A while ago a friend of mine went on holiday for a few days in Suffolk. Knowing he's of a nervous disposition I carefully loaded an epub of M. R. James' <em>Ghost Stories of Antiquary</em> on his Sony ereader and suggested he read the wonderfully scary tale <em>Oh,</em> <em>Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad </em>while he was there<em>.</em> This deeply unsettling piece was set not far from Aldeburgh where he was staying, and a large part of its power rests upon James's ability to call up the soulless, bleak East Anglian coast.

When he came back he hadn't got to that story but he'd tried several others and loved them. Like most modern readers he'd never heard of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._R._James" target="_blank">M. R. James</a> (above). I was then given a very fine compliment -- 'The way he writes reminds me of you.'

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Thank you, sir, but really it should be the other way round. I've adored Montague Rhodes James since I was a kid. The atmosphere of his work has the vivid immediacy of the London Conan Doyle invented for Sherlock Holmes. But instead of fog and street lamps and hackney carriages James gives us a lost world of dusty academics, strange clerics and unremitting evil, the latter painted with little in the way of conventional horror.

At the foot of this post there's something by him you may find entertaining for a few idle minutes over the weekend. It's a fairly conventional tale, <em>Lost Hearts</em>, one that's decidedly reminiscent of Henry James's better known <em>The Turn of The Screw</em> which was published a few years before. The two men weren't related. Henry's story is decidedly the superior, more 'literary' and open to several interpretations<em>.</em> Montague Rhodes simply sets out to produce an entertaining chill and does it very well indeed.

The antiquary anthology is widely available for free on the Internet; I recommend it highly. I choose <em>Lost Hearts</em> here because it addresses some of the issues I've tried to discuss this week. The piece uses the third person omniscient narrative approach now deemed unfashionable; we have a detached narrator, one assumes James himself, telling the story. Various verbs are used to introduce dialogue -- say, sigh, ask, even 'broke forth' and not one of them causes the slightest hiccup in the telling of the tale. And yes, there are adverbs, some of which qualify a dialogue verb. Even -- cue screechy violins -- the use of the adverb 'suddenly'.

So in terms of some current modern rules of fiction this shouldn't work at all. Why does it? Because it's recounted by a master story-teller, an erudite man whose primary aim was to tell an entertaining tale, not meet some universal <em>pro forma</em> for fiction. Indeed James originally began to write stories in order to recite them in a candle-lit room to his students at King's College Cambridge each Christmas. What wouldn't you give for a time machine to be taken back to one of those evenings?

HP Lovecraft adored James. Lovecraft, of course, went on to influence a generation of modern novelists such as Stephen King. So the line from these delicate, studied stories of otherworldly events in genteel rural England to King's dark and imaginative fantasies in Maine is both direct and, if you think about it, clearly visible.

Great stuff. See you next week. The story below comes from the excellent Project Gutenberg by the way. If you want to get the full anthology <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8486" target="_blank">just look here. </a>

<a title="Lost Hearts by MR James.pdf" href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/james.jpgwp-content/uploads/2009/10/Lost-Hearts-by-MR-James.pdf">Lost Hearts by MR James</a>