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42 THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF
foregrounded a ‘whodunnit’ logic, a convention that gave structure to
the novels about werewolves that proliferated in the early twentieth
century, 101 and which persists in the werewolf subgenre to this day. 102
In such narratives, the detective investigates until the identity of the
werewolf is exposed, and the investigation often entails convincing
more sceptical protagonists that a werewolf is not ‘beyond physical
possibility’. 103 The increasing emphasis on the psychic detective’s specialized
knowledge of and technical skill in dealing with psychic or
occult matters also reflected the rise of the ‘expert’ within modernity,
a trend that had been foreshadowed by the struggles between ‘men of
letters’ and a growing cohort of professional academics. If engineers,
surgeons and other technocrats were now seen as authorities capable
of providing solutions to the practical problems of modern life, the
psychic detective was positioned as a troubleshooter dedicated to correcting
the more metaphysical problems of modernity.
In their aggrandisement of rational logic, their drive to explain all
things scientifically, and their fascinated hostility to the nightmarish
forces of chaos and uncertainty, detective stories replayed familiar
ambivalence about the nature of reality. Such fiction articulated, once
again, that hesitancy about the explanatory powers of science that
had troubled nineteenth-century scholars. As one fictional character
remarks, ‘It is not fear, but uncertainty, which disrupts the thinking
faculties; if we can settle our doubts, even for the worst, the danger
is past, for we can then find relief.’ 104 Such equivocation is charted in
Eden Phillpotts’s novel of 1937 with considerable sophistication, in a
narrative that is presented in two parts. In the first section, the story
unfolds towards a conclusion that implies that a lycanthropic transformation
has taken place. It is suggested that there are some things that
cannot be explained scientifically: ‘the wave of materialism, rampant
in the nineteenth century, has subsided. We are at a pause. Science
has told us what may be expected on a physical basis and it can do no
more for the moment.’ 105 The second section, narrated by a previously
unimportant character who now reveals himself to be an undercover
sleuth, re-examines the previous narrative to demonstrate that the
apparently supernatural events were in fact the result of foul play.