The Nightmare Men: “The Ghost-Seer”
Aylmer Vance, agent of the enigmatic Ghost Circle, made his first appearance on the nightmare stage in 1914. The creation of husband-and-wife writing team Alice and Claude Askew, Vance appeared in eight consecutive issues of The Weekly Tale-Teller between July and August. The stories-“The Invader”, “The Stranger”, “Lady Green-Sleeves”, “The Fire Unquenchable”, “The Vampire”, “The Boy of Blackstock”, “The Indissoluble Bond” and “The Fear”-ranged from grotesque to gentle, and are, by and large, of a slower pace than those featuring Vance’s contemporaries, such as Carnacki. Only one of the stories has been regularly anthologized (“The Vampire”), with the rest languishing in obscurity until the release of recent collections by Ash-Tree Press and Wordsworth Editions respectively.
Like John Silence, Vance inhabits an England of soft spiritual influence, where elementals, ancient memories and ghostly manifestations cling to the unseen corners and visit just long enough to inject the mundane with a booster shot of the strange. Unlike Carnacki’s Outer Monstrosities and Malign Visitors, the apparitions that Vance faces are utterly human in their aspect, if not their motivation. Death is no barrier to the desires of the flesh or the dreams of the determined, and it is when these elements intrude on the hard-won peace of the Edwardian mind that the Ghost-Seer must intervene.
William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki outlived his creator with a tenacity that Hodgson, a bantam rooster of a man, would have appreciated. Thomas Carnacki, resident of 472 Cheyne Walk, London, first appeared in a series of five stories (“Gateway of the Monster”, “The House Among the Laurels”, “The Whistling Room”, “The Horse of the Invisible”, and “The Searcher of the End House”) in The Idler Magazine in the January through April, as well as June, issues of 1910. But despite Hodgson’s death in World War I, Carnacki carried on in a further four stories (“The Thing Invisible”, “The Hog”, “The Haunted Jarvee” and “The Find”) retrieved from Hodgson’s papers by his wife. 
Shiela Crerar, psychic investigator and adventuress, first burst into public view in the pages of The Blue Magazine in 1920 with “The Eyes of Doom”. The obscure creation of the 
It’s always best to begin at the start, to quote no one in particular. We’ll start with the introductions: my name is Josh Reynolds and I wanted to be a detective when I grew up…no, not just a detective.