LETTERS

Detective James

Richard George ends his article “The ‘roll-off’ factor” [FT394:57] by offering an apparently unlikely role reversal: “Inspector Morse and MR James. Indeed, healthy scepticism may be more fortean than an uncritical acceptance of the supernatural. Morse as a psychic investigator? James as a Cambridge detective? Now that would be interesting…” James is a slightly odd choice here as I have always thought his attitude to the supernatural was quite fortean: while his stories certainly feature supernatural beings of one sort or another (rarely actual ghosts), in his own life he seems to have been pleasingly open-minded. Shane Leslie quotes him (possibly not entirely reliably) as saying: “Depend upon it! Some of these things are so, but we do not know the rules!”

However, I think James would have appreciated the idea of being a “Cambridge detective”. He read detective fiction avidly. In his letters he mentions a number of crime fiction writers; aside (obviously) from Conan Doyle, he enjoyed the works of such authors as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Edgar Wallace. He was also an enthusiast of true crime, including the State Trials series. In his autobiographical Eton and King’s he records a mourning card he found in a hotel in Yorkshire, containing a rhyme about the little-known Cropton Lane Farm Murders. One might even say that he wrote detective fiction himself, in that two of his stories, “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” and “Two Doctors”, essentially take the form of a collection of material from which the readers themselves are invited to act as detective and draw their own conclusions about the identity of a murderer.

Rosemary Pardoe Chester

Humble hermit

Regarding Jan Bondeson’s excellent piece on the Hermit of Hainault Forest [FT394:77]: Jan says that “his home was a primitive hut he erected himself”. It was far more humble than that – a tent fashioned from cloth over string tied to two trees!

One example of the Mandela Effect close to the heart of many interested in forteana but not mentioned in Brian Robb’s article [394:32-38] is the elusive Thunderbird photo. So many people remember seeing it but no one has yet managed to track it down.

Gary Tavender By email

Outside the spectrum

I was surprised to read that ST Joshi and Richard Stanley would be debating the inspiration for HP Lovecraft’s concept of mysterious colours outside the human spectrum [FT390:28-35]. I