From Publishers Weekly
At the outset it should be stated that this book by the author of The Occult and The Outsider is only tangentially about paranormal crime detection, and is not for true crime buffs. While focusing on psychometry, Wilson surveys parapsychological phenomena with emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. Psychometry, which is closely related to telepathy and clairvoyance, involves the psychic's touching of an object or, in some instances, only being in the presence of an object, and "reading" that object's history or the history of a person closely associated with it. The phenomenon, according to the author, has applications to police work and has been successful in archeological studies. But emerging from Wilson's admitted "bewildering array of facts" are his devout faith in poltergeists, spiritualism, dowsing and related areas, and his intention to convert skeptics.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
The curiosity of inveterate British researcher Cohn Wilson is apparently unquenchable. Among his specialities is a penchant for pricking holes in metaphysical orthodoxies while exploring the further reaches of mind and perception. He first demonstrated these traits with literary bravura in 1958 with his The Outsider, and he has since continued his probing into the psychic domain in such near encyclopedic investigatory classics as The Occult (1971), mysteries (1978) and Poltergeist (1984). Wilson isn't psychic, he tells us, but he is "ESPthick" and anti-occultist. His intention is to lay out the facts and evidences-accurately, dispassionately-for such phenomena as psychometry. mental travel, saying, mediumship, telepathy, and psychic perception, as he's culled them from Western anecdotes and investigative studies since about 1850. As usual, Wilson's prolific research has unearthed a great deal of generally unknown history of psychic research, personalities, studies and scandals. He is a gifted chronicler of what to us might seem like ancient history-die early heyday of serious scientific research into psychical activities in the late nineteenth century. Wilson documents the contributions of certain wellknown metaphysicians such as Helene Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, and Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, and he introduces us to Stefan Ossowiecki, "the great pioneer of psychic archeology and the greatest of all psychometrists." Throughout his engaging anecdotal survey, Wilson searches for explanations, for a plausible conceptual model that can explain psychometry. He is never quite satisfied, however, with any single model. He finally settles on a kind of metaphysically egalitarian stance. Psychic powers should be more common but must be understood as similar to musical or artistic gifts that require a disciplined development. Unfortunately, Wilson's efforts in The Psychic Detectives are "simplistic and superficial." He writes too many books too quickly to give any subject its intellectual due. His strong point is precis, but his weakness is the inevitable glancing inspection. While the present study is a useful, accurate reference book and an entertaining, accessible read, it is essentially lightweight and unoriginal-perfunctory, in Wilson's unique way. The bibliography is inadequate, the footnotes nonexistem and there is little post-1970 research presented, such as the recent psi studies at Stanford University. The narration reads like an intelligent commentary on a series of popular newspaper accounts. Wilson's arnbiance as chef de cuisine of a burgeoning field is inexplicably, immedicably 1950s, as if the channeling boom of the 1980s had never reached his Cornish library. His efforts to settle on an explanatory model are intellectually insincere and unconvincing-more like an expedient afterthought by a writer in a hurry. In fairness, however, we must grant Wilson his selfdescribed limitations of scope as he pursues the mystery of "thought-transference." Quoting Freud, Wilson concludes, "Even this hypothesis already represents a great and momentous step beyond our present viewpoint." -- From Independent Publisher
