A Master of Mysteries
Six supernatural terrors. Six ingenious explanations.
A circular chamber that kills the men who sleep in it. A coffin that appears to guard its own prison. A railway tunnel where invisible hands work the signals. A sacred image that speaks.
John Bell has made a profession of walking into such places and refusing the obvious explanation. Calling himself a “professional exposer of ghosts,” he takes on six cases in which terror, superstition, and apparently impossible crime turn out to conceal ingenious human design. His inquiries lead him through isolated houses and locked rooms, railway cuttings and river locks, a private gallery, and the contested evidence of an alibi – each of them rebuilt around hidden mechanism, dangerous substances, managed witnesses, and the unsettling possibilities of modern science.
First published in 1898, A Master of Mysteries is an important early collection of impossible-crime fiction. L. T. Meade’s command of the popular magazine story meets Robert Eustace’s fascination with medicine, machinery, physics, and forensic explanation, and the result sits exactly on the line between the Victorian ghost story and the scientific detective tale.
A carefully restored text. This Squire Press edition is set from the undated [1898] Ward, Lock & Co. first edition – not a facsimile dump or an anonymous public-domain reprint, but a clean text reset and checked word by word against the printed page, with two evident printing errors corrected and recorded.
- A substantial new introduction on Meade and Eustace, the rise of the scientific detective, and the collection’s place between ghost story and detection
- Fifty-four original endnotes on Victorian technology, medicine, religion, history, and language – gathered at the back, out of the story’s way
- The authors’ own introduction, retained in its proper place before the first case
- A Note on This Edition setting out the source text and the editorial approach
- Further Reading and By the Same Author sections for readers who want to go on
Look Inside
From my earliest youth the weird, the mysterious had an irresistible fascination for me. Having private means, I resolved to follow my unique inclinations, and I am now well known to all my friends as a professional exposer of ghosts, and one who can clear away the mysteries of most haunted houses. To explain, by the application of science, phenomena attributed to spiritual agencies has been the work of my life.
She led me down a long and narrow passage, and then, opening a door, down two steps into the most extraordinary-looking room I had ever seen. The walls were completely circular, covered with a paper of a staring grotesque pattern. The place felt damp and draughty, and the flame of the candle flickered about, causing the tallow to gutter to one side. There was no fireplace in the room, and above, the walls converged to a point, giving the whole place the appearance of an enormous extinguisher.
The next moment we were looking down upon the scene of the mysterious deaths, and a weird and lonely place it looked. The tunnel was at one end of the rock cutting, the sides of which ran sheer down to the line for over a hundred and fifty feet. Above the tunnel’s mouth the hills rose one upon the other. A more dreary place it would have been difficult to imagine.
