[In the following essay, Dziemianowicz reviews Wakefield's second collection of ghost stories, Old Man's Beard, noting specifically the author's use of humor as a narrative device.]

Old Man's Beard, H. Russell Wakefield's second collection of ghost stories, was first published in 1929. Its American edition was retitled Others Who Returned, no doubt to echo the title of his first collection, They Return at Evening, which had enjoyed modest success the year before. However, the reader who picked up the second volume on the strength of impressions made by the first would have noticed some fundamental differences between the two besides their contents. For one thing, the stories in Old Man's Beard are mostly shorter, where the shortest selections in They Return at Evening had run to 4,000 to 5,000 words, Wakefield's second collection was filled out with quite a few tales that ran to no more than half that length.

Very early in his career, then, Wakefield had begun experimenting with the traditional ghost story's slow and deliberate build-up of mood and atmosphere, and was challenging himself to pare his fiction down to its essentials yet still deliver the expected thrills and chills. (The ghost story writer in “The Red Hand”, who laments having only 4,000 words in which to develop the characters and plot of his story yet is secure that ‘his capacity for compression had always been pretty good’, might have been Wakefield's caricature of himself.) As readers of his later collections know, he did indeed develop a knack for the short-short ghost story, and remains one of its most talented exponents.

A more noticeable difference is the sense of humour that pervades many of the stories in Old Man's Beard, giving the lie to its subtitle ‘Fifteen Disturbing Tales’. Although Wakefield worked in the sober tradition of M. R. James (who gets an explicit mention here in “Nurse's Story” as a writer who gives readers ‘the creeps’), he was not above adding a dash of Wodehousian whimsy to his characters and their experiences in order to bring them to life. As a result, the stories in Old Man's Beard seem less stodgy than the work of James and his disciples, and certainly less predictable.

For the most part, Wakefield uses humour to initially disarm sensibilities, drawing the reader into the story through light-hearted commentary on his characters and their personalities, before giving the tale a sardonic twist. In the title story, for example, he treats a young suitor's habit of making tastelessly inappropriate remarks as though it were just one of the eccentricities of privilege that comes with the youth's recent inheritance. In fact, it proves a clue to a deep, dark aspect of the man's character that is ultimately disclosed through the nightmares that afflict his fiancée. “The Red Hand” begins as self-parody, with its portrait of a commercially-driven writer of ghost stories, but turns serious when the staunch scepticism on which the writer prides himself leads to the fatal misinterpretation of a source of inspiration. “Nurse's Tale” uses a mildly annoying ten-year-old boy with a fondness for ghost stories to introduce the grisly tale of a six-year-old victim of a terrible family curse.

Humour isn't simply a narrative device here. In a surprising number of stories, it's an end in itself. The slightest of these, “Written in Our Flesh”, is not really a supernatural story, but a tale of the trials and tribulations of the literary life. It concerns an underappreciated writer haunted by the image of a beast that is ‘furnished with tentacles and fins’ and is ravenous for books, even though it has no head—a symbol, the writer realises, of ‘the aspect of the reading public which obsesses the Unread’. Much more satisfactorily developed is “The Dune”, in which a typical Wakefield male—solitary and asexual—witnesses the ghost of a man who drowned himself over unrequited love. The twist to this story is that the protagonist finds the emotion that drove the man to his death more disturbing than the supernatural encounter. The one true comic masterpiece here, “A Jolly Surprise for Henri”, is a tale of ghostly revenge upon a philandering wife in which Wakefield turns the way he would usually handle this sort of scenario hilariously on its head. Wakefield has been accused of misogyny by many critics, owing to the relative absence of women in his stories and their less-than-flattering portrayal when they do appear, yet this tale, which features one of his most fully-developed female characters taking advantage of a succession of self-defeating lovers, supports the argument that Wakefield was critical of both sexes, as well as the society that reinforced their ill-treatment of one another.

Wakefield clearly had a talent for farce, but it would be wrong to give the impression that Old Man's Beard is a compilation of light ghost stories in the style of Thomas Smith. Horror enthusiasts who turn to Wakefield's fiction for its nasty surprises will get their fill of them in stories such as “A Coincidence at Hunton”. Using the same basic plot that he turns to comedy in “A Jolly Surprise for Henry”, Wakefield tells here of an engaged couple whose relationship turns to nightmare when the woman, who drowns in a swimming accident, begins exerting her domineering will from beyond her watery grave. With his usual skill, Wakefield piles on the menacing effects—wet footprints that appear on the steps to the man's home, a brackish smell in his room when he wakes up in the morning—to build a sense of inescapable doom for the hapless fiancé.

Most of the ghosts in these stories are conventional, in the sense that they manifest traits that recall aspects of the personalities they had in life. In the book's three best stories, though, Wakefield presents thoroughly numinous horrors and invites the reader to impress upon them his or her own worst imaginings. “The Cairn” tells of a man who is determined to climb a snowbound summit, even though he is warned by the locals that everyone shuns it when there is snow on the ground. We never see what it is that attacks him and his friend, but we are told that it is fright, rather than their physical injuries, that killed them. In “Look Up There!”, a man is prevented from completing his account of a supernatural encounter by the approach of a sudden violent thunderstorm that drives him hysterical—leaving the reader to deduce from the outline of the clouds just what the man saw. “Blind Man's Buff” is a concise (less than 2,000 words) masterpiece in which a man tries desperately to escape from a haunted house he has wandered into at night-time, but keeps bumping into something in the darkness that hinders him.

Not all the stories in Old Man's Beard succeed, even as interesting experiments. “Present at the End” is a disappointing, mawkish tale of animal rights whose strained moralising seems beneath a writer so adept as dishing out just deserts. Shorter tales like “The Last to Leave” and “Surprise Item” seem underdeveloped and fragmentary, as though they are plot germs for longer stories Wakefield hoped to write some day. Nevertheless, as Barbara Roden points out in her well-researched and insightful introduction, very few of the book's fifteen stories have been anthologised over the decades, including several stories that rank with Wakefield's best efforts. Ghost story lovers unfamiliar with the pleasures to be found in Old Man's Beard owe it to themselves to add this new edition to their libraries, if only to see whether it changes their opinions of the early H. Russell Wakefield.