As a fan of occult detectives, I am always looking for new ones. A slightly different one I came across is Rosemary Pardoe‘s Jane Bradshawe.
I had read one of the Bradshawe stories in an anthology of occult detectives and enjoyed it. Then I discovered that this collection of all of Pardoe’s fiction, including all the Bradshawe stories, had been reprinted as Occult Detective Magazine Special Edition #1 from Cathaven Press.
So who is Pardoe, and who is Bradshawe? Well, what I know is that Rosemary Pardoe is an editor and writer in England, focusing mostly in the area of supernatural fiction. There is a collection of her articles and essays, Black Pilgrimage & Other Explorations.
Surprisingly she has written very little fiction, and it’s all in The Angry Dead. There have been three editions, and this one came out in 2021 from Cathaven Press and is readily available from Amazon. Interestingly, like during the pulp era where editors who wrote on the side used pseudonyms, when these stories first appeared in the 1980s they were under the alias of Mary Ann Allen.
This is a nice volume, with a good intro on the creation of these stories and some other background. I did enjoy the interior pieces by Autumn Barlow. The collection has 12 stories, all but one being a Bradshawe piece.
Jane Bradshawe is a “church restorer.” She restores woodcarvings and paintwork, usually in old churches. As such, this has led her to various encounters with ghosts. Sometimes she can sense them or even see them. Sometimes not. She often times has to do some investigation to figure out who the ghost is. In all cases, something happened to the person while dead that has caused them to still haunt the area. And often through her work, she is able to set things right. But not always. So she is not an occult detective who is going up against evil and stopping it, but more putting to rest the haunting.
All the stories are fairly short, which is fine. There is that feeling of antiquity as she works on churches that are several hundred years old.
Sadly, we won’t see any more of these stories, but if you like occult detectives, this is a nice little collection of stories to get.
