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The Enduring Legacy of M R James: How His Ghostly Tales Defined the Genre

15 Oct

Welcome to my humble abode, dear readers of the supernatural! Today, we’re going to have a creep-tastic time exploring the question of whether M R James was the father of the supernatural ghost story genre.

Now, if you’re not familiar with M R James, he was an English author who wrote some of the most chilling and unforgettable ghost stories of all time. His tales were often set in ancient, secluded places, and featured eerie apparitions and malevolent spirits that left readers trembling in fear.

But was he really the father of the supernatural ghost story genre? Well, the answer is a bit tricky. While James certainly played a major role in popularizing the genre and establishing many of its conventions, he wasn’t necessarily the first author to dabble in the realm of the supernatural.

In fact, ghost stories have been a part of English literature for centuries. From Shakespeare’s haunting portrayal of Hamlet’s father to the Gothic tales of Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, the ghost story has a long and storied history in English literature.

However, it’s fair to say that M R James was a master of the form. His stories were expertly crafted, blending elements of horror, mystery, and folklore to create an unforgettable reading experience. His attention to detail and his ability to conjure up vivid, terrifying imagery made him a true standout in the genre.

So while M R James may not have been the father of the supernatural ghost story genre, he certainly deserves credit for his contributions to it. His stories have influenced countless writers and continue to chill readers to the bone to this day.

So, whether you’re a longtime fan of ghost stories or a newcomer to the genre, there’s no denying the impact that M R James has had on the world of supernatural fiction. So light a candle, settle in with your favorite spooky tale, and let the master of the ghost story genre take you on a spine-tingling journey into the unknown.

Read on for more…

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Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected

17 Oct

Nowadays everybody knows who Roald Dahl is – one of the most popular children’s writers the world has ever known – but there is also a generation who first became aware of him sitting in his cardigan introducing the TV series Tales of the Unexpected. For a while there were two Roald Dahls in people’s consciousness. One – the Tales of the Unexpected Dahl – who wrote slightly sinister, blackly humorous adult stories with a sting in the tail. The other – the Willy Wonka Dahl – who wrote slightly sinister, blackly humorous children’s stories illustrated by Quentin Blake. And back in 1979 the TV Dahl, the Tales of the Unexpected Dahl, took over for a while. After all, he had yet to write many of his most popular kids’ books, like The Twits, The BFG, Matilda and The Witches. But there is a third Roald Dahl, and that is the one to be found in the pages of his short stories – quite simply the master of the short-story form – because there is so much more to his tales than ‘the unexpected’, a label that has perhaps been too often applied to his adult work and which gives too narrow a view of its appeal. If every story consisted of nothing more than a twist we would read them once, perhaps skipping through to the big reveal, and then forget all about them. But you never forget a Dahl short story. He starts with ones based on his experiences as a fighter pilot in the Second World War and ends with ones of country life. In between there is horror, comedy, science fiction, satire and sex. Yes, many of them do end with a final drop of acid, but the pleasure goes far beyond the punchline.

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T G Jackson – Architect of the Gothic

16 May

Around a hundred years ago, two celebrated Gothic architects each began writing ghost stories. One was the young American, Ralph Adams Cram, whose first book Black Spirits and White appeared in 1895, but was sadly never followed by any further similar tales during his remaining forty-eight years—whereas, unlike the much younger Cram, the veteran English architect Sir Thomas Graham Jackson waited until his eighty-fourth year to publish his own sole collection, Six Ghost Stories, in 1919. Although not really a ‘Jamesian’ writer, Jackson is clearly a genuine antiquarian, scholar, and classicist, and his personal love of arcane lore, objets d’art, historic buildings, and Italian antiquities is clearly evident in these traditional post-Victorian ghost stories. During his own lifetime, very few readers knew Jackson as a writer of ghost stories (or any other kind of fiction). He was celebrated as a great ‘New Gothic’ architect, with a special devotion to the Romanesque style. In retrospect he is seen as one of those pioneers who strove to loosen the bonds of rigid medievalism in the belief that by doing so a living Gothic style, capable of gradual development, would take the place of one that was bound by archaeology, and for which they felt there could be no future. An inveterate traveller, and pursuer of antiquities, he virtually rediscovered Dalmatia as far as its art and history were concerned. A brief résumé of his incredibly busy life and achievements will reveal the unique personality behind the long-neglected collection of Six Ghost Stories.

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The Black Reaper

14 Mar

Literary fame seems almost like a lottery; ghost story writers in particular seem to pick losing tickets more than any other kind of author. It is an interesting exercise to ponder why certain authors and their works in this vein, just as well equipped to stand the test of time as their contemporaries, fall into speedy obscurity, while others stay in the public eye. The Victorian era is a fine example of this – for every tale of terror that has survived in print today, there are a hundred languishing in undeserved obscurity. Bernard Capes is a case in point. During his writing career, he published forty-one books, contributed to all the leading Victorian magazines, and left behind some of the most imaginative tales of terror of his era – yet within ten years of his death, he had slipped down the familiar slope into total neglect. Until the early 1980s, Capes seldom appeared in reference works in this (or any other) field of literature, and even histories of Victorian writers published in his lifetime give him scant mention. He was overlooked by every anthologist in this genre from his death in 1918 right up until 1978: sixty years of lingering in the dark while many of his contemporaries were brought back to light. I would place Capes among the most imaginative writers of his day. He turned out plot after plot worthy of the recognition accorded to such contemporaries as Stevenson, Haggard, and Conan Doyle, all of whom are still in print today. This selection of his stories help put Capes in his deserved position with the leading talents of Victorian fantasy.

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In Ghostly Company

17 Jan

The writing of ghost stories has attracted more talented amateurs than any other form of literature. By the term ‘amateur’, I mean those individuals whose main occupation in life is not writing, but those who take up their pen or sit at their typewriters in their idle hours between the demands of their normal profession. The list of candidates in the ghost story genre includes M. R. James, Sir Andrew Caldecott and A. C. and R. H. Benson. Another name to add to the list, one which is forgotten today by all but the most knowledgeable aficionado of supernatural fiction, is Amyas Northcote. Northcote remains a shadowy figure, and not a great deal is known about him or what prompted him to create this delicious collection of ghost stories. He was born on 25 October 1864 into a privileged background. He was the seventh child of a successful politician, Sir Stafford Northcote who was lord of the manor at Pynes, situated a few miles from Exeter. During his childhood years, all the great Tory politicians, including Disraeli, Lord Salisbury and Randolph Churchill, were guests at the house. Sir Stafford was a great devotee of the theatre and literature. He had an especial fascination for ghost stories and the tales of the Arabian Nights and needed little encouragement to spin yarns of magic, wizardry and the fantastic to his children. No doubt this influenced the young Amyas Northcote in his reading tastes and sowed seeds of inspiration which were not to flower until many years later. Amyas attended Eton and was there at the same time as that doyen of ghost story writers M. R. James. It is not known if the two young men knew each other at this time, but the ancient and academic atmosphere that they breathed in together finds its way into both of their writings when, it would seem, out of the blue he brought out a collection of ghost stories in 1921.

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Ghosts of Christmas Past

20 Dec

‘There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas,’ wrote Jerome K. Jerome in the introduction to his darkly comic collection Told After Supper (1891), ‘something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails’. Dickens would no doubt agree, as well as anyone who grew up in the 1970s and was scarred for life by the BBC’s annual Ghost Story for Christmas. It is often assumed that this is a tradition inaugurated by the publication of A Christmas Carol on December 19, 1843. But Dickens had been channelling something much more ancient, something, in fact, much older than Christmas itself. These are the fireside tales of the Winter Solstice, when our Neolithic ancestors worshipped their death and resurrection gods and the Germanic tribes celebrated Yule, when the wild hunt rose and the Draugr – the ‘again walkers’ – gave up their graves on the darkest day of the year. People have always got together at this time of the year. And as these pagan echoes blend with quasi-Victorian religiosity, like rum and ginger in a winter punch, folk are bound to tell some pretty strange stories. When the unnamed framing narrator of Henry James’ seminal ghost story The Turn of the Screw listens to a friend reading the eerie manuscript, for example, it is on Christmas Eve. This was doubly so before radio and then television took over, and friends and families still had to entertain themselves. And why stand starchily around an upright piano singing carols when you can scare each other witless? This was the point of Jerome’s book, which both satirised and affirmed the genre of the late-Victorian ghost story, a particular type of English gothic that had become clichéd and ripe for parody by the end of the century. The form was, however, about to be accidently revitalised by M R James, a prestigious academic who took a ghoulish delight in frightening the life out of friends, colleagues and students by writing a single ghost story every year and reading it aloud to them in his rooms at King’s on Christmas Eve, extinguishing every candle but one. As he later explained, ‘If any of them succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained.’

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The Mozart of the English Ghost Story

12 Jul

How does William Wymark Jacobs earn the title “The Mozart of the English Short Story”? Because his prose is exquisite and translucent, and his plots – like Mozart/Da Ponte operas – are full of fun and mischief, as anti-romantic as they are romantic. Just as in the last act of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, if you blink you risk missing a sublime, or a sublimely comic moment, if your attention lapses when reading a Jacobs story, you risk missing sly irony, wry innuendo or a mordant remark – more often than not about marriage! In fact, the simple pleasure of reading Jacobs’s perfectly paced prose – in Evelyn Waugh’s words, his “exquisite precision of narrative” – is often more enjoyable than following the actual plots of his stories, which are often intricate and sometimes seem only to hang by a thread, which require the reader’s alertness, if not participation, and which are often not resolved until the very last word, sometimes leaving the reader vexed, or even disappointed, however charmed by the telling of the story itself. An example of this is the delectable The Bequest, from Ship’s Company, about late-middle-age second marriage and – inevitably with Jacobs – money. Even the end of The Monkey’s Paw requires some reader participation. The fact is that Jacobs’s invisible craft of narration often cannot be matched even by the ingenuity of his plots. That the lasting satisfaction of a Jacobs story lies less in its plot than its telling means that, like Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Jacobs is infinitely re-readable. His sentences always have buoyancy and air. Knowing the plot of a Jacobs story – but not perhaps fully understanding its denouement – does not spoil the pleasure of reading and re-reading him. Open any Jacobs story and you will receive a lesson in how to write English prose and dialogue. Jacobs sustained this prose style, seemingly entirely natural to him – but he always worked hard and slowly – over some 150 stories and six novels. This means that making a selection from his stories is extremely difficult, because they almost all offer the same degree of pleasure.

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The Three Investigators

14 Jun

The Three Investigators was a young adult detective book series written by Robert Arthur. It centered on a trio of high school boys who live in the fictional town of Rocky Beach, California. They are: Jupiter Jones, First Investigator, who is a leader known for his remarkable powers of observation and deduction; Pete Crenshaw, Second Investigator, who is a tower of strength in any kind of trouble; and Bob Andrews, Records and Research, who is something of a scholarly type with an adventurous spirit. The boys spend their free time solving various mysteries rather than true crimes, mysteries which tended to be far more bizarre, unusual, complex, and intriguing than those of other Kid Detective books of the day, with protagonists who were simply ordinary, middle-class American boys, without the riches or special advantages of sleuths such as The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew, both of whom had famous fathers who helped them out in their cases a great deal. Headquarters for The Three Investigators is a damaged 30-foot mobile home trailer within the salvage yard run by Jupiter’s Uncle Titus and Aunt Mathilda which has been cleverly hidden from view by stacks of junk which surround it. For travelling long distances, the boys have the use of a gold-plated Rolls Royce, complete with a chauffeur, Worthington, whom Jupiter won the use of in a contest. Adding to this quasi-realism was the real-life movie director, Alfred Hitchcock, who appeared in the original texts of the first thirty titles. His character provided the introductory and closing remarks in each book and, acting as a mentor, he was occasionally called upon by The Three Investigators during the course of solving a mystery. The real Alfred Hitchcock had little to do with the creation of these books. He was simply paid a handsome percentage for the use of his name and character. This provided brand-name recognition and helped boost sales of the books. Following Robert Arthur’s death, the writing of the series was taken over by several successive authors — two titles by Nick West (pseudonym of Kin Platt), three by Marc Brandel, and the bulk of them penned by William Arden (pseudonym of Dennis Lynds) and M V Carey.

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The Case of Gervase Fen

17 May

The detective Gervase Fen and his creator ‘Edmund Crispin’ were born (or, to be more accurate, conceived) sometime in April 1942, when a twenty-one-year-old Oxford undergraduate named Robert Bruce Montgomery was arguing about books over a congenial pint at a pub. His friend, the actor John Maxwell, was astonished that Montgomery had not read the detective stories of John Dickson Carr, famous as the creator of Dr Gideon Fell and master of locked-room mysteries and seemingly impossible crimes. Montgomery later recalled that in those days he was ‘a prig and an intellectual snob,’ but he agreed to read Carr’s shuddery novel of witch cults and rational detection, The Crooked Hinge. ‘I went to bed with it not expecting very much,’ Montgomery said. ‘But at two o’clock in the morning I was still sitting up with my eyes popping out of their sockets at the end of one of the sections—I think the third [actually it was the second]—with the doctor looking after the nerve-racked maid, saying, “You devil up there, what have you done?” And of course I finished the book that night. It was to be the seminal moment in my career, and to alter it entirely, for although subsequently I read and enjoyed other detective-story writers, in particular Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell, it was Carr primarily who induced me to try my hand at one myself, thus creating Edmund Crispin.’

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The Travelling Grave

12 Apr

Leslie Poles Hartley has been credited with writing some of the most sophisticated ghost stories in the English language, and was once quoted as saying that this type of story was “if not the highest, certainly the most exacting form of literary art.” Hartley was born in Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, England, on 30 December 1895. His father was a solicitor who invested his money in local brickmaking businesses, eventually becoming one of the directors of a prosperous company. Harry Hartley was a busy and respected public figure in his locality: the personification of the self-reliant and god-fearing Victorian businessman. Harry’s wife Bessie was very different, a soft-spoken woman who delighted in poetry. She was also consumed by worry about her health and that of her three children – and was never to let them forget it. Nevertheless, Hartley’s parents complemented each other, and by all accounts enjoyed a long and happy marriage. Hartley’s biographer Adrian Wright quotes Bessie as telling her husband, “I have never seen you come in without pleasure, and I have never seen you go out without regret.” Their only son was never to find such requited fulfilment, except, perhaps, in aspects of his close friendship with David Cecil – but even then Hartley’s feelings were not to be returned in the way that he seemed to have longed for. Once Hartley started to write, his short stories would frequently feature single men who were always somewhat on the edge of things, outsiders who could never quite be at home, who could never quite be themselves, even in the most apparently pleasant settings and comfortable situations.

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