Wordsworth Editions
A collection of classic supernatural tales from the Edwardian period. Originally published in 1914 between 4 July and 22 August in The Weekly Tale-Teller, the stories were belatedly collected into the current volume in the late 1990s by Jack Adrian.
This is a collection of eight ghost stories, written by the remarkably prolific husband and wife team of Claude and Alice Askew, centering on Aylmer Vance, an investigator of the supernatural. Dexter, the narrator, meets Vance during a fishing holiday and Vance tells him three ghost stories on successive nights, each story involving Vance more closely in the action. The fourth story brings Dexter himself into the action, and reveals him to have unsuspected clairvoyant powers. The remaining stories feature Vance and Dexter as a sort of Holmes-and-Watson team investigating incidents not all of which prove to have supernatural causes.
Another in the fabulous Wordsworth Editions series of 'Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural', Aylmer Vance: Ghost Seer is a short collection of Edwardian ghost stories featuring the titular psychical investigator and his 'Watson' the clairvoyant barrister Dexter.
Over the 8 tales that make up the book Vance initially tells Dexter of a number of his encounters with the supernatural; a possession from the ancient past in 'The Invader', an encounter with an old god in 'The Stranger', a love story featuring a beautiful ghost exeriencing one last soiree in 'Lady Green-Sleeves' and a tale of heartbreak, love, poetry and fire that transcends death in 'The Fire Unquenchable'. It's following this fouth story that Dexter becomes Vance's apprentice and takes a more active role in the proceedings. Like the aforementioned Watson he is very much the junior partner and serves mostly as narrator but also as pupil as result of his psychic abuilities.
The second four stories explore hauntings and possession in the 'The Vampire', haunted houses in 'The Boy of Blackstock' and 'The Fear', and the enduring influence of past lives in 'The Indissoluble Band'.
It's a great shame that the eight stories here are all that the husband and wife authors completed as both Vance and Dexter are enjoyable company and the stories are entertainingly creepy.
Over the 8 tales that make up the book Vance initially tells Dexter of a number of his encounters with the supernatural; a possession from the ancient past in 'The Invader', an encounter with an old god in 'The Stranger', a love story featuring a beautiful ghost exeriencing one last soiree in 'Lady Green-Sleeves' and a tale of heartbreak, love, poetry and fire that transcends death in 'The Fire Unquenchable'. It's following this fouth story that Dexter becomes Vance's apprentice and takes a more active role in the proceedings. Like the aforementioned Watson he is very much the junior partner and serves mostly as narrator but also as pupil as result of his psychic abuilities.
The second four stories explore hauntings and possession in the 'The Vampire', haunted houses in 'The Boy of Blackstock' and 'The Fear', and the enduring influence of past lives in 'The Indissoluble Band'.
It's a great shame that the eight stories here are all that the husband and wife authors completed as both Vance and Dexter are enjoyable company and the stories are entertainingly creepy.
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