Witty Little Knitter

That's another entry on the 'This did not work for me' shelf. Almost everything about the story seemed just odd to me.First of all Carnacki, like so many Victorian detectives has a biographer who tells his story but unlike e.g. Watson the biographer doesn't do anything. Every story starts with Carnacki visiting the narrator and some of his friends and then telling them about his latest case. What's the point of that? The only reason I can imagine is that this way Hodgson/Carnacki can drop the 'As you know' constantly. 'As you know Random Book about the Occult says about hauntings like this', 'As you know it was similar in the case of the haunted mansion of family XY'. No I don't. The nameless narrator might, but I don't. Generally that case-name-dropping was really annoying. Of course Watson occasionally also refers to cases he hadn't written about but they key-word here is occasionally. Carnacki does it at least two times per story.I also found the stories to be very forumlaic. Everytime Carnacki is called to a case, does some investigating (that's only ever described in rather general terms), eventually witnesses the hauntings first-hand, does some more investigating and finally finds the solution. No I wouldn't mind that but if you're telling the same story over and over again give my something else that grabs my attention, like interesting characters but they all stay rather one-dimensional, too. In fact I don't really know much about Carnacki, except that he doesn't like telling his tales immediately once he's visiting his friends but likes to stay absolutely silent for about one or two pages so that the narrator can ramble on about how Carnacki is the kind of guy who stays silent at first and won't answer any questions...that doesn't really make sense to me.Besides, it occasionally seemed to me that too many threads were left hanging. In some of the cases there were no genuine hauntings but people using an existing ghost-story to their own advantage...except that at the end not all the misterious happenings got explained. In one case he even admits that in adition to the man-made spook there also must have been something else going on but...nothing. He leaves it thereSo in conclusion: not very good puzzles because it's always the same story and no interesting characters. I don't really get the point of it all.