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Brodsky, Ivan. Ivan Brodsky was created by “Victor Rousseau,” the pseudonym of Victor Rousseau Emmanuel (Jim Anthony, Clifford, Ronald Gowan, Phileas Immanuel, King of Knaves, King’s Courier, Professor MacBeard, Isabel Marston, Dr. Martinus, Pennell, Shawm, Thorne, Mr. X), and appeared in eleven stories in the Stevens Point Daily Journal and Weird Tales from 1910 to 1926, beginning with “The Woman with the Crooked Nose” (Stevens Point Daily Journal, Sept. 30, 1910).

Ivan Brodsky is a Big-Headed Dwarf Genius Occult Detective. Ivan Brodsky, the Polish-born “Surgeon of Souls,” works as a “professor of nervous diseases” at a London hospital. He is a “dark, sinewy, undersized man, with a great head absurdly disproportionate to his body, and flashing eyes that seemed to pierce through you and read your thoughts.” He is “a cross between two races whose blend of shrewdness and mysticism was probably accountable for the production of so remarkable a personality as his own.” He is unassuming and doesn’t socialize, but is “all-dominating” in his hospital, where he performs experiments for treating “obscure brain lesions.” He is an expert hypnotist who receives cases from around the country. His particular cases involve psychic matters of reincarnation and possession, and he believes in an “oversoul” to which individual souls return, so that the execution of a brutal murderer will “be the release of just so much additional force of evil” to the oversoul.

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