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I Just Want a Mystery, Not a Love Story
You pick up a historical mystery because the premise sounds wonderful. An old house. A strange disappearance. Something in the local folklore that doesn’t quite make sense.
Then, three chapters later, the mystery has taken a back seat to instant attraction, romantic complications or explicit sex.
Or perhaps you’ve tried supernatural fiction instead, only to find that supernatural increasingly means graphic horror, gore and violence.
If what you really wanted was the mystery, you’ve come to the right place.
I write historical supernatural mysteries in which the investigation stays at the centre of the story. There may be friendships, marriages and relationships because people have them, but they don’t replace the mystery. Nor do I rely on graphic violence or gore to create tension.
The strange things in my stories come instead from folklore, history, landscape and documented accounts of things people once believed were real.
Séances in Victorian drawing rooms. Cunning folk practising village magic. Detectives investigating fraudulent mediums. Governments studying psychic phenomena. Old beliefs attached to particular roads, buildings and landscapes.
Sometimes the history is stranger than anything I could invent.
What You Can Expect
1. The Mystery Comes First
Investigation, discovery and understanding the uncanny drive the story. There are no forced romantic subplots or instant “swooning”. When relationships develop, they do so slowly and naturally.
2. The Supernatural Has Roots
The stories draw on documented folklore, historical events, real landscapes, old newspaper reports, psychical research and the beliefs of the period. I research what I can before allowing the fiction to take over.
3. Tension Without Graphic Horror
You won’t find explicit violence or graphic gore. Suspense comes from atmosphere, place, uncertainty and the uncomfortable possibility that the supernatural explanation might be the right one.
Where Should I Start?
Finding Mabel
Start here if you’d like to try a complete novel for free.
Finding Mabel is the main doorway into Easterwich. It follows Joyce Turner, whose search for Mabel Shirley leads her into a hidden history she could never have expected.
Short Fiction
If you’d rather begin with something shorter, explore the original short stories.
These are supernatural mysteries inspired by places where history and folklore become difficult to separate. Some begin with real events, old newspaper reports or local legends. Others begin with those places where the past still seems unusually close.
I research what I can, then allow the fiction to take over.
The Corpse Door
If you want to go back to where the fictional world began, The Corpse Door is the novel that started it all.
A grounded supernatural mystery and the first published doorway into the world that would eventually become Easterwich and the Mabel Shirley stories.
Curious About What’s Behind the Stories?
The Things We Left Behind
If the folklore, history and strange ideas behind the fiction interest you as much as the stories themselves, explore The Things We Left Behind.
These essays look at folklore, place, intuition, atmosphere, inherited traditions and experiences that resist easy explanation.
This isn’t a paranormal blog and it isn’t an academic journal. It sits somewhere between the two: an exploration of how belief, investigation, history and folklore shape the stories we tell about the unknown.
Explore The Things We Left Behind →
Explore the Research
The research behind the stories reaches into several recurring subjects:
Supernatural Belief
Ghosts, spiritualism and the cultural traditions surrounding contact with the unseen.
Folklore & Witchcraft
Cunning folk, divination, charms and the everyday magical traditions that existed alongside organised religion.
Psychic Research
Historical investigations into psychic phenomena, from Victorian psychical societies to Cold War experiments.
Policing & Investigation
Detectives, policing methods and the historical investigation of supernatural claims and fraudulent mediums.
Intelligence & Security
Wartime secrecy, the development of the modern information state and the strange intersection between intelligence agencies and paranormal research.
If you’d rather see everything in one place, the Archive provides a complete map of the articles organised by subject.
— Richard Odell