Collected Ghost Stories (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

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The Ghost Stories of M. R. James. 1986. Selection by Michael Cox, including an excellent introduction with numerous photographs.

Clark directed another story by M. R. James, Casting The Runes for the series ITV Playhouse, produced by Yorkshire Television and first broadcast on ITV on 24 April 1979. Adapted by Clive Exton, it reimagined the events of James's story taking place in a contemporary television studio. [22] As is often the case with master storytellers, James began composing his ghost stories for a close circle of friends and colleagues at the University of Cambridge, where James worked as a medievalist scholar, as Provost of King’s College, and eventually, as Vice-Chancellor of the whole university. He would read them out every year on Christmas Eve, before they were eventually published in a number of collections.I admire and constantly reread James, Dunsany and Hearn....I wish I wrote things as well as James did.". Wellman interviewed in Jeffrey M. Elliot, Fantasy Voices: Interviews with American Fantasy Writers. Borgo Press, San Bernardino. 1982 ISSN 0271-7808

James held strongly traditional views about literature. In addition to ghost stories, he also enjoyed reading the work of William Shakespeare and the detective stories of Agatha Christie. [23] He disliked most contemporary literature, strongly criticising the work of Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey and James Joyce (whom he called "a charlatan" and "that prostitutor of life and language"). [3] [4] [23] He also supported the banning of Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel about lesbianism, The Well of Loneliness, stating, "I believe Miss Hall's book is about birth control or some kindred subject, isn't it? I find it difficult to believe either that it is a good novel or that its suppression causes any loss to literature." [23]H. Russell Wakefield's supernatural fiction was strongly influenced by the work of James. [33] A large number of British writers deliberately wrote ghost stories in the Jamesian style; these writers, sometimes described as the "James Gang", [32] include A. N. L. Munby, E. G. Swain, "Ingulphus" (pseudonym of Sir Arthur Gray, 1852–1940), Amyas Northcote [34] and R. H. Malden, although some commentators consider their stories to be inferior to those of James himself. [2] [35] Although most of the early Jamesian writers were male, there were several notable female writers of such fiction, including Eleanor Scott (pseudonym of Helen M. Leys, 1892–1965) in the stories of her book Randall's Round (1929) [36] and D. K. Broster in the collection Couching at the Door: Strange and Macabre Tales (1942). [36] L. T. C. Rolt also modelled his ghost stories on James's work, but, unlike other Jamesian writers, set them in industrial locations, such as mines and railways. [36] [37] In fact, although some of his stories were first published as “Ghost Stories of an Antiquary” and “More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary”, it could be argued that they are tales of terror rather than traditional ghost stories. James greatly admired the work of both Sheridan Le Fanu and Walter Scott, and along with the horror his stories contain a strong element of the weird, in its original sense of uncanny. The first five films are adaptations of stories from the four books by M. R. James, published between 1904 and 1925. [8] The ghost stories of James, an English mediaeval scholar and Provost of Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, were originally narrated as Christmas entertainments to friends and selected students. [8] [9] There Was a Man Dwelt by a Churchyard", in Snapdragon (Eton ephemeral magazine), 6 December 1924, pp.4–5