Kate and Hesketh Prichard wrote the Flaxman Low stories as “E. & H. Heron” for Pearson’s Magazine in the late 1890s. Their psychic detective predates Carnacki and John Silence, and the cases mix colonial unease with straightforward occult detection.
The Experiences of Flaxman Low,six stories appeared in Pearson’s in 1898, and a further six followed in 1899, whereupon the tales were collected together in bookform and published complete later that year. In the introduction to the first story, the authors asked ”Have ghosts any existence outside our own fancy and emotion?“, and wrote that Low ”approached the elucidation of so-called supernatural problems on the lines of natural law“. Just as Sherlock Holmes was the court of last appeal for those who had exhausted more official channels, so Flaxman Low is the last hope for those unfortunate people who are faced with a mystery that seems beyond all natural laws, and which imperils not only their bodies, but in some cases their very souls.