Several months ago, I got an offer to contribute to an anthology. Its presumed title: The Speculative Detective Agency: Case Files of the Supernatural and Fantastic (SDA). As described, this was to be an interconnected collection in which each story is a case completed by one of the agency’s detectives (who’d be created by the authors). The premise would be that the SDA is one of the members of the International Association of Speculative Detectives (IASD) and that the association is now completing the membership renewal. As part of the renewal application, each detective agency must submit a sample of their best cases from the past five years (2020-2025). The shared world of the anthology would be essentially our world, except that there exist speculative investigation agencies. And as far as the speculative part of the story goes, that could involve any of the speculative genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror, the supernatural, and folklore. Both the mystery itself and the means of solving the case could be speculative in nature, and there was no requirement to craft a story that seemed fantastical but came down at the end to a logical (i.e. “realistic”) solution.
Challenge offered, and of course, I accepted.
The occult detective, or some version thereof, has a long history in genre fiction, but to be honest, I’ve always preferred mystery stories with a rational basis. I love horror and other types of speculative fiction, but when it comes to detective fiction specifically, I do prefer stories involving crimes that can be solved using reason. Still, there have been occult detective stories I’ve liked and stories involving what might more accurately be called an occult investigator, from Bram Stoker’s Abraham van Helsing to Carl Kolchack, the intrepid Night Stalker, to Scully and Mulder in The X-Files. I can’t not mention two classic occult detective characters whose stories I’ve enjoyed — Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence and William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost Finder — but my favorite literary detective of this type, I have to say, is the one created by that Victorian master of weird and Gothic fiction, Sheridan Le Fanu. His collection of five tales, In a Glass Darkly, features Dr. Martin Hesselius, a scholar of paranormal phenomena. He’s among the first, if not the first, true occult detective in fiction, and the five mysteries he investigates in the book are connected by a framing device that presents them as papers from his casebook. There’s “The Familiar”, about a sea captain haunted by ghostly footsteps, “Mr. Justice Harbottle'“, a tale about the just desserts received by a cruel judge, “The Room at the Dragon Volant”, a novella more in the Gothic mode than the supernatural one, and Le Fanu’s most famous story of all, “Carmilla”, about a female vampire in Austria, a story that has influenced countless books (Dracula included) and movies. The story that opens the collection, though, is the one I revisited just before starting to write my story for The Speculative Detective Agency, and that’s “Green Tea”, a masterfully creepy tale Hesselius tells about an English clergyman and scholar who is stalked by a demonic, spectral monkey. Nobody else can see this monkey, and it appears to him in private and public spaces. From the clergyman’s descriptions, it is clear he thinks that the tormenting figure is trying to wreck his mind and ruin his life, but could the monkey’s appearance be linked to the large quantities of green tea the clergyman drinks? Hesselius, who has struck up an acquaintanceship with the man, investigates, and despite the best efforts of the doctor, everything leads to a grim conclusion.
My contribution to The Speculative Detective Agency is called “The Case of the Singular Hands.” The story is contemporary, set in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and the detective on the case is named Wyvern, a nod to another LeFanu work, his novel The Wyvern Mystery. I won’t describe what my story is about, but I will say I had a lot of fun writing it and that it has to do with vengeance and a haunting.
The stories in The Speculative Detective Agency all stand on their own but have some interconnection with each other, and they are filled with monsters, myth, and personal quests. They blend horror, science fiction, and fantasy with mystery and suspense: a young girl’s sister kidnapped by djinn, a woman’s errant husband transformed into the moon, an age-shifting detective sent undercover at a middle school, a luchador who may/may not have lost his last fight because of a curse.
The publisher is Diversion Books; the editors are Mathew David Goodwin and Richie Narvaez. Authors who contributed to the anthology include Frederick Aldama, Heather E. Ash, Megan Chee, Victor De Anda, Alex Grecian, Alex Hernandez, Monique Laban, Lincoln Michel, Richie Narvaez, Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, Nadia Amina Rabbani, Karlo Yeager Rodriguez, Lekha Sen, Amber Sparks, and Martin Willis.
The Speculative Detective Agency is due out October 6, 2026, and it’s available now for pre-order at these places:
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