We're concluding the Occult Detectives of Victor Rousseau with one last story, from Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, September 1931.
In A Cry From Beyond, Dr. Claude Merrick investigates a case at the behest of a spirit: the late artist, Weathermore. The wife of Alfred French, another artist, keeps falling into strange, cataleptic sleep; their daughter is mysteriously wasting away. Could French's dead first wife be the culprit?
Taken on its own, this isn't a bad story at all. But if you've been reading a lot of Rousseau's occult investigator fiction, you'll find this tale fairly derivative. The plot is a variation on the first Dr. Martinus story, "Child or Demon--Which?". The discussion of "elementals" waiting to prey on the living harks back to the Ivan Brodsky series. And like Brodsky, Merrick believes that most cases of insanity are really due to spiritual possession.
The basic character setup of an occult investigator with a servant cum medium as his assistant is just like the previous story I shared, featuring Dr. Rinaldi. There are details, like the poltergeist anecdote, that I recognized from previous stories. The only work this story doesn't remind me of is the Dr. Immanuel series.
But as I said, it's not bad, and it does have some of the horror story elements that Rousseau began introducing into his occult detection tales with the Dr. Martinus series. I liked that Dr. Merrick got "hired" by a ghost to take on this case. I also liked the public telephone analogy of communicating with the other world:
Imagine a public call-box, with the receiver off the hook, and a mob, all at the same time, trying to transmit messages, while half asleep, to various friends; also imagine a group of urchins interrupting them to shout opprobrious epithets or to play pranks, and you begin to get some notion of the difficulties of posthumous communication.
Dr. Merrick's servant/medium is his Chinese "houseboy" (ugh) Charlie Wing, which is cringey, but I've read worse. His Watson is his personal secretary, Benson.
Overall, a satisfying way to wrap up this series. Do enjoy.