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Le Grange, Rosalie. Rosalie Le Grange was created by Will Irwin and appeared in three stories and story serials in Saturday Evening Post in 1908, beginning with “The Law and Laughing Eyes” (Saturday Evening Post, Feb. 1, 1908).

Rosalie Le Grange is a Con Man. She is a fraudulent medium working in Brooklyn. “Rosalie, plump, cheerful, good-natured, a clairvoyant who prided herself on practicing honest mediumship and taking no graft beyond regular fees.” She is a part of a community of mediums, and she is friends with them, including Professor Haley, who keeps the “Blue Book, that classified directory of sitters and their desired dead, to which all his clients contribute knowledge according to their abilities, and from which they take according to their needs.” When Rosalie’s friend Professor Beach is charged with a murder committed during a séance held by two apparently genuine—but evil—mediums, Rosalie is forced to solve the murder, using all her guile and local knowledge. She works with and manipulates Detective-Sergeant McGee, and thanks to her solving the case, and McGee getting the credit for it, she’s never troubled by the police again.

* I'm including the Rosalie Le Grange stories in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because they're good clean fun. Rosalie Le Grange is an appealing protagonist, her supporting cast of mediums are an inspired bit of creation of secondary characters, her enemies are suitably wicked, and the stories themselves are well-written and take exactly as much time as they need to do their job--no more, no less. Will Irwin was famous in his time for his journalism and his skepticism of spiritualism, but the Rosalie Le Grange stories are quite genial and mostly light-hearted--it's as if Irwin wanted to write a What If Mediums Were Actually Kind-Hearted set of stories rather than his usual debunking of mediums and spiritualists. 

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