Karl Grier: The Strange Story of a Man with a Sixth Sense

In 1906, Louis Tracy crafted one of the earliest novels about extrasensory perception, and it crackles with the giddy optimism of an age still believeing the impossible might be measurable. Karl Grier possesses what his friends call telegnomy: a sixth sense allowing him to see and hear across vast distances, to intuit the meaning behind a bird's cry or a ship's distress. Raised in India, he first proves his gift as a child when he senses a tea-garden raid and saves the Hutchinson family. Later, aboard a homeward vessel, he pinpoints a man overboard, Constantine, moments before drowning. At Oxford, his abilities sharpen into something stranger still: he beholds Manhattan Beach, a storm-lashed liner called the Merlin, and watches a theatrical agent named Steindal encoding a cable meant to lure the beautiful Maggie Hutchinson into a trap. The narrator, Karl's lifelong friend, frames everything with Victorian precision, lending the supernatural an air of empirical possibility. This is adventure fiction before irony, when the extraordinary was still exhilarating rather than explained.