The Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) is recognized as a master of the psychological ghost story as well as a pioneer of the story of detection. He created a strange and fascinating universe of demons and ghosts, Faustian pacts, thwarted loves, bigamous marriages, murders, doubles, duels, suicides, kidnappings, persecuted maidens, mysterious animals, fantastic paintings, dreams, and madness. His foremost originality, however, lies in the combination of horror with rationality. Like Poe, Le Fanu was a pioneer of the story of detection. The title he gave to his first collection, Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery (1851), is meaningful; it represents the two sides of the coin: the irrational and the rational.
One of the favorite gimmicks of Le Fanu's work is the “locked room,” a hermetically sealed space where a murder takes place, and he uses this setting in several of his novels—particularly in his masterpiece Uncle Silas (1864)—and...
