Ghost hunters, supernatural sleuths and occult detectives. It’s no secret that we love the blend of mystery/thriller and the ab-natural – although we’ll happily take either on their own, especially in historical settings. So, as we’re also exploring LGBTQ+ in scary fiction this month, what better than to feature a guest review of KJ Charles’ The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal? For this happens to be an occult detective book which has both a mention of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder – and gay protagonists.

Dave Brzeski tells us more…

KJ Charles – The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal

Publisher: KJC Books (self-published)

Format: Paperback/Kindle

Reviewer: Dave Brzeski

“After twenty years in UK publishing including a stint at Mills & Boon, KJ Charles is now a full-time writer. She lives in London with her husband, two kids, an out-of-control garden and an increasingly murderous cat. KJ writes mostly historical romance, often with some fantasy or horror in there.”

It’s not often that it’s another a review of a book that leads me to pick it up and review it myself, but this is what happened here. Marina Berlin wrote a nice piece on KJ Charles’ work for Tor.com, which interested me greatly.

Berlin discussed this and other works by Charles from the viewpoint of “queer romance” fiction, which I have to admit isn’t a great interest of mine. Not that I have any problem with the sexuality, I’m just not a romance fan—at least not when that factor is the major focus of the book.

I do, in fact, read quite a lot of books that were described as romances in the past, but those tended to be closer to adventure fantasy, albeit they (Edgar Rice Burroughs etc.) often did feature what we now call ‘romantic’ elements.

I mention all of the above because it occurs to me that the “queer romance” aspect could put off a few readers who might otherwise enjoy the book, though it shouldn’t. The gay sex element is explicit in places – but brief and not overdone.

This is actually a novel, but it’s written in the style of a “fix-up”, which is the term often used to describe collections of previously published short stories with a continuous narrative thread that were later reformatted into a novel. In this case, however, the individual chapters were not originally published separately. I shall refer to the chapters by title, as I would with a short story collection.

‘The Caldwell Ghost’ introduces us to Robert Caldwell and tells us of his first encounter with Simon Feximal: Ghost Hunter. Caldwell is heir to a huge, dilapidated manor house that he can’t possibly afford to run, so he needs to deal with the ghost problem before he can sell it. I very much liked the way Charles portrays the reality of owning a manor house, in that we may think of the owners as rich, but we don’t always consider how much it costs on a daily basis just to keep the damn things standing. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of focus on the sexual tension between the two lead characters here, which eventually blossoms into some quite graphic gay sex. It is, however, very brief and intrinsically relevant to this particular haunting. I was delighted at this point to discover that Charles has set her stories in the same world as William Hope Hodgson’s Thomas Carnacki stories.

‘Butterflies’ gives us a very original series of supernatural murders for Feximal and Calder to investigate. They aren’t yet a team, due to the inevitable misunderstandings that so often seem to be a feature of romance stories, but circumstances conspire to bring them together on the case. This time the focus is more on the story than the sexual element, and their “private time” is kept off-screen for the most part.

‘Remember, Remember’ is where this collection really took off for me. Calder is assigned to report on the strange events at Hartwell House. He discovers that he’s been given this job on account of his association with Feximal, which rankles a little, since he’d recently been stood up by him without explanation. This is soon explained when Calder gains entry to Hartwell House and finds not only Feximal, but two other occultists on the case. In her review, Berlin makes much of the idea that Feximal and Calder are pastiches of Holmes and Watson. This is true in that the genus of all detective/assistant teams certainly had their roots in Conan Doyle’s stories, but it quickly becomes plain that Charles is quite well-read in classic occult detective fiction as well as the Holmes canon, with Carnacki and John Silence both referred to in this story. It also becomes plain here that, if anything, Calder is the more skilled at basic grass roots investigation. Calder is also shown to be something of an idealistic crusading reporter type.

If this book is considered as a “fix-up”, then ‘Silver’ would be one of the bridging pieces, added to connect the original stories and make them work as a novel. Calder discovers how quickly his idealistic stance as a journalist could bring repercussions—serious repercussions. The mysterious Doctor Berry, introduced as one of the other occultists in the previous story is shown to be an enemy—one of the sort who genuinely believe in the rightness of their cause. This isn’t really a spoiler, as the reader is given little cause to like the man from the get go and it’s fairly obvious this is the direction things would be taking.

The fix-up element of this novel does fall apart a little from this point on. ‘Cakes and Ale’ relies rather strongly on readers having read the previous chapter and so wouldn’t have worked quite as well as a stand-alone story. I have to admit that the romance/sex element was starting to bug me a bit by this point. Feximal and Calder were beginning to remind me of Scott and Jean in the early X-Men comics, constantly agonising over their feelings for each other, yet never having the courage to actually broach the subject. Thankfully, this situation is dealt with here. The story itself is an amusing variant on a haunted house story.

In the excellent ‘Devils on Horseback’, the crossovers with public domain characters become a major element as Feximal and Calder are strong-armed by a certain government man, a member in good standing of the Diogenes club whose intelligence is only matched by his corpulence, into working on the same case as their nemesis, Doctor Berry. Not only that, the story opens with the information that Calder has sold his first story of Simon Feximal’s exploits to The Strand Magazine! Carnacki even puts in a cameo appearance at the end of the story.

Charles pulls no punches in her description of the filthy underbelly of London life in the late 19th century in ‘An Eye for an Eye’. Cornelia, Feximal’s mute household servant, brings them a case involving a friend in dire need of help. Her friend’s grandson is in a relationship with a tosher girl and that girl has gone missing. A tosher is someone who scavenges in the sewers, a sewer-hunter, especially in London during the Victorian era. Understandably, they were not exactly well-regarded by most people. I’ve read a few stories in the past that involve various “spirits of the city”, but this is certainly one of the better ones. Interesting, too, to see an occult-based explanation for heterochromia*.

We finally get to learn something of the origins of Simon Feximal and Theodosia Kay in ‘The Writing on the Wall’. I stated above that the occult detective aspect of this book was of much more interest to me than the “queer romance” side, but in this story the relationship between Caldwell and Feximal is of major importance. We learn how Feximal and Miss Kay came by their strange abilities, and whose fault it was. We have yet another crossover here, but I’m going to keep the details to myself. I’ll just say it’s a name which will be very familiar to all fans of classic ghost stories.

‘Turn of the century’ has Calder and Feximal take a trip to the seaside, ostensibly to investigate a fortune teller, who has earned the disapproval of a rather bigoted individual who runs a coconut shy. They meet the strange, androgynous young fortune teller and his companion, but there’s not too much else to the story, apart from working out why the fortune teller couldn’t enter the cathedral. I’m not saying it’s not a good story, rather than it simply serves to add two more characters to the roster.

At least that’s what I thought, but the book ends with ‘The End’, which sees Calder and Feximal again blackmailed into serving His Majesty’s (it’s now 1914) Government. Quite literally, National Service, as they are conscripted to help combat the enemy’s use of occultism in warfare. It’s obviously Charles’ version of ‘The Final Problem’, albeit it’s not just Feximal who disappears at the end. I hope that isn’t too spoilerish, but I thought it was pretty obvious where it was headed. One rather hopes that we’ll see his return eventually, just as we did with that other hero of The Strand Magazine.

It did, I admit, feel a little odd that Charles had just expanded the cast, only to decide to finish the series without making any real use of the new members. That there’s lots of scope for the return of Feximal goes without saying. The cases presented here take place over quite a considerable time frame and there are many stories left untold, including some of the stories that were printed in The Strand Magazine. I can’t help but wonder why those particular issues appear to be so very hard to find…

In conclusion, I obviously liked this book quite a lot. I suspect some readers would be happier without any sex scenes or romance of any kind, but I genuinely feel it would be a loss for anyone to pass this book by on those grounds.

You can find out more about KJ Charles at her site:

http://kjcharleswriter.com/

* By one of those odd coincidences, the forthcoming Occult Detective Quarterly #5 contains no less than two stories in which the protagonist has heterochromia – the latest Ismael Carter tale by the award-winning Tim Waggoner (‘The Empty Ones’), and ‘Storm Stones’ by Cody Schroeder. ODQ#5 should be out any day.