IT HAS ALWAYS been a tricky business to combine supernatural elements and logical deductions in mystery fiction, but William Hope Hodgson (1875–1918) managed it wonderfully in his stories about Thomas Carnacki, a psychic detective.
Born in Essex, Hodgson left home at an early age to spend eight years at sea, traveling around the world three times. Living in the south of France with his wife when World War I erupted, he returned to England, received a commission, and was killed in action. Most of his fiction dealt with weird and occult subjects, the best of them being eerie tales of the sea and a series of stories about a shady smuggler, Captain Gault: Being the Exceedingly Private Log of a Sea-Captain (1917).
Carnacki is a ghost-finder brought into cases to discover or explain certain phenomena that have every indication of being connected to the supernatural, although many times that appearance is deceptive. He is a skeptic regarding the truth—or untruth—of ghost stories. He does not let “cheap laughter” deter him from ascertaining the possible truth of a fantastic legend. When he is on a case and alone (or possibly with some “Thing from the Other World”) in the dark, he admits he is scared half to death. After a case is concluded and he is ready to talk about it, he sends a note to three friends who come to his house to listen. He settles into his easy chair, lights a pipe, and recounts the adventure without preamble. When the story is finished, he genially says “out you go” and the evening is concluded.
“The Thing Invisible” was first published in The New Magazine in 1912; it was first collected in book form in Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (London, Nash, 1913); it was first published in the United States in 1947 by Mycroft and Moran with three additional stories.