Defensive, condescending, full of made-up knowledge, and absolutely lethal to patients — these are the hallmarks of the occult detective, such as Algernon Blackwood’s Dr. John Silence, probably the biggest jerk in weird fiction. Like Batman, Silence vanished for 5 years of international training, only to return well-versed in being obnoxious and making things up. His first adventure was “A Psychical Invasion” (1908) in which a humorist overdoses on marijuana and loses his sense of humor. Silence uses a magical collie to fight what he claims is an evil ghost lady, relays a bunch of pseudoscience as patronizingly as possible (“As I told you before, the forces of a powerful personality may still persist after death in the line of their original momentum…If you knew anything of magic, you would know that thought is dynamic…etc.”), then he has the humorist’s house torn down.

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