Rousseau's second occult detective series features Dr. Phileas Immanuel, an eminent Greek physician with unorthodox views on mental illness and criminality. He has two regular sidekicks: one is the narrator, an unnamed American doctor. The other is Paul Tarrant, a millionaire financier, art collector, and scholar of Assyrian artifacts. Tarrant provides a sympathetic but sceptical foil for Immanuel to debate his theories with.
Dr. Immanuel expounds to the narrator and Paul Tarrant.
Source: Hoosier State Chronicles
In contrast to Ivan Brodsky, whose broad spiritualistic view encompasses past lives, the spirits of dead people, and elementals from the spiritual plane, Dr. Immanuel works from a strictly reincarnation-based perspective. According to Dr. Immanuel's theories, unresolved issues in a soul's past lives can cause previous personalities to emerge, interfering with the present personality. This can manifest as strange, even criminal behavior. Resolve those issues, and the bad behavior goes away.
So in a sense, the Dr. Immanuel stories are a modern updating of classic Chinese and Japanese ghost stories: stories of reincarnation and the karmic cycle, events replaying until the souls' underlying issues are resolved. That's what (to me) makes the best of The Tracer of Egos more interesting than The Surgeon of Souls.
The first story, The Amulet of Marduk, introduces the three main characters. After Dr. Immanuel outlines some of his theory of reincarnation, he then applies it to the case of the Tarrant family's kleptomaniac governess.
The Stories #
Nine of the twelve Tracer of Egos tales initially appeared over the period June 1913 to February 1914, in Holland's Magazine, a U.S. magazine. Three additional tales appeared when the series was syndicated to other U.S. periodicals. Spectre Library published a collection of all twelve stories, called The Tracer of Egos, in 2007. That collection is out of print.
However, I was able to find what I assume are the original nine stories, as they were published in the Evening Republican, a Rensselaer (Indiana) newspaper, over the period January-April, 1917. I originally planned to transcribe all the stories, since the scans are a little difficult (but not impossible) to read comfortably.
I eventually decided to only transcribe the stories that I liked best, and link back to the other stories at the original archive. Since transcribing is a bit slower than linking, this series will come out a little at a time. I linked to my transcription of "The Amulet of Marduk" above; and I'll also link to the next available story on the project page as well.
You can read about my reasons in the next section. My misgivings about some individual stories aside, I do think that Dr. Immanuel is a character who should be better known. There are some excellent stories in this series, and I hope that you enjoy them.
Nothing is Perfect: My Reservations about Some Individual Stories. #
Anyone who reads old popular fiction will inevitably run into attitudes, stereotypes, and sometimes language, that are problematic by modern standards. If you want to keep reading works of this age, you mostly shrug your shoulders and carry on---so long as the pleasure you get from the stories outweighs the cringe. Everyone has a different threshold, but (roughly) here's mine:
Sometimes in a story, characters express casual slurs that reflect "how things were" at the time the author was writing. If it's a passing remark that's not relevant to the progress of the narrative, I usually let it go. Often an author will have an unsympathetic character express an opinion that was likely objectionable even at the time; I consider that a part of the storytelling, and won't hold it against the story. But problematic attitudes that form the basis, or even a key theme, of the story--for example, "yellow peril" stories--will make me stop reading. So will problematic attitudes that are expressed enough that I begin to feel that they are coming from the author, rather than from a character.
By the above criteria, I didn't have a problem with the Surgeon of Souls. Unfortunately, some of the stories in Tracer of Egos express racist and/or classist attitudes that gave me pause. And one of the stories was so misogynist that I nearly threw my reading device across the room. I didn't want to spend a lot of time transcribing stories I dislike.
So I've compromised: I'll transcribe the stories I like, and link to the stories I don't. To be honest, one or two of the stories I simply didn't like, even if there was nothing explicitly problematic about them. So readers who have a higher tolerance for outdated attitudes than I do can still read all the available stories, if they wish.