcising the former” (ibid.: 10). Stephen Knight writes that

48
Ascari points out that “a ‘foundation myth’ identifying Poe as the father of detection was created to support a
normative view of the genre” (2007: 10). His criticism is very much in line with the view of detective fiction as
crime fiction.

30
Poe’s detective stories “condense the idea of Gothic thrill and rational inquiry: […][they] im-
pose the mastery of a mind on the unusual and stimulating” (2004: 28). John Cawelti notes that
Poe’s Gothic and detective stories shared the theme of hidden guilt and “[b]oth coincided
culturally with the decline of the old regime and the rise of the middle class to social and cultural
dominance” (1976: 102). The nineteenth century was a period of great changes; the rise of
science and changes in the structure of European society (most notably through the French
Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century) produced anxieties which found a release in
the Gothic49 and which detective stories attempted to exorcise50 through their rationalization of
crime and restoring of social order. And yet the irrational is always present in detective fiction
(cf. Tani 1984: 7) and not just in the form of murder as the ultimate disruption of social order
but also in the very nature of the detective; while it may seem that some detectives are reason
personified, even the most rationalistic classical detectives possess an element of the irrational,
which usually finds expression in the detective’s eccentricities.

Dupin, the prototypical detective, is thus for instance described by Tani as

an essential Romantic hero, the absolute individualist, almost a divinity through the power of
his double gift, imagination and reason. His reason (or judgment) is almost preternaturally
developed, and through imagination, or an intensely active kind of fancy […][,] he can
intuitively feel out the universe. But he is not an innocent Romantic hero. (1984: 4)

Cawelti makes a similar observation:

When one thinks about it, the close resemblance between Dupin and the gothic villain is
immediately clear. Both are demonically brilliant, night-loving creatures, and both are involved
in plotting out elaborate and complex stratagems. One might interpret Poe’s invention of the
detective as a means of bringing the terrifying potency of the gothic villain under control of
rationality and thereby directing it to beneficial ends. (1976: 94f)

Ascari also notes the paradox inherent in Dupin as the first detective figure:
What […][a majority of] gothic novels have in common is the fact that a seemingly infinite
power is in the hands of a character who is either a true villain or else is perceived as such. Poe’s
trilogy reverses this situation, since here it is the detective who holds a supreme power that is
based on his encyclopaedic knowledge and analytical frame of mind. While the omniscience of
the villain is a source of terror, that of the detective is apparently reassuring. Yet Dupin’s vision

49
Cawelti suggests that “much of the fascination of the gothic story for the early nineteenth-century middle-class
reading public derived from the complex of feelings surrounding the breakup of long-established social and spiri-
tual hierarchies in Europe” (1976: 101)(cf. also Wolf 1995, “Angst und Schrecken als Attraktion”).

50
Although David Trotter expresses doubt in this assumption (see 1989: 221); indeed this exorcism is only
temporary and in fact crime is the ruling principle (cf. Pyrhönen 1994: 9). For gothic fiction as a continuation of
some elements of 18th century literature of sensibility see Wolf (1986).

31
 has a paradoxical quality that brings us back to the gothic, since it is not associated with light,
but with darkness. (2007: 49)

The narrator of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” describes Dupin as the supreme “analyst”
who is “fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a
degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural[,]” and whose
results have “the whole air of intuition” (Poe 1841/1912: 379). He is said to possess true
imagination (which is contrasted sharply from fancy)(cf. ibid.: 381) of a “wild fervor” and
“vivid freshness” (ibid.: 382). His temperament is of “rather fantastic gloom” (ibid.) and he
would be perceived by society – had society known him intimately – as a madman (cf. ibid.).
And however much Dupin’s imaginative powers are praised as opposed to the mere fanciful,
his love of the night is for lack of a better explanation called “a freak of fancy” and a “wild
whim” (ibid.: 382).

Dupin’s gift of ‘mind-reading’ is rationalized as minute observation and inference, and yet the
manner in which he discloses his “intimate knowledge” of people’s thoughts is decidedly odd,
“frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor,
rose into a treble which would have sounded petulant but for the deliberateness and entire
distinctness of this enunciation” (ibid.: 383). The narrator amuses himself with the fancy of “a
double Dupin – the creative and the resolvent” (ibid.). Tani notes that in order to solve a puzzle,
Dupin […] temporarily sets aside his own psyche, much in the fashion of a medium at a séance
(note the strange “treble” voice), to allow in something outside of himself, presumably the nature
or personality of the criminal. This is the “creative” side of the double Dupin’s process of
detection, a first step in the process, to be followed by activation of the “resolvent” side, the
psychological state in which Dupin makes the necessary connections and finds a harmony in
apparently disparate clues. (1984: 5)

This ambiguity and double nature of the detective is inherent in the genre of detective fiction,
although this characteristic changes in shape and intensity in subsequent forms of the genre.
While Poe produced the original formula of detective fiction, it was Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes stories which in the late nineteenth century initiated the genre’s popularity
(cf. Cawelti 1976: 80). On the surface Sherlock Holmes – who was also the model for most
classical detectives – seems the prototypical rational, scientific investigator, “the supreme man
of reason” (ibid.: 11), and yet “his character paradoxically incorporates basic qualities from a
contrary stereotype, that of the dreamy romantic poet, for Holmes is also a man of intuition, a
dreamer, and a drugtaker, who spends hours fiddling aimlessly on his violin” (ibid.). In The
Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), Holmes’ methods take on an even more uncanny and, indeed,
almost occult character.
32
Srdjan Smajić (cf. 2010: 131-136) shows how The Hound transgresses the genre’s rules by
incorporating seemingly supernatural elements which go beyond the typical red herring (as seen
in the family curse and the spectral hound of the Baskervilles). The first example of this
transgression is Holmes’ excursion in spirit to Devonshire at the beginning of the story, which
he relates to Watson:
“…I have been to Devonshire.”
“In spirit?”
“Exactly. My body has remained in this arm-chair, and has, I regret to observe, con-
sumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco. After you
left I sent down to Stamford’s for the Ordnance map of this portion of the moor, and my spirit
has hovered over it all day.” (Doyle 1901-02/89: 464)

Smajić sees Holmes’ rather ironic description of his levitating episode/out-of-body experience
as reminiscent of what spiritualists in Doyle’s times51 would call travelling clairvoyance (cf.
2010: 133). Another instance of transgression is Holmes’ act of recognizing in the portrait of
Hugo Baskerville the face of Stapelton (who is in fact Rodger Baskerville Jr.) and commenting
that “it is an interesting instance of a throw-back, which appears to be both physical and
spiritual. A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the doctrine of reincarnation”
(Doyle 1901-02/89: 533). These uncanny instances of the (seemingly) supernatural in The
Hound remind us that “detective work is everywhere haunted by the spectre of what is forbidden
in rational explanations” (Smajić 2010: 134). “Holmes acknowledges that some mysteries may
involve the supernatural and as such are beyond the grasp of secular rationalism” (ibid.) when
saying to Watson that “if we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there
is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling
back upon this one” (Doyle 1901-02/89: 464). As it turns out, there are no supernatural forces
at work in the mystery of the Baskerville hound (the supposed legendary ghostly hound is a
large dog made luminous with phosphorous) and Holmes can “la[y] the family ghost once and
for ever52” (ibid.: 541). Yet his restoration of the temporarily shaken materialist worldview “is
shadowed by his clairvoyant-like episode and his ideas of reincarnation, which summon the
ghosts of things that detective fiction denies” (Smajić 2010: 134).

51
It is not an unimportant fact that Doyle himself was a prominent spiritualist and therefore it might come as less
of a surprise that some supernatural elements managed to insinuate themselves into his Holmes stories.

52
Baldick observes that in The Hound of the Baskervilles the detective acts as illuminator of dark places – the
Gothic elements of archaic forms of despotism and cruelty – and that his intervention leads towards the security
of modern rationality (cf. 1999: 190).

33
Another one of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories involves the supernatural, if in a different
capacity. In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (1924), a mother is seen drinking her
baby’s blood and is suspected of being a vampire. The idea is to Holmes so preposterous that
he complains to Watson about seemingly (and metaleptically!) having been “switched on to a
Grimm’s fairy tale” (Doyle 1924/89: 1015). “The mere mention of the supernatural, even if it
is immediately dismissed as inapplicable, is enough to make the detective feel displaced, not
just historically (has he been teleported into the Middle Ages?) but also genre-wise” (Smajić
2010: 3). Watson proposes that “[a] living person might have the habit” (Doyle 1924/89: 1016)
due to a belief in rejuvenation by drinking blood of the young, but Holmes dismisses this
explanation as not worthy of serious attention. “This Agency stands flat-footed upon the
ground, and there it must remain. This world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply” (ibid.),
he affirms. There is in fact a rational explanation behind the mystery; the mother has seen her
mentally ill step-son poison the baby and has been sucking out the poison from the baby’s
wound, keeping the whole affair a secret from the other members of the household for fear of
causing them grief. The emphatic assertion that the supernatural has no place in detective fiction
(one which many detective fiction authors make time and again53 and which S. S. Van Dine
included as a rule in his “20 Rules”54) may point to a feeling of insecurity about the generic
purity of detective fiction (cf. Smajić 2010: 3) and an attempt to defend the materialistic,
scientific and positivistic worldview propagated by classical detective fiction. However,
what is denied entrance into the genre manages to insinuate itself into it […] [and] the
supposedly rational is everywhere55 contaminated by the supernatural, occult, or irrational; […]
the epistemological principles and investigative procedures that define detective fiction’s char-
acteristic modality are deeply implicated in what the genre insists on condescendingly treating
as ‘rubbish’ and ‘pure lunacy.’ (Smajić 2010: 3; cf. Freud 1919, the return of the repressed in
“Das Unheimliche”)

53
Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) for example, which has been hailed as the first detective novel in English,
is marked by a similar ambiguity: the supernatural elements in form of the curse of the diamond and the Indians
search for it by means of clairvoyance are debunked by a character claiming that “[w]e have nothing whatever to
do with clairvoyance, or with mesmerism, or with anything else that is hard of belief to the practical man, in the
inquiry that we are now pursuing” (1868/1994: 286) and by providing a rational (grounded in psychology)
explanation for the mystery.
54
For an explanation of the “20 rules” see Footnote 2 on p. 1 of this paper.
55
‘Everywhere’ is rather too crude and sweeping a term on Smajić’s part; it is important to note that while the
mere hint of the supernatural (especially in locked-room mysteries or a character having to be in two places at
once to commit a murder) indeed seems to exist in the detective genre, mostly the admission of the seemingly
supernatural serves to secure the boundary between reason and unreason; it can also serve as proof of the detective's
ability to find the right rational explanation for the seemingly inexplicable. We must keep in mind that Smajić is
very much reading detective fiction against the grain.

34
It must be noted that “this particular hybridization [of ghost and detective fiction] occurs prom-
inently toward the end of the nineteenth and in the early decades of the twentieth century”
(Smajić 2010: 3), a time which was also marked by an ardent interest in spiritualism.

The proliferation of spiritualism in Victorian and Edwardian times has been linked to the
increasing secularization of society and a resulting religious uncertainty (cf. Oppenheim
1985: 1) and the belief in ghosts56 has often been seen as resulting from “a dissatisfaction with
mechanistic models of the universe and the displacement of intuition- and faith-based forms of
knowledge by materialism and scientific naturalism” (Smajić 2010: 55), but to claim that this
is all spiritualism was is to ignore a crucial dimension of this phenomenon – namely that
“nineteenth-century science opened up new paths into the occult by virtue of its explorations of
objects and phenomena that elude the limited register of the bodily senses – the invisible, unseen
world surrounding us” (ibid.: 137).

Julia Oppenheim notes that, contrary to the controversial and often ridiculed status of para-
psychology today, “[t]hen, a century ago, spiritualism and psychical research loomed as very
serious business to some very serious and eminent people” (1985: 3). Far from the immediate
“triumph of the scientific method and a materialist approach to reality, […] this cultural phase
was ambivalent, involving an interest in the spiritual and in the occult” (Ascari 2007: 66). It
was felt that science (what today would be called pseudo-science, like the study of the ‘ether’)

56
The belief in ghosts can be seen as a remnant of religious belief in God and the devil, where belief in (and fear
of) a malevolent entity lingers longer than belief in a benevolent God.

35
would provide the answers to the eternal question of the afterlife and this public belief prompted
the emergence of a new kind of detective narrative – occult detection57 (cf. ibid.: 77).

Occult detective fiction originates in the 1870s in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s stories, featuring
the metaphysical physician Martin Hesselius. According to Smajić, occult detection
operates on the boundary between the natural and the supernatural worlds – and questions the
separation of the two. Occult detectives blend ratiocination with intuition, corporeal-sense observa-
tion with clairvoyance and telepathy, and effect a reconciliation of metaphysical and materialist
paradigms, and also foreground the affinities between two ostensibly divergent and antagonistic
literary genres: ghost and detective fiction. (2010: 8)

Many occult detectives are not detectives in the traditional sense of the word, but rather physi-
cians who deal with cases of spirit persecution, hauntings and other supernatural phenomena in
a variety of ways. Seeking to separate fraud from fact and employing traditional methods of
enquiry and speculation same as the classical detective, occult detectives possess “special psi
[i. e. psychic] powers and[/or] a knowledge of occult practices. They embodied a new spirit of
inquiry and speculation, functioning by turns as detectives, physicians, scientists, inventors,
healers, and priests” (Tibbets 1999: 358). LeFanu’s Dr. Hesselius (In a Glass Darkly (1872)),
for example, is more or less a chronicler of cases involving the supernatural and rarely takes an
active role in the investigation besides being an observer and, occasionally, consultant.
Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence, Physician Extraordinaire (1908) is a psychic doctor
specializing in nervous disorders, investigating cases of supernatural phenomena, notably
hauntings and spirit possession. He uses his vast knowledge and psychic powers to debunk false
hauntings and exorcise real spirits. William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost Finder
(1913) is what today would be called a parapsychologist, as he investigates supernatural
phenomena using an impressive array of instruments and gadgets in order to record and measure
spiritual activity, while also being knowledgeable about occult rituals of exorcism.

57
Supernatural detection was nothing new per se, as Ascari notes;
in the Middle Ages – according to popular belief – the primary agent of detection was divine providence. People
believed that God, being inherently just, could not tolerate crime going unpunished. Detection was often linked to
the belief in the premonitory value of dreams as divine messages which could, if correctly interpreted, guide us in the
right direction. (2007: 19)
Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies are also characterised by “the supernatural apparatus of dreams and
ghosts” (ibid.: 30) – here Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which has been recognized by some critics as a detective nar-
rative, immediately springs to mind. The Victorian public interest in spiritualism – séances, mediums and the
communication with spirits/ghosts, helped revive the old paradigm of supernatural detection (cf. ibid.: 57f; see
also p. 14 of this paper).

36
Sax Rohmer (Arthur S. Ward)’s Moris Klaw in The Dream Detective (1925) most closely
resembles the traditional private investigator, while at the same time moving close to the
supernatural as a ‘real’ fictional fact. He is a mysterious figure of indeterminable age, comic in
his eccentric appearance, manner and occupation (he owns a curio shop and collects historical
accounts of valuable relics among others), and yet he possesses incredible power and “a
tremendous and original mind” (Rohmer 1925/66: 15). His method of investigating crime
(murder and theft) or supernatural phenomena (hauntings and spirit possession) is to sleep at
the site of the crime and retrieve the thought impressions from the ether in dreams. As a criminal
investigator, he is associated with the traditionally nonplussed Inspector Grimsby of Scotland
Yard, while conducting his inquiries into the supernatural on his own. His cases are recorded
by a likewise traditional chronicler, Mr. Searles, a typical Watson figure. While Klaw’s method
and beliefs – “the Cycle of Crime, the criminal history of all valuable relics, the indestructibility
of thought” (ibid.: 63) which imprints itself upon the ether and can be retrieved, even developed
into a mental photograph – are paranormal and shrouded in pseudoscientific discourse, the
solutions to the mysteries he investigates are usually natural and a human agency is identified
as the culprit. In this, the stories more closely resemble the pattern of classical detective fiction.

Occult detective stories continued to be written in the twentieth century, but their production
dwindled considerably with the abatement of the spiritualist movement in the 1920s. Due to the
failure of science to provide proof of supernatural phenomena or the existence of spirits and the
mass debunking of charlatan mediums, the public became disillusioned by spiritualism and
turned away from it. This led to the emergence of, in Ascari’s words,
crime stories where the supernatural is offered not as an over-arching explanation of the
plot (that is, as a device framing the story and legitimising it in spite of its crude subject
matter), but rather as a transitory explanation – a picturesque and eerie component, a
frisson to be enjoyed and eventually refuted. In order to assert a new standard of
verisimilitude, the supernatural was marginalised both as an instrument of detection and
as a criminal tool, but it re-entered the genre through the back door, so to speak, for
writers were unwilling to forsake its powerful grip on the public. Re-enacting the
transition from the gothic proper to the rationalised gothic, crime writers resorted to
‘staging’ the supernatural and deconstructing their own ‘plots.’ (2007: 62)

Agatha Christie is especially famous for using the supernatural as a red herring58, playing with
the reader’s fears and fantasies and then finally providing a rational explanation for apparently

58
Most notably in The Sittaford Mystery (1931), Peril at End House (1932), Dumb Witness (1937) and The Pale
Horse (1961).

37
supernatural phenomena.59 Several of Christie’s works feature séances and mediums who are
“usually portrayed as rather ridiculous figures, almost invariably being ill-educated, badly-
dressed, middle-aged and vulgar” (Willis 2000: 62). This is as much true of the sisters Tripp in
Dumb Witness (1937), who unwittingly provide an essential clue to Poirot which they believe
is supernatural in origin – in two séances, a luminous haze is seen to surround Miss Arundell
(the victim)’s head like a halo, emerging from her mouth, which is interpreted as a warning of
Miss Arundell’s imminent death – yet Poirot recognizes it for a sign of phosphorous poisoning,
as it is true of the three spinsters dealing in the supernatural in The Pale Horse (1961). While
the Tripps are ridiculous and benign characters, the nature of the supernatural in The Pale Horse
takes on a very sinister note. The plot revolves around the idea of being able to kill at a distance
by channelling an evil spirit through an electrical machine. Throughout the novel, suspense is
created through the focaliser – the amateur detective Mark Easterbrook, who is unsure of
whether to believe in the supernatural or not and who experiences a moment of terror during a
séance, followed by doubt and apprehension. Yet finally this uncertainty is resolved in favour
of a rational explanation, which has nothing to do with the supernatural except using it as a ruse
to foil any investigation. As Ascari notes,
Christie reduced the supernatural to the subsidiary role of transitory explanation, but at the same
time she also exploited it to conjure up an ominous atmosphere of mystery that lures the public
into reading and is progressively cleared away by the investigation. (2007: 172)

Paul Gallico, on the other hand, takes a more optimistic approach to the supernatural; in The
Hand of Mary Constable (1964), his detective Alexander Hero is the “chief investigator for the
British Society of Psychical Research” (11) and “had established a practice as an independent
private detective of the occult, or ghost-breaker” (ibid.).
A seeker after the truth in the obscure and often dangerous regions of the paranormal, he was
required to keep an open mind, to be an accurate judge of human nature, free from superstition,
unswayed by bigotry of any kind, including the scientific. He was as eager for genuine proof of
a life in the hereafter as he was active in destroying the charlatans of spiritualism who preyed
upon the misfortunes of the bereaved and ignorant. (ibid.: 11f)

59
Incidentally, apart from her ratiocinative mysteries Christie also wrote a collection of supernatural detective
fiction stories featuring Mr Quin – an allusion to Harlequin. The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930) appears whenever
there is danger to lovers and acts on their behalf through his quasi-assistant, Mr Satterthwaite, an elderly bachelor
who likes to observe the drama of life and progressively, to take a part in it. Mr. Quin is in fact an immortal being,
the incarnation of Harlequin/Death, and he possesses clairvoyance and the ability to read minds. However, he is a
catalyst to detection rather than the detective; he prompts others to start asking questions and finding the answers,
ultimately solving the puzzle. The stories progressively move from hinting at the supernatural to an affirmation of
its existence.

38
After proving that what initially seems like a possible proof of life after death – a hollow wax
hand of the deceased Mary Constable with her fingerprints inside it – is an elaborate hoax to
lure an American scientist developing a secret weapon into collaboration with the Communists,
Hero feels dejected and angry at the false medium for disappointing him in his quest yet again.
Each new case that swam into his ken seemed in some way to offer hope of survival, each one
seemed to end in disillusionment and tragedy, the mystery of the unknown still unpierced.
Yet in his heart, Hero knew that he was not giving up. If there was no limit to human corruption,
chicanery and greed, neither was there any boundary to that endless space which man had named
the universe. The enigma of its meaning was yet to be solved. (ibid.: 254)

Even though the (seemingly) supernatural events that constitute the main plot are disproved,
the overall ontological status of the supernatural is left open at the end. As Willis notes,
[b]y the 1960s, spiritualism was not such a topical or controversial issue as it had been in the
1930s, so it is easier for the detective to be tolerant. This atmosphere of tolerance becomes even
more marked in more recent fiction dealing with spiritualism. The growth of New Age beliefs
has led to an interest in the occult, and spiritualism has become a ‘respectable’ subject for
mainstream fiction[.] (2000: 69)

From here on, tracing the supernatural in detective fiction becomes somewhat more difficult,
in accordance with increasingly overlapping genre boundaries in the context of postmodernist
hybridisation, and the emergence of film as the new popular medium, which reached more
people and therefore became the primary site of perpetuating cultural myths and archetypes. 60
The research that has been done on occult and supernatural detection primarily focuses on the
Victorian Era– the beginning of detective fiction and on the ‘golden age’ (cf. Tibbets 1999,
Ascari 2007, Smajič 2010).

Certain postmodern detective stories embrace the supernatural as a means of playing with the
conventions of the genre and the reader’s expectations. Douglas Adams, more famous for his
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe series, created in Dirk Gently a postmodern anti-
detective, who investigates cases involving the supernatural. In Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective
Agency (1987), Gently investigates a complex and lurid mystery involving two different ghosts
(one human, the other alien), time-travel, a malfunctioning robot and other bizarre events and
circumstances. In the following The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Gently

60
Significantly, supernatural detection in film seems to be much more prolific than in literature. Usually it is a
psychic woman who either has premonitions about crime which become true or who shares a psychic bond with
the killer and sees through his eyes while he murders his victims (invariably, the murderer is a male). The psychic
usually cooperates with the police, who initially doubt her powers only to be proven otherwise. Most of these films
belong to the (psycho)thriller genre.

39
investigates in a case revolving around long forgotten Nordic gods who are frustrated and bored
with life in the modern world. Both novels are a typically postmodern generic hybrid of science-
fiction and detective story, laced with parody, and clearly written from an atheist point of view.

In Alice Kimberly’s The Ghost and Mrs McClure (2004), another generic blend occurs, only
this time it is within the genre of detective fiction. The recently widowed Penelope McClure
returns to her home town and takes over and remodels her aunt’s “mystery-themed” (19)
bookshop. Incidentally, this bookshop is haunted by the ghost of the hard-boiled detective Jack
Shepard, who had been murdered there some decades previously while pursuing a case. The
ghost decides to make his presence known to Penelope when the bookshop is hosting a writer
of detective stories based on the life and cases of Jack Shepard himself. When a murder occurs,
the ghost and Penelope act as a postmodern Holmes-Watson duo and solve the crime.

Another strand of detective fiction where the supernatural occurs often is Native American
detective fiction, in which usually the two different ways of explaining the world and restoring
order to the community, the traditional and the modern, coexist simultaneously. Gina and
Andrew Macdonald distinguish two types of Native American detectives, Sherlocks and
Shamans; the former relying on rational deductive reasoning, observation and ratiocination, the
latter on intuition, spirit guides and spiritual tools (cf. 2002: 8f). While Tony Hillerman’s
Leaphorn is a typical Sherlock and Jim Chee embodies both worldviews, James D. Doss’ Daisy
Perika is a full-blown Ute shaman who communicates with the spirit realm and receives from
it messages and visions. In The Shaman Sings (1994) she aids police detective Scott Parrish, a
man with clairvoyant powers himself, in uncovering the murderer of a young physicist.
Contrary to Hillerman, where the supernatural is often only alluded to and/or presented as an
alternative Native American worldview, in Doss the supernatural permeates the story and the
truth value of dreams, visions, premonitions as well as supernatural beings is affirmed without
a shadow of doubt.

Native American detective fiction is particularly open to the supernatural due to representing a
plethora of cultures that have a worldview and system of beliefs where the supernatural coexists
and is inextricably intertwined with the natural. The ensuing cultural encounter of two very
different epistemologies, the European-scientific and the Native American one61, “ultimately

61
Of course, there are (sometimes quite marked) differences between the various Native American cultures and
one should never assume that ‘Native American’ denotes a homogeneous culture or belief system, yet in the basic
40
questions our view of the world at large, as a material universe linked by ‘scientific’ chains of
cause and effect, or as a spiritual world rich with unseen forces and powers, some psychological,
perhaps, but others quite real and sometimes terrifying” (Macdonald 2002: 48).

Recent years have seen a proliferation of what is best termed supernatural (psycho)thrillers. The
usual differentiation drawn between detective fiction and thriller is that the former centres on
the detective’s investigation while the latter’s focus is on crime and the criminal. However,
according to Scaggs, the difference is rather
one of narrative effect and narrative structure, both of which go hand in hand in […] one of the
central aspects of the crime thriller: that it emphasises present danger rather than reflecting on,
or investigating, past action[.][…] Furthermore, in order to create this danger in the present the
protagonist of the crime thriller must be threatened, or believe him- or herself to be threatened,
by powerful external forces of some form or another[.] (2005: 107; cf. Priestman 1998: 43)

An interesting hybrid of detective fiction and thriller is Philip Kerr’s Prayer (2014), where a
generic shift occurs once the supernatural enters the plot. What seems to be a typical detective
story at first turns into a psychological thriller where the detective struggles to overcome the
supernatural forces that threaten to destroy him. The detective is only able to escape death by
truly accepting the existence of God (the unmerciful, vengeful God of the Old Testament) and
by repenting his sin of doubting God through Confession and asking forgiveness. Having barely
escaped with his life intact, and now possessing a terrifying knowledge of God, the detective
first commits murder to stop the killings and then leaves the FBI to become a Roman Catholic
priest. In Prayer, knowledge is damning and ignorance is bliss, quite the opposite of typical
detective fiction.

In supernatural thrillers, detection takes second place to the protagonist’s fight with evil
supernatural forces and their initially thwarted and endangered romantic relationship. Cawelti
postulates that the crime thriller, rather than being a pure mystery genre (like classical detective
fiction), “tend[s] to shade over into adventure or romance, though mystery remains a basic
interest and an important secondary principle of the form” (1976: 43). He assumes the cause
may be that the majority of people will quickly lose interest in the predominately rational
structure of the detective story and “will prefer their mysteries served up as a sauce to heroic or

premise of the supernatural we can generalize the Native American approach to be inclusive and accepting as
opposed to the European-scientific approach, which excludes the supernatural from the normal and natural and
questions or even firmly denies its existence.

41
erotic action. Used in this way, mystery can intensify and complicate a story of triumph over
obstacles or of the successful development of love by increasing suspense and uncertainty and
adding further interest to the final resolution” (ibid.). At first glance at least his assumptions
seem to be correct – there appear to be many more supernatural thrillers than there are detective
stories/novels with supernatural themes. Most supernatural thrillers come in the form of a police
procedural (Kay Hooper’s Bishop/Special Crimes Unit series, M. R. Sellars’ Rowan Gant
series, Joseph Glass’ Susan Shader novels, etc.) or feature amateur detectives with psychic
powers (Shirley Damsgaard’s Ophelia and Abby series, Charlaine Harris’ Harper Connelly
series, Nancy Atherton’s Aunt Dimity series and many, many more).

At this point it is necessary to mention a wholly different supernatural crime thriller form which
features the supernatural in the form of alien beings (as per Cawelti’s definition, cf. 1976: 43ff),
namely vampires, werewolves, angels, demons etc. Generally, these are even further removed
from classical detective fiction than the previously mentioned supernatural crime thriller,
although it must be noted that the most famous vampire story, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897),
though a “gothic fantasy” (Ascari 2007: 73), contains a strong element of detection and features
the occult detective Professor Van Helsing, who uses pseudoscientific methods to locate and
destroy Dracula. The work is “strongly influenced by the sensation school” (ibid.:74), and,
typically of the crime thriller, detection plays a secondary role to the sense of imminent danger
to the protagonists and indeed, the whole world. Although abundant, and due to the crime
thriller’s connection with the Gothic and sensational extremely conductive to the supernatural,
the supernatural crime thriller will not be included in the ensuing analysis due to the secondary
role of the process and method of detection.

Compared to the supernatural thriller, the inclusion of supernatural elements in the highly
rationalistic genre of classical detective fiction appears much more scandalous. The
supernatural in detective fiction creates a tension, an antithesis which subtly questions modern
epistemological assumptions and calls for the detective as “an epistemological super-hero”
(Ascari 2007: 52) to resolve this conflict.

42
3.2. Methodology and Classification for Analysing the Supernatural in
Detective Fiction

In developing a methodology for analysing the supernatural in detective stories in light of their
implied epistemological worldview, Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of the fantastic has been of great
use. Todorov describes the fantastic as follows:
In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils, sylphides, or
vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar
world. The person who experiences the event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either
he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the
world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part
of reality—but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. […] The fantastic occupies
the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic
for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. (1970/73: 25)

Todorov foregrounds the necessity of someone, either the reader or the character, choosing
between two possible explanations of the supernatural event (cf. ibid.: 27). If the
reader/character decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the
phenomena described, the work belongs to the genre of the uncanny. If on the other hand the
reader/character decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the
phenomena, the work belongs to the genre of the marvellous.62 The fantastic lasts only as long
as the reader/character hesitates between the two choices (cf. ibid.: 41). Todorov therefore
locates the fantastic on the border between the uncanny and the marvellous:

uncanny │ fantastic-uncanny │ fantastic-marvellous │ marvellous

where the median line separating the fantastic-uncanny from the fantastic-marvellous represents
the pure fantastic (ibid.: 44).

Todorov’s choice of terminology has become rather outdated, as today the fantastic usually
implies what Todorov calls the marvellous, and the term uncanny would be better suited to what
he calls the fantastic, since it is the uncertainty over whether the unexplained phenomena are
supernatural in nature or not which produces a truly uncanny effect. For the present study,
though, the terminology itself is unimportant; it is rather the categories themselves that will

62
The uncanny and the marvellous also correspond to the two major tendencies in Gothic fiction: the supernatural
explained (“the uncanny”), as it appears in the novels of Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliffe; and the supernatural
accepted (“the marvelous”), which is characteristic of the works or Horace Walpole, M. G. Lewis, and Mathurin
(cf. Todorov 1970/73: 41f).

43
serve as a basis for my proposal of a similar distinction between detective stories featuring the
supernatural, according to the ontological status of the supernatural on the story level (Figure
2):

ontological status of the

the supernatural as illusion the supernatural as fact
supernatural undeterminable

Figure 2: The ontological status of the supernatural in (detective) stories

The correlation is not perfect by any means. Todorov emphasizes that just because there might
be no hesitation or even astonishment over the presence of supernatural elements, we do not
automatically find ourselves within the marvellous; “[t]he marvellous implies that we are
plunged into a world whose laws are totally different from what they are in our own and in
consequence that the supernatural events which occur are in no way disturbing” (ibid.: 171f).
Even if the supernatural is presented as fact in detective fiction, it is always disturbing and
seems to violate natural laws. The only case where we might assume a correlation between the
supernatural as fact and Todorov’s marvellous is in the “scientific marvellous,” where the
supernatural is presented as the paranormal – explainable in a rational manner, but according
to laws which contemporary science does not acknowledge (cf. ibid.: 56).

The supernatural as illusion (what we could also call the seemingly supernatural) usually takes
the form of red herrings within detective fiction; what at first seems supernatural is in fact either
a scam on the part of the murderer(s) (The Pale Horse, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The
Hand of Mary Constable) or a misinterpretation of completely natural facts due to superstition
(Dumb Witness, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”). This type of the supernatural is
always ‘explained away’ by the detective and thus effectively exorcised.

The supernatural as fact can either be ‘explained’ (as opposed to ‘explained away’) 63 using
pseudoscientific discourse (for example, as the paranormal) or it can remain a mystery. Usually,
in case of the supernatural as fact the detective has an above-average awareness and
understanding of the supernatural and might even be able to exert a level of control over the

63
It is important to note the distinction between the supernatural ‘explained’, where pseudoscientific discourse is
used to validate supernatural phenomena, and ‘the supernatural explained’ as a strand within the Gothic tradition
– the latter is, in fact, the supernatural ‘explained away’.

44
supernatural powers/beings. In essence, the supernatural is often just one more aspect of the
superhuman nature of the detective.

Detective fiction stories where the status of the supernatural is ontologically undeterminable
are extremely rare – as rare as Todorov’s ‘true fantastic’. In these stories it remains ultimately
unclear whether the supernatural is fact or illusion and the reader is free to choose the
explanation he or she prefers.

If the first criterion for analysing the supernatural in detective fiction is the ontological status
of the supernatural on the story level, the second criterion which might prove useful is the type
and form the supernatural takes (cf. p. 9ff of this paper). The two distinct types of the
supernatural are: a) the paranormal (the supernatural as an extension of physical reality;
rationally accessible) and b) the mystical (to be contemplated and visioned instead of speculated
about; rationally inaccessible). Further, the supernatural can take the form of powers, beings
and/or the environment. The type and form of the supernatural in detective fiction will
determine the characters’ level of control over supernatural forces/events and whether the
supernatural acts as a benevolent/malevolent/neutral force – determining which will provide a
key to understanding the implied worldview in a particular story.

A third possibly useful criterion for analysis would be the level of involvement of the
supernatural in the plot of a given detective story. The involvement can either be minimal and
the supernatural just dealt with in passing (as in Christie’s Dumb Witness, for example) or the
supernatural element can be instrumental to the plot. Since in all the works analysed in this
paper the supernatural is crucial to the plot, however, this criterion will not be applied.

45
4. The Implied Epistemological Worldviews of Detective Fiction
Stories Dealing with the Supernatural: Case Study

There were several choices as to the works analysed in this paper and thereby narrowing down
the options presented a problem which is intricately connected to setting borders. If the focus
had been on supernatural detection, the pool of suitable works would be immense. Since the
focus is on the supernatural in detective fiction, the basic premise is that works which feature
the supernatural belong primarily to the genre of detective fiction. This enables us to apply to
the stories the tools of analysing detective fiction – one of which is analysing detective stories
as epistemological allegories.

The order of analysis is based on the first (and, as far as the implied epistemological worldview
of particular stories is concerned, most important) criterion as proposed in the previous chapter
– the ontological status of the supernatural on the diegetic level. The analysis will begin with
Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse (1961), where the supernatural is presented as illusion; move
on to Ben Aaronovitch’s The Rivers of London (2011), where the supernatural is presented as
fact; and conclude with Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way (1970), where the ontological
status of the supernatural is undeterminable. In case of serial novels (i. e. Hillerman and
Aaronovitch), the first book of the series has been chosen to serve as the example.

4.1. The Supernatural as Illusion in Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse

(1961)

Christie’s The Pale Horse centres on the idea of murder at a distance, using a sophisticated
electrical machine in combination with a female medium in order to direct a malevolent spirit
to work on the subconscious of the intended victim, allegedly causing them to ‘activate their
natural desire for death’, upon which they fall ill and die of natural causes.

The narrator and focaliser of the story is Mark Easterbrook, an intellectual who is in the process
of writing a book. We meet him in a café through the following opening lines of the story which
set the tone for the desired reader reception throughout the story:
THE Espresso machine behind my shoulder hissed like an angry snake. The noise it made had
a sinister, not to say devilish, suggestion about it. Perhaps, I reflected, most of our contemporary

46
 noises carry that implication. The intimidating angry scream of jet planes as they flash across
the sky, the slow menacing rumble of a tube train approaching through its tunnel; the heavy road
transport that shakes the very foundations of your house… Even the minor domestic noises of
to-day, beneficial in action though they may be, yet carry a kind of alert. The dishwashers, the
refrigerators, the pressure cookers, the whining vacuum cleaners—“Be careful,” they all seem
to say. “I am a genie harnessed to your service, but if your control of me fails …”
A dangerous world—that was it, a dangerous world. (Christie 1961: 9)

Mark, who is initially oblivious to the world around him (reminiscent of Dupin and his
reclusiveness, as well as Holmes and his extreme focus on the things useful for his job and not
much else), decides to take conscious notice of his surroundings “with a feeling of conscious
virtue” (ibid.: 11). This is a parodic allusion to the detective’s typical extraordinary powers of
observation which make him/her uniquely suited to solving mysteries. Having adopted the
proper attitude of a detective, Mark indeed witnesses an event that is significant for solving the
ensuing mystery and which leads him to investigate the Pale Horse, a former inn with a shady
past, now occupied by three spinsters: the authoritative Thyrza, the medium Sybill and their
housekeeper Bella.

While the three women occupying the Pale Horse outwardly appear as three rather harmless
village ‘witches’ (said to have ‘second sight’), the Pale Horse is secretly an establishment which
offers murder at a distance, by allegedly using supernatural powers. Mistaking Mark for a yet
sceptical potential client, Thyrza engages him in the following conversation: “‘You don’t
believe any of it, do you?’ she murmured. ‘But you’re wrong, you know. You can’t explain
away everything as superstition, or fear, or religious bigotry. There are elemental truths and
elemental powers. There always have been. There always will be’” (ibid.: 78). Thyrza affirms
that she does not merely believe, rather she knows that she and the other two women have
supernatural powers (cf. ibid.: 79). She explains:
‘Death. There’s always been a greater trade in that than there ever has been in love potions.
And yet—how childish it all was in the past! […] But we’ve progressed a long way beyond that
nowadays. Science has enlarged our frontiers. […] There are new horizons.’
‘Such as?’
‘The mind. Knowledge of what the mind is—what it can do—what it can be made to do.’
‘Please go on. This is most interesting.’
‘The principle is well known. Medicine-men have used it in primitive communities for
centuries. You don’t need to kill your victim. All you need to do is—tell him to die.’
‘Suggestion? But it won’t work unless the victim believes in it.’
‘It doesn’t work on Europeans, you mean,’ she corrected me. ‘It does sometimes. But that’s
not the point. We’ve gone farther ahead than the witch-doctor has ever gone. The psychologists
have shown the way. The desire for death! It’s there—in everyone. Work on that! Work on the
death wish. […] To destroy your subject, power must be exerted on his secret unconscious self.
The death wish that exists in all of us must be stimulated, heightened.’ Her excitement was
growing. ‘Don’t you see? A real illness will be induced, caused by that death-seeking self. You
wish to be ill, you wish to die—and so—you do get ill, and die.’

47
 She had flung her head up now, triumphantly. I felt suddenly very cold. All nonsense, of
course. This woman was slightly mad…And yet— (ibid.: 80ff)

This passage plays up to the general ambivalence to both scientific development and
psychology. Although part of popular culture, psychological concepts were likely not
completely understood by the general public at the time and thus they engendered fear.
Psychology tells us that our subconscious is more powerful than our conscious mind and that
while we may think we have control over our thoughts and actions, in fact we do not (cf. Freud’s
study of hysteria). The emotional effect Thyrza’s speech has on Mark is clear: he reacts strongly
to it, and we can assume that the reader is encouraged to entertain similar apprehensions about
the possibility of the existence and harnessing of supernatural powers.

Mark, who after the encounter with Thyrza regains his composure, is still convinced that there
must be a natural explanation behind the seemingly natural deaths connected with the Pale
Horse and he decides to set a trap for the women by ordering the murder of his friend Ginger.
He is invited by Thyrza to attend a ritual designed to unleash the power of the supernatural on
Ginger, causing her death. The ritual, with which a spirit is supposedly channelled and sent to
Ginger to activate her latent death wish, is a curious mixture of the primitive and the
(pseudo)scientific. The barn where the séances are held is cast in indirect, dim light. Thyrza
puts on protective clothing and gloves as a “precaution” against “the forces that are dangerous
to those who do not know how to handle them” (ibid.: 180f). She uses a special lamp to screen
Ginger’s glove which Mark brought with him according to the instructions, commenting on the
suitably strong “physical emanations from its wearer” (ibid.: 181). She forms a circle holding
hands with Mark and Bella while Mendelssohn’s funeral march starts to play faintly from the
ceiling. Mark is initially not much impressed:
‘Myse en scène,’ I said to myself rather scornfully. ‘Meretricious trappings!’ I was cool and
critical—but nevertheless aware of an undercurrent of some unwanted emotional apprehension.
The music stopped. There was a long wait. […] And then, suddenly, Sybil spoke. Not,
however, in her own voice. It was a man’s deep voice, as unlike her own mincing accents as
could be. It had a guttural foreign accent.
‘I am here,’ the voice said.
My hands were released. Bella flitted away into the shadows. Thyrza said: ‘Good evening.
Is that Macandal?’
‘I am Macandal.’ (ibid.: 182)

Thyrza then compels the spirit Macandal to do her bidding and to deliver death to the intended
recipient. She draws the sign of the cross upside down on Sybil’s forehead. She addresses Mark:
‘I don’t suppose you’re much impressed, are you, by all the ritual? Some of our visitors are.
To you, I dare say, it’s all so much mumbo jumbo…But don’t be too sure. Ritual—a pattern of
words and phrases sanctified by time and usage, has an effect on the human spirit. What causes

48
 the mass hysteria of crowds? We don’t know exactly. But it’s a phenomenon that exists. These
old-time usages, they have their part—a necessary part, I think.’ (ibid.: 184)

Thyrza’s comment alludes to the power of language as a tool which defines and shapes reality,
in particular as it has been used in religion (the power of prayer, Holy Mass). This combination
of old belief with (relatively) recent scientific discoveries makes it difficult for Mark (and
consequently the involved reader) to discard the ritual as complete nonsense. Even more
difficult to discard is the “large electrical contrivance of some complicated kind[,]” which
Thyrza brings into play next (after Bella has prepared a white cock amidst symbols drawn on
the floor):
It moved like a trolley and she wheeled it slowly and carefully to a position near the divan.
She bent over it, adjusting the controls, murmuring to herself:
‘Compass, north-north-east . . . degrees . . . that’s about right.’ She took the glove and
adjusted it in a particular position, switching on a small violet light beside it. Then she spoke to
the inert figure on the divan.
[…]
The words rang out, echoing, repeating—the big box-like machine had started to emit a low
hum, the bulbs in it glowed—I felt dazed, carried away. This, I felt, was no longer something I
could mock. (ibid.: 185)

Mark is impressed despite his previous misgivings. His fears are transferred from the entranced
Sybil to the box. “What devilish secret was being practiced through its agency? Could there be
physically-produced rays of some kind that acted on the cells of the mind? Of a particular
mind?” (186) he asks himself. The ritual then reaches a frenzied peak:
[Thyrza’s] voice rose in a great swelling cry…And another horrible animal cry came from
Bella. She rose up, a knife flashed…there was a horrible strangled squawk from the
cockerel…blood dripped into the copper bowl. Bella came running, the bowl held out…
She screamed out:
‘Blood…the blood…BLOOD!’
Thyrza whipped out the glove from the machine. Bella took it, dipped it in the blood,
returned it to Thyrza who replaced it.
Bella’s voice rose again in that high ecstatic call…
‘The blood…the blood…the blood…!’
She ran round and round the brazier, then dropped twitching to the floor. The brazier
flickered and went out.
I felt horribly sick. Unseeing, clutching the arms of my chair, my head seemed to be whirling
in space…
I heard a click, the hum of the machine ceased.
Then Thyrza’s voice rose, clear and composed:
‘The old magic and the new. The old knowledge of belief, the new knowledge of science.
Together, they will prevail…’ (ibid.: 186f)

This passage is iconic for the frenzy and disjointedness of the ritual described: the normal
narrative code turns into a stream-of-thought technique where separate impressions are
connected by dots, which are iconic for a lack of text that the reader must supply themself.
Furthermore, the word ‘blood’ is highlighted in two different ways: in italics and in large letters,
49
mirroring the change in tone and pitch due to emotional upheaval. To the detached observer,
the passage appears parodic in the extreme – for the emotionally involved reader, however, the
effect would be one of frisson, same as when reading a Gothic story.

When Ginger, the intended victim of the ritual, indeed becomes sick, Mark panics:
Panic—I mustn’t give way to panic…There was always ‘flu about at this time of year…The
doctor would be reassuring…perhaps it would only be a slight chill…
I saw in my mind’s eye Sybil in her peacock dress with its scrawled symbols of evil. I heard
Thyrza’s voice, willing, commanding…On the chalked floor, Bella, chanting her evil spells,
held up a struggling white cock…
Nonsense, all nonsense…Of course it was all superstitious nonsense…
The box—not so easy, somehow, to dismiss the box. The box represented, not human
superstition, but a development of scientific possibility…But it wasn’t possible—it couldn’t be
possible that— (ibid.: 214)

“We [Mark and Ginger] hadn’t really believed, either of us—or had we? No, of course we
hadn’t. It had been a game—a cops and robbers game. But it wasn’t a game. The Pale Horse
was proving itself a reality” (ibid.: 218), Mark reflects. Yet precisely at that moment, he receives
a vital clue from Mrs. Oliver; she had been talking to a maid who had cared for one of the
victims and Mrs. Oliver was reminded of the fact that all victims started losing their hair64,
which immediately prompts Mark’s recollection of several “[t]hings, half-remembered scraps
of knowledge” (ibid.: 229) and he has an epiphany – the cause of the deaths is thallium
poisoning:
‘So that’s the simple truth behind the Pale Horse. Poison. No witchcraft, no hypnotism, no
scientific death rays. Plain poisoning! […] All that hooey! [230] The trance and the white cocks
and the brazier and the pentagrams and the voodoo and the reversed crucifix—all that was for
the crudely superstitious. And the famous ‘box’ was another bit of hooey for the contemporary-
minded. We don’t believe in spirits and witches and spells nowadays, but we’re gullible when
it comes to ‘rays’ and ‘waves’ and psychological phenomena. That box, I bet, is nothing but a
nice little assembly of electrical show off, coloured bulbs and humming valves. Because we live
in the daily fear of radio fall out and strontium 90 and all the rest of it, we’re amenable to
suggestion along the line of scientific talk.’ (ibid.: 230f)

In line with the conventions of classical detective fiction, the supernatural explanation is refuted
and a rational explanation for the phenomena is provided. The involved reader will along with
Mark likely feel somewhat foolish for having entertained the idea of a truly supernatural
explanation. In a myse-en-abyme to the main story, Christie covertly pokes fun at the sensation
seeking reader by presenting the actual solution of the mystery of the Pale Horse. During a

64
This information is obtained by Mrs. Oliver purely by chance(!) and therefore chance is instrumental in Mark’s
arriving at the solution of the mystery, another atypical feature for classical detective fiction.

50
discussion between Mark and his friend Mrs Ariadne Oliver, a famous detective fiction writer
(and Christie’s self-parody), the latter asks Mark whether he believes it is possible to kill
someone by remote control (cf. ibid.: 19). It appears as though Mrs. Oliver’s newest idea is to
write a detective story about murder by remote control (which is also the story of The Pale
Horse). However, when Mark asks Mrs. Oliver whether her new masterpiece is to be “Murder
by Suggestion” (ibid.: 20), Mrs. Oliver denies this, saying: “Good old-fashioned rat poison or
arsenic is good enough for me. Or the reliable blunt instrument” (ibid.). In fact, the method of
killing in The Pale Horse is not spiritual in nature (as it is speculated to be), but rat poison
(thallium) and a blunt instrument which kills the first murder victim.

The Pale Horse ends on a symbolic note of eros and tanatos by reuniting the lovers-to-be Mark
and Ginger under the sign of death:
“Look!” said Ginger triumphantly.
She indicated the old inn sign on which she was working.
The grime of years removed, the figure of the rider on the horse was plainly discernible;65 a
grinning skeleton with gleaming bones.
Mrs. Dane Calthrop[, the vicar’s wife]’s voice, deep and sonorous, spoke behind me:
‘Revelation, Chapter Six, Verse Eight. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name
that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him…
We were silent for a moment or two, and then Mrs. Dane Calthrop, who was not one to be
afraid of anti-climax said,
‘And that’s that,’ in the tone of one who puts something in the wastepaper basket.
(ibid.: 255f)

Death is, at the end, clarified, normalcy has returned and the supernatural is again firmly
contained within the domain of religion.

4.1.1. Characteristics and Aspects of the Imagined Supernatural in The Pale Horse

The supernatural in The Pale Horse is ultimately only an illusion, possessing no truth value
within the story and serving only to confound and distract. Its presence for a while obscures the
detective’s vision through the sheer fear it inspires by its imagined possibilities. The
supernatural in this story is imagined as the paranormal (an extension of physical reality), as
exhibited by the use of the electric machine and the pseudo-scientific discussions of the

65
Initially, the rider is entirely obscured by the layers of grime: “It was a crude painting with little merit except
the doubful one of old age and dirt. The pale figure of a stallion gleamed against a dark indeterminable background”
(Chrstie 1961: 74).

51
mechanisms involved in (supposedly) accessing and controlling the supernatural, as well as the
pseudo-scientific explanations of how the supernatural influences the human mind.

Both supernatural powers and beings occur; Sybil66 allegedly possesses the power to channel
the being Macandal, who is never specified (what or who is Macandal?) and neither is the way
Sybil claims to accomplish this. Although Sybil’s alleged powers are disputed as far as actually
channelling a malevolent spirit is concerned, her ability to go into a deep trance remains
acknowledged, however only as a psychological (i. e. scientifically explicable), natural
phenomenon.

The supernatural in this novel is imagined solely in its malevolent and maleficent possibilities
(it is at all times threatening, perverted and monstrous); the benevolent aspect of the
supernatural is completely absent.

4.1.2. The Detectives and Their Method of Approaching the Supernatural in The Pale Horse

There are two detectives in The Pale Horse: Mark Easterbrook, the predominant narrator of the
story, and Divisional-Detective Inspector Lejeune, the police officer investigating the death of
a priest who had right before he was murdered received information about some sort of
“wickedness” (Christie 1961: 37) during the final confession of a woman. While Mark is an
intellectual, a “scholar, author, man of the world” (ibid.: 91) who becomes an amateur detective
in the course of the story, Lejeune is a seasoned police detective, “a sturdy man” with “a
misleadingly quiet manner, but his gestures were sometimes surprisingly graphic and betrayed
his French Huguenot ancestry” (ibid.: 26). This slight eccentricity is typical for the classical
detective and is a remnant of Romanticism, pointing to the detective’s original, innate genius
which differentiates him from others and often leads to his being mocked or underrated. In
essence, Mark and Lejeune are similar in terms of their personality and skills; both are rational
and scientifically-minded individuals, both possess an inquisitive and analytical mind, and both
have an equally strong intuition and imagination. The most important difference between their
respective characters is that Mark is also impulsive and highly emotional, wavering between

66
A telling name and reference to the mythological diviner.

52
belief and disbelief and consequently feeling insecure about his knowledge, in this regard much
more closely resembling the traditional detective companion – the Watson figure, whereas
Lejeune is patient and reserved. However, Mark is more than simply another Watson; despite
his doubts and many erroneous conclusions he manages to solve the mystery behind the murders
orchestrated by the Pale Horse establishment. The identity of the mastermind and murderer,
however, eludes him (mostly due to his inexperience with solving crimes) and Lejeune is the
one who exposes the murderer in the final denouement.

Mark’s emotionality makes him highly susceptible to fear of and belief in the supernatural.
Throughout the story he wavers between belief and disbelief. When he first starts suspecting
the Pale Horse to be an establishment committing murder through supernatural means, he feels
completely overwhelmed: “I strode along, not seeing where I was going I wanted very badly to
talk to someone. […] I was alone with my chaotic thoughts and I didn’t want to be alone. What
I wanted, frankly, was someone who would argue me out of the things that I was thinking”
(ibid.: 89). Thereupon Mark visits Mrs Dane Calthrop, the vicar’s wife who, instead of
discouraging him, urges Mark to enlist the help of a friend and continue his investigation into
the Pale Horse. Mark decides to confide in his friend Hermia, with her “clear brain” and
“admirable logic”, a “tower of strength if she could be persuaded to become an ally” (ibid.: 94).
Hermia takes the rational, scholarly view of the matter:
The tone of her voice was indulgent—she seemed neither shocked nor stirred.
‘People who say that the country is dull and the towns full of excitement don’t know what
they are talking about,’ she went on. ‘The last of the witches have gone to cover in the tumble-
down cottage, black masses are celebrated in remote manors by decadent young men.
Superstition runs rife in isolated hamlets. Middle-aged spinsters clank their false scarabs and
hold séances and planchette runs idly over sheets of blank paper. One could really write a very
amusing series of articles on it all. Why don’t you try your hand?’ (ibid.: 99)

She tells him that his imagination is running away with him. For a moment, Mark contemplates
the possibility of seeing the supernatural as solely an interesting cultural phenomenon:
I was silent for a moment. My mind wavered—turning from light to darkness and back
again. The darkness of the Pale Horse, the light that Hermia represented. Good everyday
sensible light—the electric light bulb firmly fixed in its socket, illuminating all the dark corners.
Nothing there—nothing at all—just the everyday objects you always find in a room. But yet—
but yet—Hermia’s light, clear as it might make things seem, was after all an artificial light…
My mind swung back, resolutely, obstinately… (ibid.: 100)

This passage illustrates the basic tension between the two elements in the story: the rational
explanation, symbolized by (the) light (of Reason, or Enlightenment) and the present, and the
irrational explanation, symbolized by darkness (the Dark Ages) and the past. For Mark, the
drive to penetrate the darkness is stronger. In essence, his investigation is a quest into the

53
irrational realm of the supernatural and the mysterious, as modern-day common sense does not
seem to provide the true answers to life’s puzzles. The light thrown on the mystery of the
supernatural by enlightened rational thought is felt to be fake. Furthermore, the enjoyment
provided by a scholarly, systematic and critical approach to the supernatural, which Hermia
indicates, pales in comparison to the suspense and emotional thrill of the chase after the
supernatural:
I considered Hermia dispassionately across the table.
So handsome, so mature, so intellectual, so well read! And so—how could one put it? So—
yes, so damnably dull! (ibid.: 101)

At the same time, Mark feels angry with himself for “making a fool of myself! I was accepting
balderdash as solid truth. I had been hypnotised by that phony woman Thyrza Grey into
accepting a farrago of nonsense. I was a credulous, superstitious ass. I decided to forget the
whole damned business” (ibid.: 118), and in the course of his investigations feels it quite likely
“that I was now imagining things” (ibid.: 202).

In contrast to Mark, Lejeune is more sceptical about the existence of the supernatural; however,
when Mark asks him whether whole idea of the Pale Horse is “poppycock” (ibid.: 162), Lejeune
sighs:
‘You know what I’d answer—what any sane person would answer—the answer would be
‘Yes, of course it is!’—but I’m speaking now unofficially. Very odd things have happened
during the last century. […] Would you have believed—Oh! a dozen other things—things that
are now everyday knowledge that a child gabbles off!’
‘In other words, anything’s possible?’
‘That’s what I mean. If you ask me if Thyrza Grey can kill someone by rolling her eyes or
going into a trance, or projecting her will, I still say ‘No.’ But—I’m not sure—How can I be? If
she’s stumbled on something—“
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The supernatural seems supernatural. But the science of to-morrow is the
supernatural of today’
‘I’m not talking officially, mind,’ Lejeune warned me. (ibid.: 163)

Lejeune’s admission seems to legitimise Mark’s continuing inquiry into the possibly
supernatural. The differentiation between Lejeune’s official and private persona is quite
interesting, as it highlights the duality of social reality on the one hand, in which the
supernatural explanation is unacceptable (Lejeune speaking as a social authority figure) and
personal reality on the other, in which a supernatural explanation is acceptable, and
consequently highlights the difference in value between social (presumably objective) and
personal (subjective) truth, and by extension, knowledge.

In The Pale Horse, the detective is predictably the person most suitable for solving the mystery
and reinstating order in the community. There are two mysteries to be solved: the mystery of
54
the supernatural (solved by Mark) and the mystery of the identity of the murderer (solved by
Lejeune). In order to solve the first, Mark must investigate the possibility of the supernatural
rationally, without allowing himself to be drawn into superstition. This is difficult to do because
of the fear associated with the supernatural as well as the lack of factual data and knowledge
about it; when gathering information about the supernatural, Mark is only able to ascertain
assumptions about what it might be and, in order to ascertain its veracity, he himself must
perform an experiment, observe and make logical deductions. Using a scientific, rational
approach and overcoming his irrational emotional impulses, he is able to arrive at the rational,
natural explanation behind the illusion of the supernatural.

4.1.3. The Implied Worldview and Functions of the Supernatural in The Pale Horse

The central question of analysing detective stories as epistemological allegories is: How
readable is the fictional world? This paper additionally looks at how the supernatural influences
the readability of the fictional world in detective stories – is the fictional world more or less
readable because of it? In other words, is the supernatural meaningful or meaningless?

Looking at the readability of the fictional world in The Pale Horse, the supernatural represented
therein is reminiscent of nonsense poetry – at first glance it may look like a meaningful
linguistic code, but is, in fact, only “mumbo-jumbo” (ibid.: 184) and “balderdash” (ibid.: 105).
This meaningless code obscures the true, meaningful code of the text. Once the detective figures
out the correct meaning behind the clues, he is also able to discern what about the (seemingly)
supernatural is true (e. g. Sybil’s ability to go into a trance) and what is false (e. g. the existence
of spirits, using psychic powers to influence someone’s mind at a distance, the machine). The
detective learns the truth by looking at the larger picture, connecting the vast and varied
knowledge he possesses. In the process, he overcomes his fears and inherent irrational beliefs.

In The Pale Horse, the link between the ritual performed in order to kill someone and the
person’s actual, apparently natural death is initially missing. This deficient causality makes it
possible for the supernatural to assume the role of causal link between two facts (the ritual with
a specific intent and the corresponding fact, i. e. death). Until the detective finds the true missing

55
link (the murderer who poisoned the victims), the supernatural explanation seems possible,
which causes uncertainty and fear67.

Through Christie’s narrative technique68, the reader is drawn along with the detective into
intense speculation about the supernatural and its possible, deadly existence. The threat posed
to society by the supernatural and its potential destructive powers is neutralised, however. The
fact that the detective’s investigation proves that the supernatural is only an illusion provides
reassurance of a stable, ordered, scientifically understandable universe, where the truth can be
brought to light by overcoming our irrational/emotional, primitive self (“Man the human
animal” (ibid.: 198)) and acting from our rational, evolved self (“Man the Thinker, the
Controller” (ibid.)). The supernatural in The Pale Horse represents the unknown and terrifying,
and the disproval of its existence points to an inherent epistemological optimism. At the same
time, despite the optimistic ending, The Pale Horse addresses humanity’s recurring fear of the
destructive powers of nature and human technology; in the words of one character:
‘All life is dangerous. We forget that, we who have been reared in one of the small pockets of
civilization. For that is all that civilization really is, […] [s]mall pockets of men here and there
who have gathered together for mutual protection and who thereby are able to outwit and control
Nature. They have beaten the jungle—but that victory is only temporary. At any moment, the
jungle will once more take command. Proud cities that were, are now mere mounds of earth,
overgrown with rank vegetation, and the poor hovels of men who just manage to keep alive, no
more. Life is always dangerous—never forget that. In the end, perhaps, not only great natural
forces, but the work of our own hands may destroy it. We are very near to that happening at this
moment…’ (ibid.: 199)

The Pale Horse was written post-World War II, which had confronted the world with the deadly
power of technology, at the time of the Cold War with its threat of nuclear warfare and the
beginnings of major social changes (the emerging youth culture, women’s liberation, etc.). The
lack of understanding of new scientific theories (like the relativity theory) and complex
technological inventions activated people’s fearful imagination as they attempted to make sense
of the world. What The Pale Horse does is reaffirm that despite these novelties, the world is
still best understood using one’s common sense and one’s rational mind, and that when one

67
On the diegetic level, at least. Due to the conventions of the genre, most readers will of course expect a rational,
naturalistic explanation.
68
The narrative technique employed in The Pale Horse supports Cawelti’s statement that “[f]ormulaic literature
is generally characterized by a simple and emotionally charged style that encourages immediate involvement in a
character’s actions” (1976: 19).

56
uses this technique, superstition and fear will be overcome, which is an essentially humanist
idea.

4.2. The Supernatural as Fact in Ben Aaronovitch’s The Rivers of London

(2011)

In Ben Aaronovitch’s police procedural The Rivers of London (2011), Metropolitan Police
Constable Peter Grant one night while guarding the scene of a murder unexpectedly meets a
ghost named Nicholas Wallpenny, who claims to be a witness of the murder. Although shaken
by the encounter since he does not believe in ghosts, Peter takes Wallpenny’s statement. The
evidence gathered by the murder team supports the ghost’s statement, and seeking more
information, Peter returns to the scene hoping to meet the ghost again. Instead, he meets Chief
Police Investigator Thomas Nightingale, a modern-day wizard, whose responsibility is
investigating crimes involving the supernatural and keeping the “Queen’s peace” (Aaronovitch
2011: 101) between London’s supernatural beings and humans. Nightingale singlehandedly
leads the Folly, both a unit of the Commercial and Specialist Crime department and “the official
home of English magic since 1755” (ibid.: 79).

After proving himself able to detect and perform magic, Peter become Nightingale’s wizard
apprentice at the Folly, where he lives with Nightingale and their housekeeper Molly, who is
some kind of supernatural creature and is said to be “indispensable” (ibid.: 81) by Nightingale.
Peter divides his time between police work, studying magic and the occult and interacting with
the “the spirit[s] of a place” or the “genii locorum” (ibid.: 101) of London, trying to solve a
dispute between the two main river gods, Mother and Father Thames, in such a way that the
Queen’s Peace is maintained. In the course of his negotiations with Mama Thames, he offers
her a large gift in the form of a lorry full of beer and other alcoholic beverages, upon which she
grants his request and also gives him a gift in return: the name Tiberius Claudius Verica.

In his police capacity, Peter works together with a team of police officers which includes his
friend and colleague Lesley May on solving the crimes orchestrated by Mr Punch (of the puppet
play Punch and Judy), “the spirit of riot and rebellion” (ibid.: 342) who is manipulating another
ghost, an actor named Henry Pyke, into invading people’s minds and using them as human
puppets in order to enact scenes out of Punch and Judy, ultimately hurting or killing them.
Pyke’s possessed victims end up with their face “flopping open like a starfish” (ibid.: 159)
57
because of a spell which shapes the victim’s face into “a caricature man-in-the-moon face that
no human could have in real life” (ibid.: 158), damaging their facial bone structure and blood
vessels.

The team plans to stop Pyke’s ghost by following the script of Punch and Judy themselves and
adopting the role of constable, who comes to arrest Punch for his misdeeds. For this purpose
Peter and Nightingale obtain a warrant of arrest signed by a ghost Magistrate for “Henry Pyke,
[…] [w]ho goes by the name of Punch, and also by the name of Pulcinella69” (ibid.: 159). The
enacted plan backfires, Nightingale is shot, and Peter realises that Lesley has been
“sequestrated” (ibid.: 247), i. e. possessed, by Pyke and has been playing a double role. After
Lesley/Pyke causes a massive riot in Covent Garden by compelling the audience of the London
opera house to go out into the streets and cause destruction and mayhem, she disappears. In
order to both save her life and prevent further crimes from being committed, Peter asks his non-
human housekeeper Molly to help him travel to the spirit realm (having learned of this option
from Nightingale earlier) where he intends to find and apprehend Henry Pyke:
‘Do it,’ I said.
She moved so fast I didn’t see it, throwing herself against me […][, and] she bit me hard. I
felt the action of her swallowing as she sucked at my blood but I also felt the connection with
the tiles beneath me and the bricks and the walls […] and then I was falling backwards into
daylight and the smell of turpentine. […][I]t was like breathing vestigia, like swimming in stone.
I found myself in the Folly’s memory of the atrium.
I’d done it – I was in. (ibid.: 362)

This travelling to the spiritual realm of London takes Peter back in time to the eighteenth
century where he finds Henry Pyke and recognises him as Nicholas Wallpenny, the ghost he
had met at the beginning. When Pyke notices Peter, the ghost’s face changes and Peter realises
that it is not, in fact, Pyke, but rather Punch, an older malevolent spirit. Peter chases Punch
through London, going backwards in history until the time of London’s beginnings, where he
calls on Father Thames for help, recognising him as Cladius Tiberius Verica, the name given
to him by Mother Thames. Father Thames hands Peter a pilum (roman spear) and with it, Peter
stabs Punch, thus making a sacrifice to the gods that the Father Thames of the past had been
waiting for:

69
Mr Punch, or in his older form, Pulcinella, seems to be akin to the Lord of Misrule, a function which dates back
to the Roman Saturnalia festivities and was still popular at the court of Henry VIII. The Lord of Misrule supervised
the entertainments surrounding Christmas (or summer) festivities and generally caused chaos (cf. Sim 1999: 88).

58
 I knew what to do. I upended the heavy spear and hesitated. Mr Punch shrieked and
bellowed in his strange, reedy high-pitched voice. ‘Isn’t it a pity about pretty pretty Lesley,’ he
squealed. ‘Will you still love your pretty little Lesley when her face has fallen off?’
This is not a person, I told myself, and drove the pillum into Mr Punch’s chest. There was
no blood, but I felt the shock as it pierced skin, muscle and finally the wooden planking of the
bridge itself. The revenant spirit of riot and rebellion was pinned like a butterfly in its display
case. (ibid.: 371)

Upon this he is thrown into the Thames and wakes up in the Folly again, where he barely
escapes Molly’s attack (tasting his blood has made her lose control over herself) and flees to
his apartment. There he finds the sequestrated Lesley and saves her by persuading Pyke, who
is lost without Mr Punch pulling his strings, to willingly leave her body, wrapping Lesley’s
head and calling medical help so she survives the destruction of her face.

The murder mystery finally solved, Peter performs a ceremonial “hostage exchange” between
Father and Mother Thames, where one of Mother Thames’ daughters joins Father Thames and
one of his sons joins Mother Thames, as a “confidence-building measure to cement ties between
the two halves of the river; a suitably medieval solution designed to appeal to two people who
definitely still believed in divine rights. It was a typically English compromise held together by
string, sealing-wax and the good old network” (ibid.: 387). When Peter delivers Beverley Brook
to Father Thames, the latter

welcomed her in a language I [Peter] didn’t understand, and kissed her on both cheeks.
The air was suddenly full of the scent of apple blossom and horse sweat, Tizer and old hose
pipes, dusty roads and the sound of children laughing, all of it strong enough to make me take a
step backwards in surprise. A wiry arm snaked round my shoulders to steady me, and Oxley
slapped his hand on my chest in friendly rib-bending fashion.
‘Oh, did you feel that, Peter?’ he asked. ‘That’s the start of something, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘Start of what?’ I asked.
‘I have no idea,’ said Oxley. ‘But summer is definitely in the air.’ (ibid.: 389)

Thus the supernatural energies of London are balanced again, and life can go on.

4.2.1. Characteristic and Aspects of the Supernatural in The Rivers of London

In The Rivers of London, an extensive conglomerate of various types and forms of the
supernatural is presented as a fact within the fictional story world. The supernatural is for most
parts presented as the paranormal, i. e. an extension of physical reality obeying physical laws
which are yet little known, but can be learned. The co-existence and even close connection
between the supernatural and the natural is highlighted by posing Sir Isaac Newton as the

59
Folly’s “founder, and the first man to systemise the practice of magic” (ibid.: 79) in the book
“Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis, Autore: I.S.Newton” (ibid.: 81).

A variety of supernatural beings appear: ghosts, river spirits, vampires, trolls and others, some
of them without labels. As Peter asks Nightingale:
‘Is this where you tell me that there’s a secret branch of the Met whose task it is to tackle
ghosts, ghouls, faeries, demons, witches and warlocks, elves and goblins…?’ I said. ‘You can
stop me before I run out of supernatural creatures.’
‘You haven’t even scratched the surface,’ said Nightingale. (ibid.: 34)

Most supernatural beings are presented as inherently neither good nor bad, apart from vampires
who are “anti-life” (ibid.: 131) and who ““parasitical[ly][…] suck the life out of everything [in
their environment]” (ibid.: 201). Some supernatural beings (notably older female ones) seem to
be morally ambiguous: the river spirit Mother Thames has captured and enslaved a man through
magic; her daughter Tyburn is involved in ‘dirty’ deals and politics; and Peter strongly suspects
Molly, the Folly’s housekeeper, to have bitten off a man’s penis with her vagina dentata and
devoured it. Mr Punch, the spirit of riot and rebellion, is clearly a malevolent and maleficent
being, whereas the ghost of Henry Pyke seems to be incomplete, “a patchwork, a personality
cobbled together from half-remembered fragments. Maybe all ghosts were like this, a pattern
of memory trapped in the fabric of the city like files on a hard drive – slowly getting worn away
as each generation of Londoners laid down the pattern of their lives” (ibid.: 317).

A supernatural environment exists in The Rivers of London alongside (or perhaps superimposed
on) the natural environment. This supernatural environment appears to store the memories
produced by the beings in it, and it also seems to store magic. The Folly, for example, is
protected by “magic force fields and stuff” (ibid.: 139), as Beverly Brooks tells Peter. When
the latter wants to install a cable connection in the Folly, Nightingale tells him: “We can’t have
anything physically entering the building […][because] [t]here’s a series of protections woven
around the building. […] If we introduce a new physical connection with the outside, it would
create a weak spot” (ibid.: 163f). Environmental spirits like the river gods “draw power from
their environment” (ibid.: 201), but it is not clear where this magic comes from originally.
According to Nightingale, magic is generated by life and the more complex life is, the more
magic it generates (cf. ibid.: 201). If the normal criteria for life apply, it appears that magic
originates from life forms and is stored by the non-live environment.

Another aspect of the supernatural environment is the “world of ghosts” (ibid.: 255) that Peter
travels to with Molly’s help. He describes it as follows: “It wasn’t like a VR [virtual reality] or
60
how you imagine a hologram should work; it was like breathing vestigia, like swimming in
stone” (ibid.: 362). ‘Vestigia’ are described as impressions of the uncanny upon the
environment. When Nightingale and Peter visit the morgue to examine the body of the first
victim for traces of the supernatural, Nightingale tells Peter:
‘I want you to get your face as close to his [the victim’s] neck as possible, close your eyes
and tell me what you feel[.]’ […]
I did as I was told and closed my eyes. At first there was just the smell of disinfectant,
stainless steel and freshly washed skin, but after a few moments I became aware of something
else, a scratchy, wiry, panting, wet-nose, wagging sensation.
‘Well?’ asked Nightingale.
‘A dog,’ I said. ‘A little yappy dog.’
Growling, barking, yelling, flashes of cobbles, sticks, laughing – maniacal, high-pitched
laughing.
I stood up sharply.
‘Violence and laughter?’ asked Nightingale. I nodded.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
‘The uncanny,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s like a bright light when you close your eyes, it leaves
an afterimage. We call it vestigium.’
‘How do I know I didn’t just imagine it?’ I asked.
‘Experience,’ said Nightingale. ‘You learn to distinguish the difference through
experience.’ (ibid.: 37f)

Sensing ‘vestigia’ is one among the many supernatural powers that present themselves in The
Rivers of London. The others include the power to: influence and/or control someone’s mind;
control animals and; influence and/or control the environment. The latter includes the
performing of magic, which is described as “a ‘something’, like a catch in the silence at the
moment of creation” (ibid.: 93). Once the practitioner learns to perform a spell, a word is
attached to it, a process explained by Nightingale: “You practice the word until the word
becomes the spell and the spell becomes the word. So that to say lux is to make light” (ibid.:
135f)70. The combinations of spell and word are called ‘forma’ or forms. Although the original
forms are set down in Newton’s Principia Artes Magicis, changes have been made over the
years by “‘[p]eople who can’t resist fiddling with things,’ said Nightingale. ‘People like you,
Peter’” (ibid.: 137).

70
This conflation of the signifier and the signified is reminiscent of the Bible, Genesis 1:3: “And God said, Let
there be light: and there was light” (quote from http://biblehub.com/kjv/genesis/1.htm).

61
4.2.2. The Detectives and Their Method of Approaching the Supernatural in The Rivers of
London

Police constable Peter Grant is the main detective and narrator in The Rivers of London. When
first introduced to the reader, he is about to end his probation and fancies becoming a detective,
mostly because he wants “to be in the Sweeney or a Murder Investigation Team and swan
around in a big motor while wearing handmade shoes” (ibid.: 12). Instead, his shift commander
recommends him for the Case Progression Unit:
The role of the Case Progression Unit is to do the paperwork for the hard-pressed constable
so he or she can get back out on the street to be abused, spat at and vomited on. […] The truth
is that the paperwork is not that onerous[.][…] The problem is that police work is all about ‘face’
and ‘presence’ and remembering what a suspect said one day so you can catch them in a lie the
next. It’s about going towards the scream, staying calm and being the one that opens a suspect
package. It’s not that you can’t do both, it’s just that it’s not exactly common. What [the
commander] was saying to me was that I wasn’t a real copper – not a thief taker – but that I
might play a valuable role freeing up real coppers. (ibid.: 14)

Peter is said to be “too easily distracted” (ibid.: 16) and to not “see the world the way a copper
needs to see the world – it’s like seeing stuff that isn’t there” (ibid.: 17), but he indeed possesses
the ability to see things that others do not, which earns him a place as Nightingale’s apprentice.
Peter’s ability to see/sense the supernatural seems to be innate, not learned, and thus he is
marked as being special, cognitively different from the average person, which is a typical(ly
Romantic) trait of literary detectives.

Peter approaches the supernatural like a scientist (using the scientific method, i. e. observation,
hypothesis, experiment and conclusion). He uses a laboratory at the Folly to devise and conduct
experiments in magic, which is explained in (pseudo)scientific terms of energy, the laws of
thermodynamics, ‘vestigium’, ‘forma’ etc. In contrast to the scholarly Nightingale, Peter is more
of a practical, empirical scientist. He seeks answers to ‘why?’ and ‘how?’, and it is precisely
this enquiring, analytical quality of mind which enables him to resist the (many) manipulations
of the supernatural beings he encounters. In his first meeting with Mama Thames, “I was
fighting the urge to fling myself to my knees before her and put my face between her breasts
and go blubby, blubby, blubby. When she offered me a seat I was so hard it was painful to sit
down” (ibid.: 110). During their talk, however, he starts to wonder about the nature of river
spirits and whether all rivers have a god and “[w]ith that reality check, I realised that some of
the glamour was wearing off. I think Mama Thames must have sensed it too, because she gave

62
me a shrewd look and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see how it is now. How clever of your Master
to choose you’” (ibid.: 122).

When he first sees Nicholas Wallpenny while guarding the murder scene, Peter is not
immediately aware that he is seeing and talking to a ghost. As the ghost reveals his incorporeal
state by stepping into the light and becoming transparent, Peter thinks: “Right, […] just because
you’ve gone mad doesn’t mean you should stop acting like a policeman” (ibid.: 7), so he
proceeds to interview the ghost as a witness. As he encounters something new and strange, his
training takes over and he deals with the situation calmly and efficiently. The next day he wakes
up, “hoping that my memory of talking to a ghost might fade like a dream, but it didn’t” (ibid.:
10). Still, Peter hesitates to believe in the supernatural based on his sensory perceptions alone;
his belief is only consolidated once he receives Nightingale’s confirmation that the supernatural
is indeed real:
‘Ghosts are real,’ [Nightingale said].
I stared at him. I didn’t believe in ghosts, or fairies or gods, and for the last couple of days I’d
been like a man watching a magic show – I’d expected a magician to step out from behind the
curtain and ask me to pick a card, any card. I wasn’t ready to believe in ghosts, but that’s the
thing about empirical experience – it’s the real thing. (ibid.: 33f)

Flexibility and adaptability to new situations are among Peter’s most important characteristics,
as are his reliance on practical reasoning and controlling his emotions. Even Nightingale, who
is Peter’s superior and also a fully trained wizard (in which he more closely resembles the
enigmatic, highly skilled classical detective than Peter does), often relies on Peter and also
follows his lead. When Nightingale becomes incapacitated during a failed operation, Peter is
the one who singlehandedly solves the mystery and achieves the final resolution, both of the
criminal case and of the dispute between the river spirits; when Peter plans how to draw out the
ghost and trap him, Nightingale plays the part Peter assigns to him. Whereas Nightingale is
traditional, precise, solid and workmanlike (Neoclassicist attributes)(cf. ibid.: 187), Peter is an
innovator and experimenter who often acts instinctively (Romanticist attributes). Peter is the
link between the old-fashioned Nightingale and the modern times; the former’s cunning is
juxtaposed to the latter’s solidity and workmanship and while Nightingale’s knowledge often
proves invaluable, Peter’s ingenuity seems to be more important for achieving a solution to
mystery and conflict71.

71
For example, when preparing to perform an experiment by taking Toby, the first murder victim’s dog, to the
crime scene to see whether he can sniff out ‘vestigia’, Nightingale turns to Peter:
63
Initially often on the verge of being completely overpowered by the River gods, Peter uses his
cunning and reasoning to assert his independence. In order to do this, he must affirm his new
identity and thus establish his place in the community. When solving a dispute with Mother
Thames’ daughter Tyburn, the latter tries to bully him into submission:
‘We know who you are,’ she said. ‘Your father is a failed musician and your mother cleans
offices for a living. You grew up in a council flat, and you went to your local comprehensive
and you failed your A levels…’
‘I am a sworn constable,’ [Peter] said, ‘and that makes me an officer of the law. I am also
an apprentice, which makes me a keeper of the sacred flame, but most of all I am a free man of
London and that makes me Prince of the City.’ (ibid.: 357f)

In this regard The Rivers of London has some elements of the Bildungsroman, or coming-of-
age story; Peter’s initially unrecognised potential is revealed through his choices and actions,
and finally even his shift commander accedes that he was “‘wrong about you, Grant. […] You
do have the makings of a proper copper’” (ibid.: 324). Peter feels that “becoming a wizard is
about discovering what’s real and what isn’t” (ibid.: 154)72.

Although Peter actively shapes his own life rather than allowing outside forces to control it, he
does not stand apart from society. A significant chunk of his efforts is spent on building and
maintaining his professional social network, on which he relies heavily. This highlighting of
the importance of community and team work is typical of the police-procedural genre, where
criminal cases are solved by a team of detectives working closely together. “Police work is all
about systems and procedures and planning – even when you’re hunting a supernatural entity”
(ibid.: 261), it is stated. The detective work described in The Rivers of London is highly
systemised and organised, and a lot of people are involved in a murder investigation (incident
response officers, murder investigation team, pathologist, forensic teams, uniformed officers),
in difference to classical detective fiction. “Criminals are not caught by brilliant deductive
reasoning but by the fact that some poor slob has spent a week tracking down every shop in
Hackney that sells a particular brand of trainer, and then checking the security-camera footage
on every single one” (ibid.: 64). This claim is slightly tongue-in-cheek however – the mystery

‘How do you want to do this?’ asked Nightingale.

‘You’re the expert, sir,’ I said.
‘I looked into the literature on this,’ said Nightingale, ‘and it wasn’t very helpful.’ (Aaronovitch 2011: 53)

72
Making this distinction by learning to differentiate illusion and fantasy from reality is part of every human
individual’s process of growing up.

64
of the ghost is nonetheless mostly solved through deductive reasoning and the forming and
execution of “cunning plan[s]” (ibid.: 249). In The Rivers of London, teamwork73 is absolutely
essential not so much for arriving at the solution, but rather for controlling disorder and
reinstating order. The detective uses many police techniques in his inquiries, but they are not
sufficient in themselves. The detective still arrives at the solution via individual ratiocination,
due to his brilliant and imaginative mind, thus remaining anchored in the tradition of classical
detectives.

4.2.3. The Implied Worldview and Functions of the Supernatural in The Rivers of London

The fact that the supernatural in The Rivers of London is presented as true within the fictional
world and is dealt with so matter-of-fact, transposes the reader partly into another genre (i. e.
Hoppenstand’s supernatural formula) where the presence of the supernatural does not break the
aesthetic illusion. Accordingly, the supernatural enhances rather than obscures the readability
of the fictional world in The Rivers of London; it is a second layer of meaning superimposed on
the first (i. e. the natural). Supernatural signs (‘vestigia’) can be read by an individual with the
ability to perceive them and interpreted correctly using the appropriate method, which is
rational analysis. As in The Pale Horse, the detective must learn to differentiate between truth
and superstition, between fact and illusion. This is often a struggle for Peter due to the pull of
the supernatural into the realm of the irrational (fear, sexuality, violence, or even death), which
he has to resist. The only way he can effectively do that is when he is performing magic, which
represents rational control of supernatural powers. “To do magic, your mind has to be working”
(ibid.: 293), meaning that magic is a conscious, rational feat. The ability to do magic (i. e.
exercise rational control over one’s thoughts) protects the wizard from the manipulations of the
supernatural (i. e. being led by one’s irrational impulses) which seem to “[act] on the instinctive
bit of [their] brain, not the ‘higher’ functions” (ibid.: 242).

Magic is closely linked with science in The Rivers of London, with Isaac Newton as the alleged
founder of magic, Nightingale’s stress on using the scientific method to approach the
supernatural and Peter’s scientific experiments in magic. The promotion of a scientific, rational

73
Interestingly, the majority of the police force is unaware of the existence of the supernatural. Only a few police
officers in top position and Peter's closest associates have access to this knowledge, making it a privilege of those
in power and those initiated.

65
approach is typical for detective fiction as a ratiocinative genre and the supernatural entering
the narrative does not change this basic scheme. The supernatural represents an enigma that the
detective feels the need to solve. “Once you cross this particular Rubicon there will be no going
back” (ibid.: 72), Nightingale tells Peter, who responds:
‘I’ve just seen a man kill his wife and child,’ I said. ‘If there’s a rational reason for that,
then I want to know what it is. If there’s even a chance that he wasn’t responsible for his actions,
then I want to know about it. Because that would mean we might be able to stop it happening
again.’
‘That is not a good reason to take on this job,’ said Nightingale.
‘Is there a good reason?’ I asked. ‘I want in, sir, because I’ve got to know.’
Nightingale lifted his glass in salute. ‘That’s a better reason.’ (ibid.: 73)

The ‘no going back’ suggests that once something is known, it cannot be unknown, and that
knowledge means both power and responsibility. At the same time, a utilitarian approach to
knowledge is not appropriate; knowledge is valuable and should be sought for its own sake.

Seeking assurance that the gruesome double murder occurred not because of unimaginable
human evil but rather because of the influence of external, inhuman forces points to a basic
belief in an ordered, moral universe where everything happens for an understandable reason.
This belief is reflected in the use of the supernatural in The Rivers of London; the irrational
Other is personified74 and displaced into the realm of the supernatural, which the detective (as
the ideal human intellect, the rational Self) then interacts with and brings under control. This
narrative strategy provides a ‘safe’ way of exploring crime and disorder, since by displacing
evil onto the supernatural humans can be portrayed as inherently moral and good (if sometimes
foolish) beings75, which has a reassuring effect on the reader and provides them with a sense of
security and order (– the desired effect of formula fiction). Ultimately, rational and irrational
forces are balanced, peace and order have been restored and (for the time being) are maintained.

The Rivers of London was written in a globalised world with its fears of another world war,
environmental catastrophes, market collapse, deadly diseases, artificial intelligence, etc. The
illusion that humankind controls nature by some kind of divine right has by now mostly been

74
Chaos/disorder is personified in the spirit of Punch, the murderer, who is “the manifestation of a social trend,
crime and disorder, […][t]he spirit of riot and rebellion in the London mob” (Aaronovitch 2011: 250), a ubiquitous
force created and powered by irrational energies from countless human beings. Thus the detective is not seeking
to contain an individual, but rather the socially disruptive impulses of the human mind which have gotten out of
control.
75
In subsequent novels, Aaronovitch complicates the matter somewhat, especially when Lesley turns against Peter
and betrays the team in order to join a dark wizard.

66
exposed as such. Since the New Age Movement, alternative, spiritual rather than materialistic,
concepts of nature have often been invoked in public discourse (e. g. Mother Earth as a sentient
living organism). London, the main setting of the story, has in the past decades become an
international metropolis, with an ethnically and culturally diverse society. The message inherent
in The Rivers of London seems to be that our rational, analytical mind remains a successful tool
for understanding and making sense of the world despite the (fairly) recent and profound
cultural changes in contemporary Western society (indicating a humanist philosophy), and that
the world can still be understood and the truth arrived at by someone possessing the necessary
characteristics (indicating an epistemological optimism) which in addition to being analytical
and rational include being open to new kinds of knowledge and insight.

As previously stated, the supernatural in The Rivers of London provides a way of personifying
and displacing the irrational Other, at the same time providing the detective hero with the power
to control it (through magic). A secondary and perhaps not immediately apparent function of
the supernatural in The Rivers of London is the enabling of a symbolic exploration of the fears
and anxieties connected with human sexuality and sexual coming-of-age (mirroring the
previously identified element of Bildungsroman). When looked at more closely, most of Peter’s
encounters with (notably female) supernatural beings contain either explicit sexual imagery (as
evident in some of the quotes above) or implicit sexual allusions. Performing a full
psychoanalytical analysis thereof is far beyond the scope of this paper and would not contribute
significantly to the discussion of the supernatural in detective fiction, therefore I will not
attempt it. However, it is interesting to note that the supernatural can still serve as perhaps not
quite a pretext for discussing taboo subjects76 but certainly as a device which enables an indirect
discussion thereof.

76
Among the issues thus addressed by The Rivers of London are: an unresolved Oedipal complex (as alluded to in
Peter’s meetings with Mama Thames); sexual violence (e. g. Molly’s bite which transports Peter to the spirit realm
and subsequently her attack on him); and fear of female sexuality (e. g. the ‘vagina dentata’ incident Peter
investigates).

67
4.3. The Supernatural as Ontologically Undeterminable in Tony
Hillerman’s The Blessing Way (1970)

The story of The Blessing Way (1970) is set on the Navajo reservation where traditional Navajo
belief in evil witchcraft and the power of ceremonies to dispel evil and restore order to the
community coexists with a contemporary Western approach to crime and crime prevention. The
main detective is Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, who is sceptical (yet
respectful) of local beliefs/superstitions and relies on a scientific and rational method to solve
crimes on the reservation. He is initially joined in the investigation by his old friend,
anthropologist Bergen McKee who has visited the reservation in order to collect material for
his study of Navajo witchcraft beliefs, with which he hopes to “tie all Navajo superstitions into
a tidy, orderly bundle” (Hillerman 1970: 17).

The tale begins with Luis Horseman, a Navajo youth who had been involved in a knife fight,
who hides from police persecution in the wilderness of the Lukachukai77 Plateau, in the vicinity
of the Anasazi Houses (yet staying clear of them, believing them to be haunted by the ghosts of
the ‘Old People’). Horseman is preparing to hunt, holding a turquoise bear amulet and chanting
bits of a Navajo hunting song “to be heard in the minds of the animals” (ibid.: 2) and thus draw
them out of hiding. His hunt is interrupted, however, by the appearance of a man with a wolf
skin draped around his shoulders:
[Horseman] glanced around for a place to stand. And then he saw the Navajo Wolf.
He had heard nothing. But the man was standing not fifty feet away, watching him silently.
He was a big man with his wolf skin draped across his shoulders. The forepaws hung limply
down the front of his black shirt and the empty skull of the beast was pushed back on his
forehead, its snout pointing upward.
The Wolf looked at Horseman. And then he smiled.
‘I won’t tell,’ Horseman said. His voice was loud, rising almost to a scream. And then he
turned and ran, ran frantically […][.] And behind him he heard the Wolf laughing. (ibid.: 10f)

Horseman decides to stay on the plateau despite seeing the Wolf, believing it to be the only
place to hide from the “Blue Policeman” (ibid.: 13). Nevertheless, he is afraid, darkening his
body with ashes “to blind the ghosts” (ibid.: 12) and chanting a song for protection, wishing

77
The Lukachukai Mountains are a mountain range in northeast Arizona, USA, within the Navajo Indian
Reservation.

68
that he had paid more attention to his uncle’s teachings on how to “talk to the Holy People”
(ibid.: 13).

Leaphorn and McKee travel to Shoemaker’s trading post at the foot of the Lukachukai
mountains in order to spread the word among Horseman’s relatives that the attacked man had
survived and that it would be better for Horseman to turn himself in. A big Navajo man buying
a hat seems very interested in Leaphorn’s story and Leaphorn suspects that the Navajo knows
about Horseman. Leaphorn is also very puzzled by the Navajo’s claim that his old felt hat was
stolen, but his silver concho belt was left behind.

The following morning, a local man called Joseph Begay finds the body of Luis Horseman:
He stopped just as his truck tilted down the steep incline, put on the emergency brake, and
stepped out. […] It was when he was turning to climb back into the pickup that he saw the owl.
It flew almost directly at the truck, startling him, flitted through the headlight beams, and
disappeared abruptly into the dawn half-light up the wash. He sat behind the wheel a moment,
feeling shaken. The owl had acted strangely, he thought, and it was known that ghosts sometimes
took on that form when they moved in the darkness. It looked like a burrowing owl, Begay
thought, but maybe it was a ghost returning with the dawn to a grave or a death hogan.
[…] But by now the mood of the morning had recaptured him and he thought that it was just
a burrowing owl, going home from the night’s hunting and confused by his headlights. It was just
beyond the rim of the shallow canyon […] that he saw he was wrong.
The body lay just beside the track […]. (ibid.: 41f)

When Leaphorn is called to the scene of the crime, he is confused because Horseman’s location
does not make sense. When looking at the body, he notices that it had been dragged after rigor
mortis had set in. He sees no reason why someone should have murdered Horseman – “[j]ust
another poor soul that didn’t quite know how to be a Navajo and couldn’t learn to act like a
white[,] [n]o good for anything” (ibid.: 67) – and then left his body where it would certainly be
found instead of hiding it. He concludes that his warnings at the trading post that Horseman
should give himself up or the police will come looking for him had gotten Horseman killed.

McKee begins his investigation into the Navajo Wolf sightings by interviewing an old Navajo
woman, Old Woman Grey Rocks. She tells him that the Wolf is thought to be a stranger,
something which surprises McKee:
A few hours ago he would have rejected such an idea as incongruous. The witch should be one
of the clan, a known irritant or target of envy. But now he was faced with a new set of facts.
There seemed to be, if Old Woman Grey Rocks was well informed, none of the usual causes
that produce a scapegoat witch. The cause, when he found it, now would be likely something
isolated and outside the usual social pattern. (ibid.: 57)

This is confirmed by the news Leaphorn and McKee receive about Charlie Tsosie, one of the
people “bothered by the witch” (ibid.: 71), having an Enemy Way performed. “[T]he only times

69
[McKee] had heard of its being used was when members of The People came home after being
off the Reservation, people like discharged servicemen, people who had been in contact with
foreign influences—white men, or Pueblo Indians, or Mexicans” (ibid.: 71f).

Leaphorn and McKee split up, the former continuing his investigation, the latter driving into
the canyon to meet his colleague Jeremy Canfield who is conducting an anthropological
research into the burial sites of the Anasazi (the pre-Navajo cliff-dwellers) and accompanying
him to the canyons in the Lukachukais, where they are later to be joined by Ellen Leon, a young
woman trying to locate her fiancé who had gone to the reservation to perform unknown
engineering experiments.

By attending the Enemy Way ceremony performed for Charlie Tsosie, Leaphorn learns that the
Big Navajo is believed to be the Wolf and that is why his hat was stolen as a scalp – “something
from the witch’s person, a clipping of hair if that could be had, something with his blood on it,
or some article of clothing which had absorbed his sweat” (ibid.: 103) – to be symbolically
killed and the witch killed “within the year by his own witchcraft—turned against him by the
medicine of the Enemy Way” (ibid.: 106).

Meanwhile, McKee finds his colleague Canfield missing, having left a strange note signed with
the wrong name (John instead of Jeremy), telling him he had found an injured man and had
taken him to the hospital. That night, McKee barely escapes the Big Navajo who comes to get
him dressed as the Wolf. Not finding McKee at the camp, the Big Navajo disables McKee’s car
and leaves. The next day, McKee attempts to escape from the canyon on foot and meets Ellen
on her way to the camp. Ellen does not believe his story of the danger they are facing and due
to her hesitation, the Big Navajo catches them and holds them hostage. The man had killed
Canfield and made him write the note, now ordering McKee to write a letter. Because of a hand
injury sustained during his escape, McKee’s writing is unrecognisable, and the Navajo takes
them to the Anasazi cliff dwellings to camp and allow the injury to heal.

There McKee uses his anthropological knowledge of the Anasazi to find a way to escape, killing
the Big Navajo’s accomplice and leaving an injured Ellen behind in order to seek help from her
fiancé Jim Hall, who McKee suspects is working nearby. The Big Navajo hunts and shoots
McKee, but is killed by the latter. McKee reaches Jim, suddenly realising that Jim had been
collaborating with the Big Navajo. He is saved by Leaphorn, who had come to the canyons to
investigate Horseman’s murder.

70
It is revealed that Ellen’s fiancé had been spying on the military using a radar and had hired the
Big Navajo to keep people away from the Lukachukais, which the latter did by pretending to
be the Navajo Wolf and scaring people off their land. The Big Navajo had been a “Relocation
Indian” (ibid.: 267), which threw Leaphorn off the trail;
[…]I figured him to act like a Navajo and he was acting like a white man. […] If he was a
Navajo, no matter what he was doing in there, killing Horseman would have screwed it up for
him. He would have gone off somewhere and had a sweat bath, and then he would have found
himself a singer and got himself cured and forgot about it. (ibid.: 269)

Thus the murders are solved, order is restored in the community, and the ending hints at a
budding romance between Ellen and McKee, following the established pattern of classical
detective fiction.

4.3.1. Characteristics and Aspects of the Supernatural in The Blessing Way

In The Blessing Way, the supernatural is presented both as a fact within the Navajo culture and
belief system and as an illusion as seen from the Western point of view. Within the Navajo
culture the supernatural is presented as the mystical to be contemplated rather than studied and
analysed scientifically; no attempts at explaining the supernatural or wondering about its
ontological status occur throughout the story apart from Leaphorn’s rhetorical question to
McKee: “Or maybe it’s a real genuine Witch, who really turns himself into a werewolf and
wouldn’t that knock hell out of you scientific types?” (ibid.: 23).

Among the Navajos the supernatural is inextricably linked with the natural in that all natural
beings and phenomena have a supernatural/spiritual counterpart: humans have a spirit which
after death is left behind to haunt the physical world as a ghost; animals have spirits which
communicate with humans and which can be influenced by humans through ritual and song;
natural phenomena such as the wind also possess a spiritual component and can similarly be
influenced by humans through chants or ritual.

Witches are believed to cause bad dreams, illness and misfortune with the help of evil spirits,
yet it is unclear how much and in what way witches use supernatural powers in the process of
their witching. Primarily, a witch is someone who “turn[s] antisocial, away from the golden
mean of nature, deliberately choosing the unnatural, and therefore, in Navajo belief, the evil
way” (ibid.: 23). According to the Navajo Origin Myth, witchcraft was brought into the world
by Diving Heron, who was sent for ‘the way to get rich’ by First Man and First Woman (cf.

71
93). As Leaphorn tells McKee: “Crazy to get rich. […] You call it ambition. Sometimes we call
it witchcraft” (ibid.: 264).

Witchcraft is diagnosed by a Star Gazer or a Hand Trembler whose hands shake when held over
the afflicted person and who may advise further measures to determine whether evil spirits are
involved (e. g. blackening of the body with ash to hide a person from the ghosts). To counter
the effects of witchcraft, a Navajo needs to have a Blessing Way performed for them by a
Singer, someone who knows the old chants that can restore spiritual order and harmony.

The Enemy Way performed for Tsosie by the Singer Sandoval is a type of Blessing Way. Part
of the ceremony is the drawing of a sand painting:
[Sandoval] had known it was going to work all right when he poured out the colored sand to make
the Encircling Guardian. He had made it in a square as his father had taught him, with the east side
open to keep from trapping in any of the Holy People. The Guardian’s head was at the north end,
with his two arms inward, and his feet were at the south end. His body was four alternating lines
of red and yellow sand, and at the opening Sandoval had drawn the elaborate figure of Thunder,
wearing the three crooked arrows in his headdress and carrying the crooked arrows under his
wings.
‘Put Thunder there when you sing for a witching,’ his father had told him. ‘His lightning kills the
witches.’ (ibid.: 86)

Later in the day, a thundercloud rises over the Lukachukais. “Sandoval will know his medicine
is working, Leaphorn thought. He has called for Thunder to kill the Wolf and Thunder has come
to the appointed place” (ibid.: 104). Just after the symbolic scalp shooting and killing, a
lightning bolt flashes over the Lukachukais:
The high slopes of the Lukachukais were obscured now by the darkness of the cloud. Light from
the setting sun glittered from the strata of ice crystals forming in the thin, frigid air at its upper
levels. Deep within it, the structure of the cloud was lit by a sudden flare of sheet lightning. And
then there was a single lightning bolt, an abrupt vivid streak of white light pulsing an electric
moment against the black of the rain, connecting cloud and mountain top. (ibid.: 106)

According to Navajo belief, the witch will be dead within a year of the ceremony by his own
witchcraft. And in fact, the Big Navajo is killed soon afterwards by McKee. His death can be
seen from two different perspectives, the Western and the Navajo one. According to the
Western perception of causality, the reason for the Big Navajo’s death is a natural one: he makes
a mistake when pursuing the escaped McKee and the latter kills him in self-defence. According
to the Navajo perception of causality, on the other hand, the Big Navajo dies because he has
abandoned the Way of the People, seeking to become rich and thus going against the natural
order of society. The ceremony has recreated balance and accordingly, the witch dies. The text
enables both explanations, the natural and the supernatural one, to be read as correct within
their respective cultural frameworks.
72
4.3.2. The Detective and His Method of Approaching the Supernatural in The Blessing Way

Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn is the main detective in The Blessing Way. Called
“Blue Policeman” (ibid.: 8) by Navajos, he operates on both Western and Navajo cultural
principles. Although he “ha[s] a white man’s haircut[,] [n]ot like Changing Woman had taught”
(92 ibid.:) and “[t]he law he enforce[s] had been taken by the Tribal Council from the white
man's laws” (ibid.: 102), he “still kn[ows] the old and patient ways” (ibid.: 90) of The People
and adheres to them, both in interaction with others and in acting alone78. While he believes in
evil and understands the value of tradition and spirituality (to the point of feeling “fierce pride
in The People” (ibid.: 97)), he does not believe in the supernatural aspects of what the Navajo
call witchcraft. Instead, he seems to be a typical ratiocinative detective:
Leaphorn never counted on luck. Instead he expected order—the natural sequence of behavior,
the cause producing the natural effect, the human behaving in the way it was natural for him to
behave. He counted on that and upon his own ability to sort out the chaos of observed facts and
find in them this natural order. Leaphorn knew from experience that he was unusually adept at
this. As a policeman, he found it to be a talent which, when it worked unusually well, caused him
a faint subconscious uneasiness, grating on his ingrained Navajo conviction that any emergence
from the human norm was unnatural and—therefore—unhealthy. And it was a talent which
caused him, when the facts refused to fall into the pattern demanded by nature and the Navajo
Way, acute mental discomfort. (ibid.: 202f)

Leaphor has a natural talent for analysis and deduction, which sets him apart from the rest of
society much like we see in other classical detectives (e. g. Holmes, Poirot). Instead of feeling
superior because of being different than the majority of people, however, this makes him uneasy
due to his Navajo upbringing. This points to the inherent differences between Western and
Navajo culture: whereas original genius and individual difference is highly valued in the
individualist Western culture, the collectivist Navajo culture has different values (tradition,
hierarchy, conformity, close in-group relationships etc.). One of Leaphorn’s most important
skills is maintaining the balance between these two sets of values and worldviews, unlike most
other Navajo characters in the story, who either uncompromisingly adhere to tradition or are
“lost somewhere between the values of The People and the values of the whites” (ibid.: 95),
often resulting in alcohol abuse, criminality and/or depression.

As much as his sense for establishing the natural order behind seemingly chaotic facts usually
aids him in his investigations, in the case of Horseman’s murder Leaphorn has trouble figuring

78
(e. g. singing chants from the Blessing Way while driving (cf. Hillerman 1970: 202))

73
out the truth precisely because he expects natural order where there is none: “‘I was slow
figuring it out,’ Leaphorn said. ‘I smelled something about [the Big Navajo]. But I figured him
to act like a Navajo and he was acting like a white man’” (ibid.: 269). Leaphorn fails to arrive
at the solution until he realises that the Big Navajo is a “Relocation Indian. California Navajo.
[...] [A]ll he knew about The People he must have got out of a book” (ibid.: 267f). Once he
realigns his sense of order to account for Western cultural values and ideas (money, ambition,
time), he is able to piece the clues together into a meaningful whole and thus arrives at the truth.

Leaphorn is joined in the investigation by Bergen McKee, who is an anthropologist at the

University of New Mexico. McKee is a “bulky, big-boned, tired-faced man who looked at once
powerful and clumsy” (ibid.: 15f) and who has been depressed and unsure of himself ever since
his wife left him. McKee decides to resume his research in Navajo witchcraft beliefs and thus
briefly joins Leaphorn’s investigation, serving as a kind of Watson figure who represents the
average reader intellect. He initially excitedly participates in trying to solve the puzzle of
Horseman’s murder, but then reminds himself that unlike the detective, he is not particularly
suitable for detective work:
He had once again, as he had for years, fallen victim to his optimism. Expecting something when
there was always nothing. Anticipating some romantic mystery in what […] Leaphorn must
already see as a sordid, routine little homicide. It was this flaw, he knew, that had cost him these
last eight years of anguish, turned to misery, turned to what was now simply numbness. (ibid.: 73)

McKee abandons the murder investigation and travels to the Lukachukais to investigate the
Navajo Wolf incidents. His instincts – “something primitive within his mind signaling danger
and urging caution” (ibid.: 114) – help him initially avoid the Big Navajo and when he and
Ellen are captured and held hostage, McKee proves his knowledge, courage and survival skills
by escaping and killing the kidnappers. Whereas Leaphorn is the typical ratiocinative detective
who mostly uses his ‘little grey cells’ to solve the puzzle, McKee is the hero adventurer,
overcoming death to gain love79.

Both McKee’s academic knowledge about the Anasazi and his knowledge of the Navajo
language and culture is instrumental for his survival (and possibly for the final complete
solution of the puzzle). In fact, the voice of McKee seems to function as a mediator between
the reader and Navajo beliefs and traditions, explaining the Navajo culture as seen through the

79
In this sense, The Blessing Way is a hybrid of the mystery and the romantic-adventure genre (cf. Hoppenstand
1987).

74
eyes of Westerners. His perspective on Navajo culture is out-group (using Western
psychological and sociological concepts to explain Navajo beliefs), whereas Leaphorn’s is
decidedly in-group and therefore slightly alien to the Western reader.

4.3.3. The implied worldview and cultural functions of the supernatural in The Blessing Way

In The Blessing Way, the two very different worldviews of Navajo culture on the one hand and
Western culture on the other are presented. The narration shifts between these worldviews as it
moves between focalisers and between different environments. These shifts are anticipated at
the beginning of the story by the description of the wind: whereas it is “the Wind People” who
move across the reservation (ibid.: 12), who whine past the boulder where Horseman is hiding
(cf. ibid.) and rattle at the windows of the Law and Order Building where Leaphorn is listening
to “the voices in the wind” (ibid.: 12f), it is “the wind” which is the result of the geological
characteristics of the region, which can be measured for speed (cf. ibid: 12), yet which makes
McKee nervous (ibid.: 14)80.

The fictional world of The Blessing Way is readable in two different ways, only one of which
includes the supernatural as a fact (rather than superstition and/or illusion). As far as Leaphorn’s
investigation is concerned, the supernatural explanation (i. e. that the murders were caused by
witchcraft and evil spirits) is meaningless and has value only as it explains the motives and
actions of those who believe in it.

The detective learns the truth by a process of rational investigation, analysis and deduction,
repeated over and over until he is left with the only possible explanation of events:

80
The entire passage is as follows:
That night, the Wind People moved across the reservation. On the Navajo calendar it was eight days from the
end of the Season When the Thunder Sleeps, the 25th of May, a night of a late sliver of moon. The wind pushed out
of a high-pressure system centered on the Nevada plateau and carved shapes in the winter snowpack on San Francisco
peaks, the Sacred Mountain of Blue Flint Woman. Below, at Flagstaff airport, it registered gusts up to thirty-two
knots—the dry, chilled wind of high-country spring.
On the west slope of the Lukachukai Mountains, the Wind People whined past the boulder where Luis
Horseman was huddled, his body darkened by ashes to blind the ghosts. […]
A hundred miles south at Window Rock, the Wind people rattled at the windows of the Law and Order Building,
where Joe Leaphorn was working his way through a week’s stack of unfinished case files. […] [H]e listened to the
voices in the wind, and thought of witches, and of Bergen McKee, his friend who studied them. […] Leaphorn snapped
off his desk lamp and sat a moment in the dark listening to the wind.
At Albuquerque, four hundred miles to the east, the wind showed itself briefly in the apartment of Bergen
McKee, as it shook the television transmission tower atop Sandia Crest and sent a brief flicker across the face of the
TV screen he wasn’t watching. […][T]he wind made him nervous. (Hillerman 1970: 12ff; italics mine)
75
 At approximately four o’clock Joe Leaphorn […] led his borrowed horse the last steep
yards to the top of the ridge behind Ceniza Mesa. Almost immediately he found exactly what
he had hoped to find. And when he found it the pieces of the puzzle locked neatly into place—
confirming his meticulously logical conclusions. He knew why Luis Horseman had been killed.
He knew, with equal certainty, that the Big Navajo had done the killing. The fact that he had no
idea how he could prove it was not, for the moment, important.
At about ten minutes after four o’clock, Lieutenant Leaphorn found something he had not
expected to find on the Ceniza ridge. And suddenly he was no longer sure of anything. This
unexpected fact visible at his feet fell like a stone in a reflecting pool, turning the mirrored image
into shattered confusion. The answer he had found converted itself into another question.
Leaphorn no longer had any idea why Horseman had died. He was, in fact, more baffled than
ever. (198f)

This process of oscillation between knowing and not knowing typically occurs in detective
stories. There is usually a period of time when the detective is thoroughly confused by the
semiotic signs which do not seem to form a pattern, followed by the detective finding the correct
code (in Leaphorn’s case this means abandoning the Navajo ideological framework for the
Western one) and arriving at the truth. Despite his non-Western ethnicity, Leaphorn still
operates as a typical classical detective and the story promotes epistemological optimism and
scientific positivism.

The detective provides a natural explanation for the murder and the actions of the Navajo Wolf
turn out to have been a ruse. In difference to classical detective fiction, however, the detective’s
explanation is not presented as the only true one (even though it is clearly favoured).
Furthermore, in contrast to classical detective fiction where the enigma of the supernatural must
be solved before the correct frame of reference can be established (i. e. determining whether
the supernatural is a fact or an illusion in the fictional world) in order to be able to arrive at the
truth, in The Blessing Way the supernatural is not something that the detective is concerned
with, neither proving nor disproving its ontological value.

In Navajo culture, the role of the detective as the one who restores order in the community does
not exists; instead, this task is performed by the spiritual leaders of the community. The role of
the Tribal Police is thus not to restore order as the Navajos see it, but to ensure that the Western
laws and order are maintained. 81

81
Interestingly, in later books of this series, beginning with People of Darkness (1980), Hillerman introduces a
second Navajo detective, Jim Chee, who is both a police officer and apprentice to a Singer, where the conflict of
different cultural values is made even more obvious; at the same time with Chee the authority of the Priest
archetype is invoked.

76
In The Blessing Way, two frames of reference are presented side by side and the reader is free
to decide what truth value to assign to them. The supernatural forms a different causality, i. e.
a different interpretation of events and the causal links between them. For example, Horseman
is killed by the Big Navajo because: a) he had left the Way of the People, which is why he
committed a crime and thus became further unbalanced and also why, instead of returning to
his family and finding a Singer to cure him, he escaped to the Lukachukais and stayed too close
to the ancient dwellings of the Anasazi and their ghosts, thus exposing himself to witchcraft; or
b) because he had committed a crime and run away, coincidentally staying too close to the Big
Navajo and thus representing a threat of exposure, which the Big Navajo realises once he
coincidentally learns that the police would come looking for Horseman if he did not return on
his own. Notably, in the first, Navajo version there is no room for coincidence and the world is
entirely meaningful, whereas in the second, Western version coincidence plays a crucial role in
the chain of events, suggesting that the world is inherently meaningless – a typically
postmodern82 idea.

The question posing itself in regard to the supernatural in The Blessing Way is not so much
whether the supernatural exists, but rather what role it plays in Navajo culture (cf. McKee’s
theory that “the Wolf superstition [is] a simple scapegoat procedure giving a primitive people
a necessary outlet for blame in times of trouble and frustration” (ibid.: 23)). Implicitly, the
difference between belief and knowledge is also questioned, and the text goes even further;
when Leaphorn sees the thunder clouds gathering over the mountain during the Enemy Way
ceremony, he thinks: “Sandoval will know his medicine is working” (ibid.: 104; italics mine).
Designating Navajo beliefs as knowledge exposes the ultimate uncertainty of differentiating
between belief and knowledge, hinting at an inherent epistemological pessimism. While The
Blessing Way is not a postmodernist anti-detective story, its plurality of ethnic voices and the
resulting destabilisation of the notion of absolute knowledge/truth places it within the
postmodern/postcolonial tradition, where it “points towards [a] number of unresolved issues in
American society: homogeneity versus diversity, the claims of the past versus the demands of
the present, and the very nature of crime, aberrancy, and justice” (MacDonald 2002: 48).

82
The idea of the inherent meaninglessness of the world originates in modernism and is the underlying theme of
hard-boiled detective fiction. Postmodernism further developed the idea, making it explicit and central to the
narrative.

77
5. Conclusion

The supernatural is one of the ultimate enigmas of human existence. In the pre-modern
episteme, a variety of questions were answered through the supernatural: What is the meaning
of life? When did life begin? What happens after death? Does some higher force or being exist
and if yes, what does that mean for humanity? Is the human being only a machine, an assembly
of body parts, with the human consciousness simply a result of physicochemical processes – or
is there an immortal soul inhabiting our physical body? Despite the vast amount of knowledge,
methods and technological equipment available today, there is still no definitive answer to some
of these questions within the modern episteme and thus stories about the supernatural continue
to be one way of exploring these questions and our beliefs.

One of the questions asked at the beginning of this paper was whether the supernatural is a
meaningful literary category when analysing detective fiction. The answer is a resounding ‘yes’.
The supernatural remains one of the ultimate frontiers in humankind’s exploration of the world.
(Dis)Belief in the supernatural varies greatly among cultures and has even varied significantly
across different time periods within cultures. As Irwin observes:
Those of a sceptical bent may question why so many researchers are apparently wasting their
time investigating the causes and consequences of beliefs that are evidently false. If so, they
miss the point. Paranormal beliefs are very widely held in the population: around the world,
surveys consistently show that about 50 per cent of people hold one or more paranormal beliefs
and, of these, about 50 per cent believe they have had a genuinely paranormal experience.
Regardless of whether these beliefs and experiences are ‘correct’, they are clearly an important
part of what it is to be human. Paranormal beliefs occur in every culture around the world.
Therefore academics have a responsibility to attempt to understand what causes these beliefs,
and the consequences to individuals and to society of holding them. (2009: viii)

Whenever the supernatural enters the detective narrative, it illuminates the contrast between
idealistic subjectivism and rationalistic objectivism as two opposing epistemological
principles83, a dialectic already apparent in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in Dupin’s

83
Irwin offers the explanation that
paranormal belief is simply one fact of a broader worldview, a view that is primarily characterised by a highly
subjective and esoteric perspective on humanity, life and the world at large. For example, under this worldview events
may be interpreted more in terms of intangible mental and metaphysical processes than in relation to observable or
physical factors. Truth is held to be revealed wholly by the exercise of contemplation and reflection and it is evident
by its consistency both internally and with other endorsed truths. By contrast, people with an extremely objective,
materialist worldview are inclined either to deny or to take no interest in the existence of things that are not physically
observable; further, they will seek to discern truth through systematic, unsentimental observation of external events.
(2009: 67)
78
double nature: the creative (idealistic subjectivism) and the resolvent (rationalistic objectivism).
Classical detective fiction falls mostly within the latter; truth is arrived at through logical
deduction and must be supported by objective facts, or it is not the truth. Detective fiction where
the supernatural is more than simply an illusion sparks the idea of idealistic subjectivism as an
alternative and possibly equally valid worldview and thereby makes the dialectic between the
above two epistemological principles its central argument/theme.

The analysis of the three detective novels – The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie, where the
supernatural is finally exposed as a carefully orchestrated illusion; The Rivers of London by
Ben Aaronovitch, where the supernatural is a fact within the fictional world; and The Blessing
Way by Tony Hillerman, where the ontological status of the supernatural is ambiguous – shows
that the supernatural in detective fiction provides more than just embellishment to the story; its
function goes beyond the aesthetic, beyond simply providing emotional frisson. Rather, the way
that the supernatural is dealt with in each story provides an important clue to the implied
epistemology of the particular story, which in turn affords us an insight into the cultural
functions of a particular type of detective fiction, especially in the sense that the detective
represents an epistemological superhero whose methods of solving mysteries and arriving at
the truth are to be emulated by individuals in search of knowledge about the world.

One of the questions the novels analysed in this paper pose and resolve, each in their own way,
is whether a detective can “practice ratiocination and logic and yet explain crime as a product
of supernatural forces with supernatural counter-forces” (MacDonald 2002: 106). Only in The
Rivers of London is this question answered in the affirmative. The supernatural in The Rivers
of London is presented as both mystical and paranormal, and while the mystical cannot be
accessed by reason and logic but rather by emotion and intuition, the paranormal aspects of the
supernatural are open to ratiocination and logical inquiry. In the other two novels, a supernatural
explanation is ultimately irreconcilable with logical, deductive reasoning. In The Pale Horse,
the threat of the supernatural as the irrational Other is exorcised by the detective’s rational,
naturalistic explanation of the mystery and displacement of the supernatural into the field of the
imaginary/superstition. In The Blessing Way, the supernatural remains firmly anchored in the
Navajo culture (which for the Western reader represents the Other) and thus the (dominant)
Western scientific-rationalistic worldview is challenged only indirectly, by being contrasted
with the (marginal) Navajo worldview, and otherwise remains in place.

79
Whether the supernatural is presented as a fact within the fictional world or whether it is
debunked as an illusion or superstition seems to have less of an impact on the inherent
epistemological premises of detective stories than whether the supernatural is presented as the
paranormal or as the mystical, for it is the latter distinction which determines the explicability
of the supernatural (as one of the central mysteries of a detective fiction story) and, allegorically,
of the world. This is likely also the reason for the small number of detective stories which
present the supernatural as the mystical, since the inexplicability of the mystery of the
supernatural would locate the detective story within the postmodern anti-detective tradition.
Detective fiction remains a popular genre first and foremost and as such it seeks to reinforce
dominant ideology rather than to challenge it.

Given that the supernatural has entered the popular formula of detective fiction to such an extent
that we could almost talk about a supernatural detective fiction subgenre, can a renewed
sacralisation of the secularised Western world be inferred? The Western world does seem to
exhibit “a gathering unease with standardization and globalization, an emerging desire for a
more grounded, spiritual way of life, and an appreciation that materialism does not
automatically accord with happiness” (MacDonald 2002: 267). The disenchantment of the
world that began with Enlightenment has led to a progressive loss of meaning which the
mechanistic model of universe failed to fill despite the ‘enchantments’ of science. The
acceptance of the Western world – at least academically – that truth is an artificial concept and
that there is much that science still cannot explain certainly opened the door to the exploration
of other ways of explaining the world, and the ability of supernatural belief to provide the
individual with a sense of control over their life, that is increasingly lacking in contemporary
Western society due to socio-economic changes which trigger a growing alienation and feeling
of helplessness of the individual, has made the supernatural very interesting to popular culture.
Still, it seems too early to claim a re-enchantment or renewed sacralisation of the Western world
at this point – the growing body of detective fiction featuring the supernatural could also be an
expression of cultural decadence84, a search for meaning in excess and transgression in “a
period characterised by doubt, fear and superstition, whose entropic zeitgeist is reminiscent of

84
For a discussion of contemporary cultural decadence, see Decadence in Literature and Intellectual Debate Since
1945 (2014), edited by Diemo Landgraf.

80
the anxiety of the 19th century fin-de-siècle” (Annesley 1996: 365), with the supernatural as the
perfect vehicle. Time will tell.

In any case, “[i]n a world that is obsessed with information, where complexity borders on
‘disorder’, and where knowledge often seems self-referential, the quest for ‘truth’ and for a
‘transcendental meaning’ is still a prime motive” (Ascari 2007: 12). Certainly the phenomenon
of proliferation of supernaturally themed popular fiction and films in the past decades warrants
academic discussion, which has long been overdue. This thesis is one of the as yet few
explorations into the contemporary cross-fertilisation between the supernatural and the
detective formula of popular literature and the methodology used to examine the supernatural
in detective fiction hopefully provides a useful starting point for further research into this
interesting and relevant topic.

81
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