SOURCE: Indick, Ben P. “H. Russell Wakefield: The Man Who Believed in Ghosts.” In Discovering Classic Horror Fiction 1, edited by Darrell Schweitzer, pp. 73-93. San Bernardino, Cal.: The Borgo Press, 1992.

[In the following essay, Indick explains supernatural and horror fiction as two unique entities and deals with the ways in which Wakefield's work encompasses both.]

There is a gulf between Supernatural and Horror fiction; it is sometimes bridged, but the entities nevertheless remain unique. In today's world, where power and violence appear to have overcome taste and subtlety, the Supernatural per se is in eclipse. Its sister, Horror, albeit in the form of guignol, reigns. Occasionally a contemporary master, such as Stephen King, will attempt to rediscover the method of the old school, as in his short story, “The Breathing Method,” from Different Seasons, but the result is somewhat self-conscious. To rediscover the genre in its clearest form, one must return to the classic British school—ghostly horror tales, characterized by elegant prose, sophisticated characterization and detachment, even a remoteness, of authorial presence and temperament. These are tales less dependent upon repugnancy, which might yet produce as scarifying a climax as readers demand in our own less easily-shocked time.

It was in the fading nineteenth century and early twentieth that the supernatural story reached its apogee. The mechanisms of past gothicists, such as ancient manors, visitations from the vengeful dead, and romanticized weather conditions as a mirror of emotion remained, but in a more sophisticated and subtle style. These were the spectral tales of such great weirdistes as the inimitable M. R. James, E. F. Benson, and J. S. Le Fanu, as well as the horror tales of Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood and all those wonderful others who have kept our midnight hours frighteningly and deliciously shudder-filled.

Less celebrated perhaps, but no less skilful in his own manner was H. Russell Wakefield. He has left half a dozen books of spectral tales, still very effective, if less overwrought than our contempoary masters of the sinister in raising hackles. John Betjeman considered him, together with Le Fanu and Henry James, as “equal seconds” behind M. R. James as master of ghost story writing.¹ However, if Wakefield commenced his career in the manner of his idol, M. R. James, and these other masters, at the end the supernatural—for Wakefield—had become a bridgepath to horror and the grotesque.

H(erbert) Russell Wakefield was born May 9, 1888, in Kent, England, received a degree in history at Oxford University, and spent his life variously as a publisher, civil servant, and full-time writer. He died August 2, 1965. His writings include mysteries and studies of true crime as well as supernatural fiction, the last being his most important contribution. Although there is something of himself in many of his stories, the supernatural was likely of greatest personal significance to him, and is well exemplified in his very earliest work.

“The Red Lodge,” his first story, is a full prototype, already displaying the format for his style: simple, direct, a tale of a house haunted by ghosts. The rationale Wakefield supplies may be vague, not fully perceived, even hearsay; ghostly personages are generally not exploited as such. Nor does he labor to obtain Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous “suspension of disbelief”; his other-worldly persons or places are simply facts, to be accepted as such. It is by their effects upon his protagonists that these dim revenants are felt. Because it is characteristic of his methods, this story will be examined in some detail, as will examples from each of his books and periods.

Wakefield claimed to have had psychic experiences himself and apparently he did have an unpleasant psychic experience in just such a house as this lodge as a young man. Writing in 1946, he stated: “Unless I believed there are inexplicable phenomena in the world, marshalled under the generic term ‘psychic,’ I should never have bothered to write a single ghost story. … Actually I am convinced there are perfectly authenticated cases of most versatile psychic phenomena, for the very good reason that I have experienced them myself.”²

In the story, a family rents the “Lodge” as a good buy, useful for their needs as well as being a “magnificent specimen of the medium-sized Queen Anne house.” A neighbor, Sir William Powse, welcomes their courtesy visit but is rather circumspect about the house, urging them, with some emphasis on his words, to see him if they find it necessary. Strange and all too quickly terrifying events occur, although rarely of particularly overt supernatural nature: slime mold patches appear on the rugs without reasonable cause; a sensation of being watched is felt; the hint of a face is seen; a sound is heard—not stereotyped chains, but rather a light cough from a space behind the father, while he is reading, where he knows no one is. The images become stronger, invading dreams as well as reality.

Soon the spots of slime have become pools of the stuff, and the unseen antagonists are becoming more frightening. One evening the father feels himself being willed to look, in the dark of night, through the blinds, when “I knew … that if I did so, we were doomed.” What he might have seen is not indicated, but the sense of fear is potent.

Finally they speak to Sir William, who tells them some of the dreadful events associated with the lodge in the past, even cases of death where prior renters were discovered in obvious states of terror. It is not, however, his property, and he is powerless to stop its owner from renting it. All he knows of its past in terms of a preternatural cause is a tradition dating back several centuries—when its second owner had bribed his servants to frighten his wife to death. Whatever they did, one day before dawn she ran to the river and drowned herself. Her various female successors did likewise and at length so did the husband. Sir William urges them to leave. It is difficult, even now, to accept an explanation which borders so on the incredible, and, in any event, the father regrets the loss of his three-month rental deposit. If they have had any hesitation, however, it is dispelled in a final terrifying scene when, to get out of the feared house, they are attempting to enjoy some picnicking. The sky has grown gray. Rain commences; thunder sounds. As the father and his son, the latter just recovering from fear-induced illness, begin to run back to the door into the garden, the man trips. The boy runs on and then his father sees “something slip through the door. It was green, thin, tall. It seemed to glance back at me, and what should have been its face was a patch of soused slime.” Seeing it, the boy screams, and runs toward the river, the figure following him. It hovers over the boy, who flings himself into the brackish water. The father, “passing through a green and stenching film,” dives after him and pulls him out of the reeds. There is no hesitation any longer. They pack and leave. But, even “as I took hold of the knob I felt a quick and powerful pressure from the other side, and it shut with a crash. The Permanent Occupants of the Red Lodge were in sole possession once more.”

The economy of words and the lean, taut narration give the reader no pause, and the vagueness of the horrors allow the imagination to fill in such details as it wishes. The charm of subtlety, of suggestion and then revelation is a technique no less terrifying ultimately than that of a King, Barker or a Herbert, but the telling of it is restrained. It is less a tale of horror and repulsion, so characteristic of these later masters, than of fear and terror. H. P. Lovecraft, sensing this, wrote of Wakefield's first two collections that he “manages now and then to achieve great heights of horror despite a vitiating air of sophistication.”³

Wakefield, however, describes his efforts and style succinctly, if good-naturedly: “Have a glance inside this book at your leisure, and then defy my hardest efforts to bring upon you the odd, insinuating little sensation that a number of small creatures are simultaneously camping on your scalp and sprinkling ice-water down your back-bone.”⁴

In comparison with such a classic and contemporary master as M. R. James, Wakefield is as urbane but less light-hearted, more detached, although more likely to have lethal effects than James. Thus, in such works as “The Mezzotint,” “Casting the Runes,” and “Oh Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad,” James' interest is in the ghostly effect (which may indeed, be less than pleasant) rather than the fate of the observer or victim. Of James, Wakefield writes that he “was the last of the great ones; he closed an epoch.” However, James, reviewing one of Wakefield's collections, suggested that “the author of ghost stories need not be a very violent believer himself.” Wakefield denies this, and comments that James, before writing “Oh, Whistle,” was “also casting a furtive inner eye at spectral heaped bed-clothes forming into fearful shapes. No doubt he soon laughed the image away, but he must have known it for a time.” He concludes that “before you can scare others, you must be scared yourself.”⁵

“The Red Lodge” appears in Wakefield's first book, They Return at Evening: A Book of Ghost Stories, published in 1928, perhaps his best collection and certainly his most definitive of the classic British ghost story.

“He Cometh and He Passeth By” surely fulfulls this description. It is forthright, firm narrative, and a good example of the basic difference in approach between Wakefield and the older, genially antiquarian-minded James. While it owes some debt to James' “Casting the Runes,” it is entirely effective in its own right. It takes the existence of Evil as a given possibility, that an individual may quite simply be evil and utilize a knowledge of Evil and Black Magic. Clichés about Far Eastern mysteries do not negate the powerful image of an Aleister Crowley-like villain, one Oscar Clinton. He has caused the death of a friend of the narrator, Bellamy. The six words which are the title of the story, scribbled on a piece of paper and recited while held against one's forehead, bring forth an unseen monstrous presence which is the mechanism of the death. In the end, it will rebound against the murderer himself.

The final paragraph is characteristic of Wakefield's style and his strength, creating a potent, lasting image while offering little in concrete description: “As Bellamy moved towards the door the lights went dim, in from the window poured a burning wind, and then from the wall in the corner a shadow began to grow. When he saw it, swift icy ripples poured through him. It grew and grew, and began to lean down towards the figure on the floor. As Bellamy took a last look back it was just touching it. He shuddered, opened the door, closed it quickly, and ran down the stairs and out into the night.”

There is, for the fancier of spectral tales, a delectable taste about his understated writing. It is as though the reader was with Bellamy, was Bellamy, and has undergone his experience and his bitter triumph. And bitter it is, since the author writes elsewhere: “I firmly believe all such psychic intrusions possess negative survival value and should in no way be encouraged.”

Wakefield, in common with most British writers of his era, certainly with James, can enjoy ironic humor, even in a ghostly tale. “Professor Pownall's Oversight” is an amusing example, and a superb little tale. The professor of the title has achieved some position in life, but, for no good reason, he seems doomed always to be second to Hubert Morrison. Pownall's abiding love is chess, and it is here at least that he hopes to overcome his gnawing inferiority. He and Morrison enter the British Championship match and Morrison stays with him. The match, with the two against each other in the last round, is progressing well for Pownall, until he sees Morrison's smile of superiority. Pownall's game begins to slip, and before it is adjourned he knows he is deeply in trouble. Only a miracle can save him. That miracle must be Morrison's death.

At his rooms, he drugs and then exposes the unconscious Morrison to gas, killing him, without causing suspicion. He is given the championship medal by default. As winner he is invited to a major tournament in Budapest. At the match, he is playing brilliantly, in sight of victory in his first match, until he sees Morrison enter and invisibly guide his opponent's hand, after which he smiles at Pownall. The match goes on, dazzlingly, relentlessly, an event to be recorded and remembered in chess annals, but Pownall is doomed. Game after game the charade is repeated. He demonstrates his brilliance, and yet is always defeated, with the smiling Morrison standing behind and subtly leading his opponents.

He returns to London, but even in his private chess club, the smiling Morrison enters. Pownall knows suicide is the only answer. He leaves behind a complete record of the events, describing every chess move of those games. Then, writing the last words even as the still smiling Morrison enters his room, his final sentence is left incomplete.

The papers eventually reach a chess player, who discovers that no record of the professor's ever playing at the British match exists. Nor was there even a match at Budapest that year! However, studying the moves, he is astonished at their brilliance. He memorizes them. Later, in a competition, he begins using the sensational moves. A stranger enters and stands behind his opponent. When his opponent moves, he seems strained and puzzled. And in turn, when he reaches to move, the hand that makes the move is not his own. He suggests the game be called a draw, which is immediately accepted, and retires to his room, where he burns the papers with all their brilliant plays. Two shadows from the corner appear to grow vast and fill the room, but the papers suddenly blaze and they are gone. And with them, happily, his memory of their plays.

It is a little tale, but a tour de force which, while amusing the reader, offers as well that “odd, insinuating little sensation.” The characterizations within its dozen pages are perfect to its purposes, and each word counts. Surely a chess devotee might well be envious of the opportunity the player was given, but might equally well agree with his ultimate decision.

If chess was the sport of “Professor Pownall's Oversight,” golf is the subject, obviously, of “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster.” Again, there is an ironic humor which underlies the developing horror of this tale of the links, perhaps because Wakefield was himself a true golfing enthusiast and enjoyed his private joke at his fellow-players' expense. The 17th hole is a newly created one, hacked through an ancient grove of trees, on a small mound that was once a place sacred to the Druids. Several people will die most awfully there, their deaths predicted mockingly in dreams to the club secretary.

Wakefield would continue to write ghost stories for nearly forty more years, and as might be expected, there would be stylistic changes in that time. They were not evident as yet, however, in his next book, published in England a year later as Old Man's Beard: Fifteen Disturbing Tales. The title was changed in the American edition to Others Who Returned, which, like the title of the first book, referred directly to the nature of the contents and provided a properly eerie ambience.

The narrative style is as crisp, the spines of the plots as straight and uncomplicated, and the chills as cold. In “Look Up There” Mr. Packard, who is vacationing to give his jangled nerves a rest, is annoyed by a little man who, at all times, even during dinner, seems to be staring upward at a 35-degree angle. His constant companion, a tacitum “yokel,” ignores his friend's mannerism. One day, outdoors, the man tells Packard his chilling tale of a manor famed as much for its ballroom and picture gallery, as for being haunted only on New Year's Eve. On such a dire occasion, as an occultist, he had come to observe a party held by new tenants. It had become feverish, even hysterical, and the little man, sensing a growing pressure, had run off to his bedroom. At midnight came a mighty tolling of the clock. Suddenly it ceased, and then he heard a woman's piercing scream: “Look up there!” … upon which every light in the house had gone out.

With a flashlight in hand, he had nervously gone down. There sat the entire company, rigid, mouths flecked with foam, and eyes wide open, focused on the door into the Long Gallery. “And then I flashed my torch up toward the door into the Long Gallery, and there—and there—”

A dazzling flash of lightning and a crash of thunder interrupt his story. He hurls his arms up, and begins screaming “Look up there! Look up there!” Mr. Packard moves to him, but the yokel is suddenly alert, grasping the little man. “Leave him to me,” he shouts, “I know what to do” and pushes him back toward the hotel, their progress punctuated by shouts from the little man of “Look up there!” And what was it that the little man had seen, that fateful New Year's Eve, through the door into the Long Gallery? Wakefield does not say.

The reader may be reminded of Michael Arlen's classic horror story “The Gentleman from America,” in which a man's madness is only perceived at the end. The significant difference is that whereas the American has accepted as his own a story which did not actually involve him, the little man's tale of the horror beyond the Gallery door may have been true. The beauty inherent in a tale which achieves its aim by suggestion is its tantalizing incompleteness, ever beguiling and bedeviling. This would not work in a tale of many twistings, but in the direct stories the author was writing at this time, it is always feasible.

Very direct, in this volume, is “Blind Man's Buff,” a terrifying nightmare in which Wakefield uses tellingly that most basic of fears—fear of the dark. A man who is considering purchase of a vacant, centuries-old manor reaches it rather late in the day; still, he must have a look. Within, he feels in the dark for the lightswitch; he cannot find it. Nor can he find matches in his pocket. Deciding he must have left them in his car, he goes back to the door.

In the darkness, he cannot find the door. He feels for it along the wall, but simply cannot find it. His efforts remain unavailing, and to give himself pause from this impossible mystery, he tries to sit and rest for a moment. Something, however, seems to brush against him. His fears mount. He just cannot find the door! The author thus tops our fears of the dark by a coup de grace—the sense of claustrophobia: “And then he ran screaming round the room; and suddenly his screams slashed back at him, for he was in a little narrow passage.”

Despite his busy profession at this time, in the later 1920s, as a publisher, Wakefield became an increasingly prolific writer, with non-fantastic books as well. Two such, Gallimaufry and Happy Ever After, appeared in 1928 and 1929 respectively. His next collection of short stories, Imagine a Man in a Box was published in 1931. The somewhat playful title would indicate a broadening approach, with less dependence on the classic ghostly tale format. They amble a bit more than the earlier stories, although some tend to return to earlier gambits of supernatural fiction, such as the dead seeking vengeance. Such shades, perceived only very dimly in previous stories, are rather more distinct here, particularly in an ironic story such as “Damp Sheets.”

Dear, wealthy, and now dead Uncle Samuel actually makes such a reappearance, briefly, and adequately. His wastrel nephew's wife had managed to hasten Uncle Samuel's demise by placing damp sheets and a leaking water bottle in his bed while he was visiting in their home. One day when she goes to her linen closet, he returns the favor. She is discovered there later, suffocated by the sheets, which are unaccountably quite damp.

Despite the sardonic charm of the telling, it is fairly routine vengeance-of-the-dead stuff, lacking the delicately drawn horror, and none of the engenderend fear, of the earlier works. Such stories would be imitated to distraction by his admirer and American publisher, August Derleth, and a host of others, although John Collier would have delightfully rich and malicious fun with the get-rid-of-the-rich-uncle theme in “Another American Tragedy.”

Wakefield had been a captain of infantry in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, 1914-1918, and had served both in France and in Macedonia. He reached the rank of captain. Memories of the Great War are recollected in another traditional type of supernatural tale—the clairvoyant or extrasensory. “Day-Dream in Macedon” is a slight tale, and perhaps a transmuted memory as well for the author. War fantasies were not uncommon. Arthur Machen's “The Bowmen” resonated in war-time Britain, and in America, A. Merritt's “Three Lines of Old French,” while by no means more than a mere story in a popular magazine, reflected the same feelings—the need for hope in a trying period.

Lieutenant Eastleigh is stationed on the western front in France. He is very close to his superior, Captain Tennie, but because of his knowledge of Balkan languages is transferred to Salonika. Tennie writes now and then, always annoyed he has not gotten into action. Several years later Eastleigh is relaxing on leave at the River Struma in Macedonia. He has a sudden vision of “the Lys, near Croix-du-bac” and a terrible battle. Soldiers are attempting to cross a stone bridge. He recognizes one—Tennie. “He tried to shout to him, but he was in a region closed to sound. Yet Tennie saw him, waved to him, and smiled. Then something lashed down on him—he flamed like a torch” and Eastleigh finds himself staring at a golden oriole in a tree, and his eyes filled with tears.

After the war he dines in London with an old company mate, Spears, who describes last Tennie's battle. Nearly the entire company had been killed, but Tennie, leading, had just disappeared. “He took a direct hit just short of the bridge,” Eastleigh murmurs “dreamily” and Spears puts down his knife and fork and stares at him.

The Green Bicycle Case, a book on criminology, appeared in 1932. That same year Ghost Stories was published, containing several new stories, but consisting primarily of stories already published. One, “Used Car,” a spoof of the ghost story, even uses a Roaring Twenties Chicago gangster milieu. It is quite a distance from the traditional oak-paneled British manor house, for in this instance the car is the haunted house! The new owner of the car is fortunate to escape alive with his family, particularly when he learns that Blonde Beulah Kratz, a “well-known moll” (in Chicago) and her boyfriend, “a thirty-minute egg who tried to doublecross the rest of the gang” had been “taken for a trip” in it. Their intangible presence has remained. The story, several light years from “He Cometh and He Passeth By” nevertheless is amusing and by any odds the most unusual “haunted house” in the literature.

A mystery novel, Hearken to the Evidence, was published in 1934, followed the next year by A Ghostly Company. Again almost all stories that had appeared before. Several were new; like the few new stories in Ghost Stories, they were hardly unique or up to Wakefield's earlier level. “Death of a Poacher” is one. It is a grouping of every imaginable cliché about “the dark continent,” with a protagonist who makes the unfortunate error of angering a witch-doctor. Later, back in England, he will pay the full and grim price.

Four years elapsed before the publication of another book of Wakefield supernatural stories, most of those collected this time new to hardcovers. The Clock Strikes Twelve was published in England in 1940 and its American edition, the first Wakefield collection to appear here in fifteen years, came off press in 1946. It was to be the first of two Arkham House collections of Wakefield stories. Furthermore, when August Derleth published it in 1946, four stories not appearing in the earlier British edition were added. (They had appeared in the several British collections prior to that.) It contained an introduction, “Why I Write Ghost Stories,” as urbane and polished as the best of his fiction. Here he explains his experience with psychic phenomena and his personal belief in them. Derleth's admiration for Wakefield is evident, inasmuch as this was one of the earliest Arkham House imprints to feature short fiction by an author not of the Weird Tales magazine group.⁶ In his personal life, Wakefield had by the late thirties become a full-time writer. In 1936 Wakefield was divorced by his first wife, Barbara Standish Waldo, an American woman he had married in 1920. In 1946 he married Jessica Sidney Davey, but had no children from either marriage.

Wakefield offers an amusing aside on the writing profession in “Not Quite Cricket,” a story that appears in this volume. The major character is a writer, and in describing his writing technique, Wakefield, no doubt with tongue firmly in cheek, possibly describes himself: “When (Mr. Winter) got a story just right, everyone concerned knew there was very little for him to do about it. In fact, there were just three letters to write about it: one to his agent enclosing the story, another to his agent accepting the offered terms, and one to his bank enclosing the cheque. For Mr. Winter had a system. Sometimes he would write a story that completely satisfied him, sometimes one that he felt a shade uncertain about. He put those of the second sort straightway into the waste-paper basket. A simple system, but editors had so much reason to appreciate and trust it that they would write out a cheque even before reading the tale. And it is persons whom editors treat like that—about 9٪ of those writing tales—who make a good living out of the game. And Mr. Winter made £2000 a year at the game, which shows the great value of a system, if editors take any notice of it.”

During World War II Wakefield served in London with the Home Forces; for the BBC he wrote plays and gave occasional talks. He had the misfortune of losing his home dring a Nazi airraid near the end of the war. He did not stop writing, but, unlike the successful Mr. Winter, he had no further novels or collections, aside from the two Arkham House books.

The Clock Strikes Twelve is a conscious, and often successful, effort to return to the style of his earlier ghost stories. Its opening tale, “Into Outer Darkness,” has, again, a haunted manor. It has its legend as well, of a man who had been walled up alive during the English Civil Wars. The new owner invites a clairvoyant friend to test it. The tale is brief, its horror being thereby attentuated, but the few paragraphs describing a candle-lit table of vaguely sensed judges, is effective, as is the all too sensitive friend's subsequent panic and suffocation. It is lean yet satisfactory Wakefield.

“The Alley” is a haunted house tale, economically, brilliantly told. The ancient house has a tragic past: in a small loft room called “the Alley” a farmer had, ages ago, tortured and driven mad his wife and daughter. In turn he was seized by the villagers and burned on a stake erected in the yard. A new owner and his friends find what must be the fateful “Alley,” well-bolted, off a staircase. It is merely a passageway, six by twelve feet, with a single sealed window and a bench. Below the window they can see a small grassless patch. With unabated skill, Wakefield develops and fear and foreboding. There will be no spectral forms; the horror that comes upon two of them is the force of a terrible, undying past.

Sport, a favorite preoccupation of the writer, enlivens “Not Quite Cricket,” a double entendre in the context of the story, and yet another tale of vengeance from the dead. It is weighty in the game's terminology, mystifying to a non-devotee, but an integral background to a supernatural tale told by an old codger sponging drinks from an amused writer of ghost stories. If the story is hardly classic, the laugh is at the end, when the writer admits to the bartender that the old man had told him a story he himself had written twenty years before. It is a raconteur's tale, and the ghostly interlude is an undistinguished part of the mechanism.

An interesting comparison with his earlier style is “Lucky's Grove,” a pagan mysteries tale, as was “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster.” Here a tree is taken from a “sacred” grove for a Christmas Day party in the newly acquired mansion of a nouveau riche. Unfortunate and unaccountable accidents occur, in an atmosphere of growing horror, soon to become terrifying and fatal. In its own right, the story is quite effective. Yet it was the direct, understated telling of “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” that made it so memorable. It is burdened here with trite snobbery⁷ and familiarity of theme. The ending itself is a final revenge by Loki (mentioned in a sub-title legend, and the real namesake of the grove) and the author alike on people neither of them likes.

It is noteworthy that in the various stories that Wakefield has written in which ghosts of ancient gods were disturbed, the victim had not wilfully sought to disturb or damage sacred places. It is chance, ignorance, or accident that brings doom. Wakefield, as quoted above, believes that ghosts are malignant, or, at least, that their effects upon human intruders will be, and therefore are best left alone.

In no other story is this better illustrated than in “Jay Walkers,” a wry tale from this volume. In this instance, the ghosts of a young woman and her lover are walking on a country road. She expects to be his wife; he will be her murderer. The anniversary of the deed brings the pair back and, regrettably, motorists passing by at a particular hour, seeing the young people in their path, veer sharply, invariably into fateful accidents.

With the drably titled “Ingredient X,” Wakefield leaves the classic vein of understated, vague spectral beings and moves into outright horror, explicit and shocking, and one of his most spine-chilling stories. In a triumph of guignol, the author drenches the story in blood: a blood-soaked body of a dog; a terrifying eyeless figure with blood gushing from its throat; and a hero who wakes in his bed thinking with gratitude that he must have been having a nightmare until, in the darkness, as he reaches for matches next to his bed, his hand touches something “swilling up over his wrist.” He smells a terrible stench, which he has previously smelled without having been able to identify it, but now he knows it for blood. Next morning he leaves. Some time later, the young man, more satisfactorily quartered, will think back, and the author will have one final triumph of fright.

Arkham House had promised a new collection of Wakefield's work “for early publication” on the dust jacket biography of the writer. In fact, it was not until 1961 that his final collection, Strayers from Sheol, appeared. In England his work had become neglected. Such stories of his that were published were appearing in the late 1940s in the short-lived Arkham House magazine The Arkham Sampler, as well as Weird Tales, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Fantastic Universe. For his final book, these stories were collected, and several others not previously printed in America were added. Most of the stories had been written prior to 1953. By 1961, Wakefield was ill. Although he still did occasional writing, he would die four years later of cancer. His introduction to the collection, “Farewell to All Those!” commences: “I've written my last ghost story.” And having written more than one hundred of them, he feels he knows what he is talking about when he adds “I believe ghost story writing to be a dying art. It's possible another Montague Rhodes James may appear some day, but I profoundly doubt it … he closed an epoch.” Concerning psychic matters, he says “Science has ursurped their function, and, I suppose, made a mockery of it.”

This final volume is uneven. It cannot pretend to have the fresh yet classic qualities of his first book, with its subtle horror, but several of the stories are splendid in their own manner. The older writer here is perhaps, as he has stated, more skeptical, too far removed from the ghosts he once had known. The more direct ghost stories fall back on mechanics of the genre. In particular, there is a preponderance of revenge-of-the-dead stories. While they represent an ingenious group of variations on that theme, they also move in the path of Wakefield's late-found graphic physical violence. The appetite of the dead for retribution has become voracious. Several tales, however, represent a new departure, stories only tenuously supernatural, possibly psychological, in the manner of Henry James' “The Turn of the Screw.”

“The Third Shadow” is such a vengeance story in a rather unusual setting—mountain climbing. The climber who deliberately caused the death of his inexperienced wife in an apparent climbing accident, is eventually himself killed while climbing with a friend. Some onlookers say a third shadow was seen along the rope with the two men. “The Middle Drawer” features a parsimonious man who has been exonerated in the sudden death of wife. Her ghost disturbs him as well as his new romance, and a drawer in a bureau has a queer habit of “shooting open” quite by itself. Within it is the cyanide he has not brought himself to throw away. Another is “Woe Water,” this time with a pair of successive ghosts, each of whom would seem to have been the victim of the diarist telling the story. Although he protests his innocence throughout, he is hanged for the murder of the second. Did their restless spirits bring him the doom he deserved, or was his diary honest, and Fate the cheat? Yet again, the unseen ghost in “Four-Eyes” gains vengeance against his poisoning wife via a pair of apparently ordinary spectacles. Her new husband finds them in a desk and they are a fine fit. When, however, he has worn them long enough, he begins to relive her late husband's last hours. She understands at once, grabs the glasses away, and goes out to dispose of them. He hears her scream and runs out. She is dead, her eyeless face bloody and splintered with glass shards.

Leaving the seemingly ubiquitous vengeful ghosts for a more characteristically ghostly tale, “Ghost Hunt” has the gimmick of being a live radio broadcast. It thus has immediacy and eventually a very personal shock value. It could well be performed as a radio drama, and although it first appeared in print in Weird Tales March 1948, perhaps Wakefield had intended it for one of his B.B.C. plays. A notorious haunted house is visited by a radio program, graphically described by the announcer and a professor recognized for his investigations of psychic phenomena. Although the devotee of the genre knows each will come to a bad end, the story is well told. The announcer will discover blood as well as the body of the professor, reciting his progress in a mad singsong to his radio listeners.

One may compare the story to the classic Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Stetson) short story “The Yellow Wall Paper.” Here the heroine and narrator goes mad within her room, and, in the final moment of shattering horror, creeping around it in endless circles, bemoans her husband's having fainted right within her path. Wakefield's announcer discovers the professor's body when he too is already mad, and is as blithe about it. Were there ghosts, and were there any in the swirling patterns of the wallpaper? We are not told.

“A Kink in Space-Time” is an unusual ghost story inasmuch as the unfortunate protagonist meets the ghost of himself after his death-to-come. Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft in their short stories “William Wilson” and “The Outsider,” and James Gould Cozzens in his remarkable novel, Castaway, offer variations of the theme, accomplished with more verve. Wakefield's man is a disturbed individual, and it is possible that it was all a fiction of his mind.

“The Gorge of the Churels,” certainly one of the book's—and Wakefield's—finest stories, had appeared on August Derleth's recommendation a decade earlier in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1951. There Anthony Bucher wrote of Wakefield that he “stood in somewhat the same relation to the old master M. R. James as James to the still Older Master Sheridan Le Fanu” and the story is “as subtle and complex as anything he's done.” It is an ironic and sensitive account of an outing of a British family and their manservant, an Indian, bringing to memory the cavern sequence of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India. Here at a gorge, the ghosts, or “Churels,” of women who die in childbirth “continue to haunt the earth, with a view to seizing the soul of some living child and carrying it off to the void to comfort them.” The British couple laugh at the notion and walk off, bearing with them the insufferable arrogance of the conqueror. Behind them the little Indian watches their child play and rankles with inferiority. “He would like to see these people punished for their vanity and stupidity.” And the worst punishment would be the loss of their child. Then he senses the presence of someone, something.

The moment calls forth the author's finest sensitivities and the result is haunting. “Just to the left of the basin was a circular grove of mulberry trees, and at the centre of this circle was something that had no business to be there, at least so it seemed to Mr. Sen. The sun's rays coiling between the leaves dappled and, as it were, camouflaged this intruder, so that it appeared just a thing of light and shade; like every other visible entity in the world, of course, yet somehow this was essentially incorporeal, not linked to earth, but painted thinly on the freckled air.

Sen watches, as child and apparition near one another, and he is “aware of a horrid tension in the air, like the swelling potential before the lightning stroke.” But, as the child sees something there and innocently runs towards it, Sen cannot allow it, and leaps up shouting incantations. “Little Nikky paused, glanced round and fell on his face, and the thing of light and shade seemed to lose its form and pass into the stippled air.” Hearing the noise the parents run in and are reassured. Sen says he shouted at a bad dream. Mr. Prinkle mocks him, asking whether he dreamed of “those bereft and acquisitive Churels.” Sen in turn laughs. “It is not fair of you, Mr. Prinkle, to pull my legs so, and remind me of the ridiculous superstitions of us poor ignorant, primitive Indians!”

In yet another variation on the ghost story, Wakefield utilizes the form as a means of characterization; such is the case with “Monstrous Regiment.” It is a harrowing if uneven tale of a man with a dying wife, who brings in an eighteen-year-old girl as governess for his seven-year-old son. She quickly becomes mistress to the man but her real interest, and it is pointedly erotic, is the boy, a “quite perfect little man” to her. The mother soon dies, hating the girl, who now establishes her dominance in the household. She carefully rears the boy so that he will one day gratify her insatiable sexual appetite. When he is thirteen, she sees to it. Her demands weaken him and he hates her even while he knows she is all he can ever want. Well into the tale, his mother appears to him, urging him to kill the girl. He does it by causing an elecrical apparatus to fall into her bath. He is overwhelmed, however, by a sense of loss, and collapses. When he awakes he is institutionalized, too young to be charged with murder. Here he writes this memoir, abuses his attendants, and then abruptly dies, still a young man, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

The appearance in the story of his mother's ghost comes almost gratuitously. Was it real to him, or was it the product of his needs, to blame her for his love/hatred of the girl, who filled and abused his life until nothing more could be made of it? Bleiler⁸ compares this type of story to Robert Aickman's “strange stories,” fantasies frequently filled with symbolism and enigmatic, unanswerable questions. One may compare “Monstrous Regiment” to “The Swords,” in which a young and sexually inexperienced young man attends a carnival sideshow and watches men plunging swords into a bored young woman, one after the other, somehow causing no harm. When his turn comes, he slips out. The girl comes to his rooms, however He fumbles for sexual union, while she is more or less supine, and suddenly her arm comes off in his hand. She gets up now, sobbing, dresses, grabs at him, for the arm apparently, and leaves.

The story offers no answers, only puzzles. It exists in its inexplicable state, its metaphors reaching into the reader's deeper mind for explanations. Wakefield does not attempt this with such explicit fantasy as Aickman, although he seems to be on the verge of such strange and outrageous symbols as Aickman's. It is also beyond the Henry James psychological query as to whether it is fantasy or truth, because it does not matter here. Only the characters matter, not the supernatural element. The story is unpleasant, but there is strength in its direct, graphic narration. It is a far cry from his simpler ghost stories. This tendency is continued in “Immortal Bird,” which, an apparent revenge of the dead story, tells of an ambitious man who has a buried and possibly justified sense of guilt. He may have caused the death of an aging professor who had refused to resign his chair to him. The many birds that inhabit the old man's garden had loved him and are an obvious and implacable symbol of his successor's guilt; in trying to destroy them he must destroy himself.

The texture of this later work is more dark and complex than those early and direct tales. Always a splendid technician of words, Wakefield remained as capable of producing an uncomfortable sensation of chilliness along the spine decades after he began this daunting task. Unfortunately, although Arkham House promised a third Wakefield collection, it was not forthcoming. There would not be many tales after Strayers from Sheol. During his final years those few were published by August Derleth in anthologies of new fiction. In 1962, “The Animals in the Case” appeared in Dark Mind, Dark Heart, and in 1964 “The Last Meeting of Two Old Friends” in Over the Edge, each among his finest in his later style. In the former, a domineering one-eyed goose is a symbol to a man of his late and beloved mother, who had killed both her lover and herself. The latter, delightfully ironic in tone, yet superbly atmospheric, finds new breath in that old chestnut of a locale, a cemetery. There are only hints of a ghost, never defined, and there are warnings to the hero by a gravedigger Hamlet would have appreciated. The climax arrives swiftly and horrifying and would appear to be less involved with the supernatural than with a bitterly jealous rival for his wife's love. Yet it is both.

Derleth would print two additional Wakefield tales posthumously, the second one, “Appointment With Fire,” in Dark Things, 1971, a trivial but comic and satiric affair in the gangster style of “Used Car.” The other, actually Wakefield's last story, found among his effects after he had destroyed most of this papers, was “Death of a Bumblebee,” which appeared in Travellers By Night in 1967. It is a fitting climax to a career marked by consistently fine and durable writing, by a writer Derleth invariably referred to as “the dean of ghost story writers.” The writing is at his most sophisticated level, erotically charged, more like his novels and plays than his ghost stories, but the driving element is among his most strange. The female protagonist is convinced, against all logic, that an unexploded World War II bomb lies directly beneath her home and will explode soon. Neither her husband nor their self-effacing friend who also loves her, nor her medical advisor, also attracted to her, can dissuade her. The bomb is the symbol of her digression into adultery, even of sexuality itself, her fear and her guilt. At the end, there is a shattering explosion and all perish. A bumblebee which has fluttered through the pages of the story is hurled from “the savoury depth of a Gloire de Dijon rose where it had been drowsily feasting.” It manages to fly up but a bird catches it. “Too harsh for its taste, the little bird spat out the dying bumblebee.” Consciously or otherwise, there is something of an epitaph here, for a writer who spent his last years for the most part ignored. H. Russell Wakefield died August 2, 1965.

In his preface to Strayers from Sheol, having been despondent about the possibilities of another M. R. James appearing one day, Wakefield decides his momentary defeatism should not, after all, prevent some new writer from snatching the “sinister torch” from his hand. His memories become warm, as he recalls a beloved M. R. James classic: “But look! Look! Those bedclothes forming into a horrid crouching shape!” and his own first and probably still dearest story: “Remember too those who galloped like crazed beasts from the Red House to their doom in the reeds! No, don't be too sure that none of the old magic endures!”

Notes

1. Quoted on the dust jacket of Strayers from Sheol, from the London Daily Telegraph, no date given.

2. Introduction, The Clock Strikes Twelve, Arkham House edition, pg. vii.

3. From H. P. Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature, reprinted in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, Arkham House Publishers Inc., Corrected Fifth Printing, 1986, pgs. 416-17.

4. Introduction, The Clock Strikes Twelve, pg. xi.

5. The Clock Strikes Twelve was the twentieth book published by Arkham House. August Derleth's immediate intention with the house was to publish Lovecraft's works, and from this he began to publish one-author collections of stories that had been published in and characterized the magazine Weird Tales. Prior to the first Wakefield collection, the only non-Weird Tales writers to be published by Arkham House in such short story books were J. S. LeFanu's Green Tea and Other Ghost Stories (#12), Algernon Blackwood's The Doll and One Other (#15) and A. E. Coppard's Fearful Pleasures (#19). Strayers from Sheol, the second Wakefield book, would be Arham House's 60th book. A third collection, promised several times in Arkham House anthologies, did not materialize.

6. Wakefield, who attended Oxford University, has a special disdain for the nouveau riche, who have made money and are ostentatious about its use. It is a viewpoint frequently found in British literature, where these individuals are usually the butt of humor or barometers of social change. Wakefield employes them in his fortunate ability of being able to write supernatural humor. Less happy evidence of his class and racial attitudes is found on several other occasions. In “Used Car,” Mr. Canning is waited upon by “a sprightly young Semite,” which is a perhaps unnecessary qualification, but harmless. In the posthumously published “Appointment With Fire,” however, the hapless gangster-protagonist Nathaniel Marks is cursed to his face as “a dirty kike” by an enemy. This is, of course, the character's prerogative. Unfortunately, the author later inserts without the benefit of conversation his own observation that “Mr. Bilker gazed down on the great gross Jew-boy.” Perhaps the author allowed himself the liberties inasmuch as both stories are satiric and really quite comic. The far superior “The Last Meeting of Two Old Friends” has brief mention of its cemetery laborers as “niggers, Polacks, and Pats.”

7. “Sheol” is the “Hebrew name for the abode of the dead or departed spirits,” Random House Dictionary of the English Language, New York: Random House, 1967.

8. Everett F. Bleiler writes, concerning Wakefield's later stories, in The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (and is referred to in this respect by Jack Sullivan in his account of Wakefield in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural) that they are “progressing from the simple Georgian story with a clear unitary theme to the modern more complex, partially symbolic story now best written by Robert Aickman.” (Pg. 510)

References

The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Bleiler, Everett F., Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1983.

The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, Sullivan, Jack, editor, New York: Viking, 1986.

The above books are indispensable as well as fascinating for the student of the genre. Bleiler offers specific notes about nearly every story by the numerous authors who constitute this genre, as well as a few key observations on the authors themselves. Sullivan offers a wide overview of the field, with brief essays on the lives and works of the authors, as well as films, plays, and other media forms pertinent to the field.

Contemporary Authors, Metzger, Linda, editor, Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1987. A multi-volume project and, in a world whose other author biography books do not find space for a great weirdiste, Ms. Metzer and staff offer nearly a full column, concise, compete and pertinent, and the source for the data presented here on the author's non-fantastic writings. It is further pointed out that “Hearken to the Evidence was made into a film of the same name; ten stories were adapted for radio and television in the United States, Europe, and Canada. His books have been translated into Dutch, French, Swedish.”

The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield, selected and introduced by Richard Dalby, Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1982. This book is important for the student of Wakefield for several reasons: it is a superb selection, from each of his periods; it has a splendid introduction, the primary source for the biographical information presented in this paper; and, it is the only Wakefield book in print.

I would also like to thank James Turner, the able successor to August Derleth as Editor of Arkham House publications, for permission to quote portions of Wakefield's writings from their two collections.