My wife and I have been paying for PBS Passport. It's been fantastic, really. We have been watching a lot of Masterpiece Mystery, which I have always loved (back when it was just "Mystery!"). We watched all the seasons of "Miss Scarlet and The Duke," now just "Miss Scarlet." It was great, about a woman detective (whose father was played by Tim Downie, who also played Gale Dekarios in Baldur's Gate 3) set in 1882 and the issues she faced.
The fun thing about Masterpiece Mystery is that it has all these shows about mysteries and murders in England. I speculated that there are more murders on PBS than in real England.
We also watched the very good "The Law According to Lidia Poët" and the enjoyable "Enola Holmes." Both on Netflix. Though I will admit the caliber of the shows on PBS is much higher in terms of writing, even if the Netflix shows have bigger budgets.
All three have strong women leads as primary investigators. They all take place at roughly the same time as well: 1882 for Miss Scarlet, 1883 for Lidia Poët, and 1884 for Enola Holmes. Given my love of the Victorian era, I could not help but enjoy these shows and wonder if there was something I could use here.
The idea was one I mulled over and sat on for a while.
I spent some time with SCP and thinking about how I could adapt my ideas for A.R.T.E.M.I.S. as well as an occult investigative organization. I mean, I really like it. The ideas are not really ready for publication here yet. I am still cooking them...and then I got a little sidetracked.
While writing, I was wondering about the origin of A.R.T.E.M.I.S. When and where it began. Who started it and why. They are some good ideas. But they don't really fit with what I really wanted A.R.T.E.M.I.S. to be. They do work great for The Artemis Club.
These new ideas began while I was recently re-reading some of my old Ghosts of Albion material. I began thinking, what if A.R.T.E.M.I.S. began as a criminal investigation club in the Victorian era? Certainly has some value to it. This gives me a chance to work it from both ends. I had some ideas I like, but they don't really fit well with the modern A.R.T.E.M.I.S.
The Artemis Club
The Artemis Club began not as an investigation club, but as a "reading club" for young women associated with Oxford University.
They began meeting informally in the Oriel College Library, often at hours when their presence would attract the least attention. They discussed history, philosophy, literature, science, antiquities, folklore, and current events. Mysteries of all sorts, however, grabbed their attention the most.
Because they were often seen moving quietly through the library stacks and galleries, the women were jokingly called "The Ghosts of the Oriel." The name began as a mockery but was quickly adopted by the women themselves. Though, feeling pressure from the University, the women moved out.
Aurora Evelyn Ashcombe, better known as Lady Ashcombe, was young, rich, intelligent, and married to a considerably older husband. Lord Ashcombe had little interest in how his wife spent her time or his money, provided her interests remained respectable and she stayed away from younger men. She obliged him by giving him his heir and only keeping the company of other women.
Aurora pays for the new meeting place and suggests the new name as an homage to the Huntress and Protector of Women. The club members, with renewed dedication, refocused on solving all sorts of mysteries. First, as an academic exercise, then as time went on, the club began hosting what became known as consulting detectives, but for female detectives. Many focused on completely mundane sorts of crimes: missing people, affairs, dishonest staff. A few cover the more complex crimes, like murder. And very few consult on crimes of a paranormal and supernatural nature. These are the sorts that Aurora herself is most interested in, and ones she secretly funds more than the others.
From the 1840s onward, the Artemis Club investigated all sorts of crimes.
The Club eventually developed a simple investigative philosophy:
Observe first. Explain afterward.
A second maxim, usually attributed to one of the original Ghosts of the Oriel, became equally important:
Dismiss nothing merely because it is impossible.
This did not mean the Club believed every tale of ghosts or monsters. Quite the opposite. Artemis investigators became notorious for exposing fraudulent mediums, false hauntings, forged antiquities, staged séances, and criminals who used superstition to frighten their victims.
For this reason, the Club's supernatural case files were not labeled "Ghosts," "Demons," or "Magic."
They were simply marked: UNRESOLVED
Members of the Artemis Club never wore uniforms or carried official credentials, but many wore a small silver brooch showing a crescent moon crossed by an arrow. It was not meant to identify them publicly. Rather, it was a quiet sign between members that help, discretion, and perhaps a warm cup of tea were close at hand.
Throughout the Victorian era, the Artemis Club quietly solved cases that baffled the preeminent and male minds of the time. By the 1880s, they had members throughout England and had begun a chapter in St. Andrews, Scotland.
But it was not to last.
The 20th Century
The end of the Victorian era and the dawn of the 20th century initially looked like a new age for the Artemis Club. Women were entering universities in greater numbers, taking professional positions, publishing under their own names, and gaining access to institutions that had once excluded them. In some ways, the world was finally beginning to resemble the one the Club's founders had imagined.
Ironically, that success weakened the Club.
The Artemis Club had been born because intelligent women had nowhere else to go. By the early 20th Century, some of those women now had universities, laboratories, newspapers, hospitals, political organizations, and professional societies of their own. The Club remained respected, but it was no longer as necessary as it had once been.
Even in her 90s, Aurora Ashcombe remained an active participant and an imposing presence in Club affairs. She represented a direct link to the earliest days of the Ghosts of the Oriel, but after her death the Club lost more than one of its founders. It lost its greatest patron.
The Ashcombe fortune had supported the Club for decades, but no fortune is endless, particularly once divided between heirs who did not share Aurora's interests. The Club continued, but with less money, fewer staff, and increasing difficulty maintaining its London house and enormous archive.
Membership numbers start to fall. The First World War was a further setback. A good many of the members put in their time as nurses, physicians, clerks, and intelligence workers, some as volunteers or translators. Some did not come back at all; others were killed. And for those who remained, the war put a different complexion on the kind of mystery one would trouble to solve. After the trenches and poison gas, after the mass graves and the millions of dead, stories of strange disappearances and ghosts had a way of seeming quaint.
There was a period when spiritualism made an appeal. Bereaved families were only too eager to think they could speak with the departed, and Club members found themselves looking into mediums and séances, even claims of messages from soldiers who had fallen. Most of it was a sham. In some instances, it was not.
The Artemis Club of the interwar years was a more closed and older organization than its Victorian predecessor. They still took on cases, but they were less of an academic exercise and more likely to involve fraud, blackmail, and political extremism than the cases that defied easy categorization. In other words, they had grown out of the "ghost hunting" business.
By the 1930s, the Club had on its books nearly a century’s worth of unexplained phenomena, which was of some interest to certain governments. They were still consulted, but more often than not, even their extraordinary-sounding cases became ordinary in the end.
Then the Second World War arrived.
The Blitz left little of London standing, and the motherhouse of the Artemis Club was no exception. The building went up in flames, and with it, their grand library. Generations of investigators had amassed casebooks, journals, maps, photographs, and artifacts; all of it was lost.
One might find a file here and there that had been copied or put in safekeeping, and the St. Andrews chapter held on to some Scottish records, as did a few families with their own papers. But the archive proper was gone.
The Club did not formally die that night, but it never really recovered. When the war was done, the rest of the members were scattered and worn out. Britain had to be put back together, as did families and careers. The world that had given rise to the Artemis Club was another matter entirely.
Former members would get together now and then in the 1950s, old friends rather than working investigators. But that too came to an end.
A couple of scholars and investigators attempted in the 1970s to put the old organization back together, riding a wave of public fascination with the occult, UFOs, and the like. They could not make it work. Too much was gone, too many of the old traditions, and the references that remained often told different stories from one another.
So by the close of the 20th century, the Artemis Club was nothing if not a historical oddity.
For most people, anyway.
The Rise of A.R.T.E.M.I.S.
Modern A.R.T.E.M.I.S. did not descend directly from The Artemis Club.
There is no charter passed down from one to the other, no secret chain of command, nor any hidden society that has been in operation since Victorian times.
The link is there, but it is a symbolic one and was put in place on purpose.
When the modern agency was being put together in the early 1990s, researchers came across odd fragments of the old Club’s history. What they found was far from complete: some case reports here, a reference in a police file or a university archive there, the odd newspaper clipping or private journal. The founders were not so much interested in the Club’s putative dealings with monsters or ghosts as they were in its approach.
Observe first. Explain afterward.
The Artemis Club had a way of doing things. It would take up claims that the establishment chose to overlook, gather evidence, cross-reference the files, and note what witnesses had to say, even if others were inclined to dismiss them. Above all, it did not turn its back on an event just because the prevailing wisdom held it to be impossible.
That kind of thinking appealed to the new organization, and the name was taken as an homage. The acronym followed in due course: A.R.T.E.M.I.S., standing for the Agency for Research into Transdimensional Events, Magic, and Inexplicable Sightings. The founders were fully aware it was put together in reverse to keep the original moniker, but that was fine with them.
Artemis stood for something of value: the hunt for truth and the protection of those who might otherwise be left out, and a readiness to go where a conventional investigator would not.
In terms of actual legacy, the new body inherited little from the Club. There was no headquarters, no continuity of institution, no command structure, or full set of archives. Just an idea, a few cases, and a name. Which is perhaps for the best.
From time to time, A.R.T.E.M.I.S. reacquaints itself with the past. An investigator may open a file from 1872 and find that the thing he is after has been encountered before. Or a sealed box is turned up in the cellar of an old Scottish property, or a journal comes to light at auction.
There have always been rumors that some of the more unusual records were removed from the motherhouse before the Blitz. No one knows by whom or where they went. Modern A.R.T.E.M.I.S. officially considers these stories unsupported. Unofficially, more than one investigator has spent considerable time looking for the missing files.
Artemis and A.R.T.E.M.I.S.
I know I am not done with either organization. Tales of the exploits of the Artemis Club are likely to surface from time to time. Of course, A.R.T.E.M.I.S. is in a solid growth stage and likely to expand and change as I write more. In fact, sitting here now, I remember I have a bunch of notes I wrote about the SCP Foundation that I plan to move over to NIGHT SHIFT, notes I could have used here today but didn't.
Well, that is another post.
