Whatever happened to the Bermuda Triangle? One minute everyone's talking about it, Barry Manilow is lamenting its capricious powers in song, the next it's dropped off the radar, never to be seen again. Lost. And what about The Man from Atlantis? I remember my childish excitement when Patrick Duffy's mysterious stranger washed up on our screens, only to sink without trace an unlucky 13 episodes later.

Another damp squib. This, of course, is the nature of the supernatural. It doesn't stick. A brief flurry of excitement, then the stories melt away like the Abominable Snowman when a new season rolls around. So what possible credit, then, for being “The Man Who Invented the Supernatural”? Charles Fort may have given us the adjective - Fortean - to label the miscellany we might otherwise mark simply “X”, but what treasures or formulae did he unearth that would warrant a 300-page biography? What wild talent did he possess that could merit being described as “the progenitor of an entirely new world viewpoint”?

The answer, according to Jim Steinmeyer's compelling account, is that Fort refused answers. Or rather, he juggled answers, conjured with them, ripped them from the pages where they sat alongside their proper questions, and fashioned paper soldiers from them, to assault every bastion of dogmatism, or set fire to themselves in protest at being discharged and forgotten.

Here is a man ahead of his time, preaching a gospel of “suspended judgment”, and the “oneness of allness” that might have been found, decades later, framed above the desks of chaos mathematicians and postmodern philosophers. A journalist with the integrity not to take his exposure of the absurd at all seriously, because “one can't be of an enquiring nature and also be very sensible”.

A surrealist scientist, the author of “non-fiction fiction” who boldly claimed: “I believe nothing... that I have ever written. I cannot accept that the products of minds are subject-matters for beliefs.” An avid collector (and exposer) of metaphors, happy in the end to destroy them all. A writer, ultimately, “of a new kind of ghost story” who recognised that “it isn't merely houses that are haunted - our textbooks are haunted, our sciences and our understandings”.

Fort's greatest collection of “non-fictional thrillers” is described in these pages as “a graceful extended conversation with an eccentric genius” - that turns out to be an accurate account of his biography. This is how biographies should be written: Steinmeyer the ideal host, introducing us to a fascinating stranger, and sliding into the background.

“We'd all be somewhat enlightened, were it not for easy chairs,” he confides. “One can't learn much and also be comfortable.” Here is a storyteller with a glint in his eye. Pull up a chair, you won't be disappointed.

Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer
Heinemann, £16.99; 352pp Buy the book here

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