Teaching, performance and ghost books
O’Donnell was born in Bristol and educated at Clifton College and the Queen’s Service Academy in Dublin. His early working life included teaching and theatrical training. Travel and performance provided material for a career that developed around supernatural subjects. For Satan’s Sake, his first novel, appeared in 1904.
He subsequently published numerous accounts of ghosts and hauntings, alongside fiction, articles, lectures and broadcasts. Personal recollection, collected stories and imaginative narration often sit close together in these books. His reputation as a ghost investigator should therefore be distinguished from independent confirmation of the experiences he described. His own autobiographical writing records the pressure of earning a living before he could concentrate on publishing.
Power becomes a business
The Sorcery Club, published by William Rider in 1912, is explicitly a novel. Hamar, Curtis and Kelson acquire a manuscript whose knowledge promises extraordinary powers. Their different desires turn a shared opportunity into an unstable alliance, moving through tests and initiation towards public performance and commercial competition.
The unwanted book initially resists disposal through ordinary encounters with a waiter and a policeman. Later, magical advantage is measured against work, invention and the treatment of other people. The contrast between extraordinary power and ordinary acts of kindness exposes character. Its Atlantis manuscript supplies the invented premise of that conflict, rather than historical evidence for a lost civilisation.
