[In the following essay, Stewart gives a negative opinion on the Wakefield tales collected in The Best Ghost Stories.]

The author of these weird tales (orthodox ghosts are rather scarce in them, but supernaturally occasioned fatalities abound) was born in 1888, the son of a future Bishop of Birmingham. Educated at Marlborough, where he distinguished himself in cricket and rugger, and University College, Oxford, where he played golf for the University, he became personal private secretary to Lord North cliffe in 1911, and later fought on the Western Front and in Macedonia. Thereafter he worked for a time as a publisher, and during the remainder of his life wrote studies in criminology, several detective novels, and a great many stories such as are here collected. The last batch of these to be brought together in this country was published in 1940 under the title The Clock Strikes Twelve. Publishers appear to have deserted him after that. His death in 1964, his present editor tells us, “was completely unnoticed by the British Press”. His mastery of his craft, however, has been saluted by various notabilities, including M. R. James long ago and Sir John Betjeman more recently.

Wakefield himself proposed a test for the merit of a ghost story. Does it, he asked, “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”? The writer must simply aim, in other words, at occasioning terror through the medium of cold print, and I think Wakefield must have achieved this often enough in the case of adequately susceptible persons. Others may have judged him too prone to delivering the icewater through a hose. Thus in “The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster” malign powers, offended that a putting-green has been constructed on a patch of ground where they have achieved obscure horrors in the past, see to it that the contractor's men die, that nobody can play the hole other than in an inordinate number of strokes, that the club secretary has a distressing dream in which he hears “a discordant chorus of vile and bestial laughter”, that a venturesome young man “screams once” before dying, while a not particularly venturesome girl overgoes this by producing “a desperate and prolonged scream” before dying too in what must have been a peculiarly horrible manner and to the accompaniment of the “terrible Death stench” which frequently hangs over the seventeenth green.

There is a great deal of this sort of thing in the stories—the governing idea of which is that of malignant forces intent upon destroying innocent persons drawn by chance or casual curiosity within their power. Sometimes they can be thwarted by an equally potent abracadabra exercised by a benevolent sage or scholar, but more commonly they get away with it. At the Red House mysterious deaths are now less frequent than in the eighteenth century; still, in the past forty years twenty people have taken their lives there and six children have been drowned accidentally. “The last case”—we are told by way of climax—“was Lord Passover's butler in 1924”.

Most of these horrid things happen in the upper reaches of society, and they involve a notable number of people absolutely at the top of their tree. Mr Solan in “He Cometh and He Passeth By” is “the greatest living Oriental Scholar” and Mr Clinton is “one of the most dangerous and intellectual men in the world”; the rival chess-players in “Professor Pownall's Oversight” are declared by an Oxford examiner to have been the most brilliant undergraduates in his time; Eastleigh in “Day-Dream in Macedon” is a linguistic genius who speaks twenty-five languages almost perfectly; we may even feel let down when we learn in “Death of a Bumble-Bee” of a lady who is no more than “one of the three greatest dramatic mezzos alive”.

If all this is a little crude and hyperbolical it is matched by Wakefield's style, which is coarse-grained in a manner oddly rubbing off on his characters, who in their clubs and country houses render an impression of being late-risen from the people. It is a style, nevertheless, cunningly adapted to its purpose, and it is undeniable that at his best Wakefield writes very effectively indeed. This is particularly true of his shorter stories, where there is less scope for the tasteless and ineffective pile-up of macabre effects. “Blind Man's Bluff” tells of a man who loses his head and dies of terror when accidentally locked into an empty and pitch dark house. “Day-Dream in Macedon” recounts a simple clairvoyant experience under conditions of warfare vividly and economically evoked. Reading these, and also “Look Up There” and “A Kink in Space-Time” (in which a man is convincingly haunted by his own ghost), we may feel that had Wakefield judiciously raised his sights at an appropriate point in his career the British press might have taken some notice of his death after all.