In Fiction
There is a long history of psychic detectives in horror and crime fiction, and in other genres as well. One of the earliest forms of the genre was the character Flaxman Low, created in 1897 by mother and son Kate and Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard. Other examples include Jules de Grandin (created by Seabury Quinn), Doctor Occult (created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster) and Agent Jasi McLellan created by Cheryl Kaye Tardif.
The popular TV show, Psych features a charlatan paranormal detective helping the Santa Barbara police with crimes that range from robberies to kidnappings to murders. However, the man actually uses an acute sense of observation he acquired as a child, a photographic memory, and deduction and reasoning to solve cases, making a running gag of his claim to be a psychic.
In Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently novels, the titular character—a "holistic" detective—is implied to have psychic powers on occasion. One incident involved Gently attempting to scam his university classmates into paying for a set of answers to an exam, supposedly obtained using psychic powers that Gently did not think he had. To his surprise, the answers he provided, which he thought he had produced randomly, turned out to be entirely correct. He was expelled as a result.
Peter F. Hamilton wrote a series of books about the ex-military psychic Greg Mandel. In the series, Greg was a retired special forces soldier created as part of an elite spec-ops unit, the Mindstar Brigade, in the 'English Army', having fought a vicious war in Turkey and helped a rebellion overthrow the People's Socialist Party at home. Having won the rebellion he then retired to Rutland, suddenly being called out of retirement by the rich heirhess Julia Evans to use his psychic talents to find the root of industrial espionage against her company, Event Horizon . The series not only focuses on Greg's abilities, but also the abilities of other psychics created as part of the Mindstar Programme, the effects of social and economic change throughout the 21st century, global warming and rapid scientific advances. Greg regularly uses his abilities both for interogation and as an offensive weapon.
The episode "Cartman's Incredible Gift" of South Park depicts a skeptical view of psychic detectives.
The Japanese manga and anime series Yu Yu Hakusho depicts a teenage boy named Yusuke Urameshi working as a Spirit Detective, which is a human who hunts down demons using supernatural abilities.
Read more about this topic: Psychic Detective
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“Coincidence is a pimp and a cardsharper in ordinary fiction but a marvelous artist in the patterns of facts recollected by a non-ordinary memorist.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)