Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (98 page)

Between 1982 and 1988, Hordern also narrated a series of audio cassettes released by Decca Records under the Argo label that featured unabridged versions of James’ stories.

“Count Magnus” was dramatized by the New York City Board of Education’s radio station WNYE-FM in the mid-1960s as part of its
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
series, and Bernard Cribbins read “Lost Hearts” on BBC Radio 3 in December 1971.

An updated version of “Casting the Runes” formed the basis of “This Will Kill You,” originally broadcast in 1974 as part of the
CBS Radio Mystery Theater
, hosted by actor E.G. Marshall. “The Mezzotint” was re-titled “The Figure in the Moonlight” for the same show four years later.

In December 1975, Peter Barkworth read an abridgement of “Number 13” on BBC Radio 4’s
Story Time: Ghost Trilogy
, and
The Ghosts of M.R. James
, broadcast on Boxing Day 1977, featured a talk on the author by Michell Raper along with readings from “Wailing Well,” “Lost Hearts,” “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “Rats” by Gerald Cross, Norman Shelley and Kenneth Fortescue.

Robert Trotter read “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” on the same station in December 1980, while readings of “Rats” by Richard Hurndal and “The Haunted Dolls’ House” by David Ashford were featured on Radio 4’s
Morning Story
slot in the early 1980s.

Conrad Phillips, Peter Copley and Kim Hartman starred in yet another version of “Casting the Runes,” written by Gregory Evans and re-titled “The Hex,” which was broadcast in January 1981 as an episode of Radio 4’s
Afternoon Play
.

James Aubrey read “Rats” on the same station in June 1986, while
The Late Book: Ghost Stories
was a series of fifteen-minute readings of M.R. James stories that ran on Radio 4 between 1997 and 1998. Abridged and produced by Paul Kent and narrated by Benjamin Whitrow, the titles adapted were “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” [sic], “Lost Hearts,” “A School Story,” “The Haunted Dolls’ House” and the ever-popular “Rats.”

BBC Radio 4’s
Woman’s Hour
featured nine classic ghost stories dramatized by Robin Brooks in fifteen-minute slots and broadcast in December 2000. The two M.R. James stories included were “Casting the Runes” and “Count Magnus.”

Derek Jacobi took the role of James himself as he introduced Chris Harrald’s fifteen-minute adaptations of “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” “The Tractate Middoth,” “Lost Hearts,” “The Rose Garden” and
“Number 13” on Radio 4’s
M.R. James at Christmas
in 2007.

In October 2009, the BBC’s digital station Radio 7 featured Robin Bailey reading “The Mezzotint” as part of its
Classic Tales of Horror
series, originally released on audio CD, while Alex Jennings read an abridged version of “A Warning to the Curious” on BBC Radio 3’s
Twenty Minutes
in June 2011.

Between 1976 and 1992, BBC Radio 4 broadcast seven plays written by Sheila Hodgson which featured M.R. James as a character. David March portrayed the author in the first six, while Michael Williams took over the role for the final one. An eighth play was broadcast by Ireland’s Raidió Telefis Éireann in 1994, with Aiden Grennell playing the part of James. Several of the plays were based on plots described in “Stories I Have Tried to Write,” and the prose versions were collected in Hodgson’s
The Fellow Travelers and Other Ghost Stories
, published by Ash-Tree Press in 1998.

Over 2006 and 2007, the Cambridge-based Nunkie Theater Company’s one-man show,
A Pleasing Terror: Two Ghost Stories by M.R. James
, toured the UK and Ireland and featured Robert Lloyd Parry’s acclaimed portrayal of M.R. James. The initial stage play adapted “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” and “The Mezzotint,” and was followed in 2007 by
Oh, Whistle …
(“‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’” and “The Ash-tree”) and in 2009 by
A Warning to the Curious
(the title story and “Lost Hearts”).

Parry recreated his award-winning role for special performances at the 2007 World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, New York; the 2009 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon, and the 2010 World Horror Convention in Brighton, England, as well as for various audio books and DVD recordings.

Although James McBryde remains perhaps the best-known artist to have illustrated James’ stories, he is far from the only one. There have been many interpretations over the years in books and magazines, and some of the most memorable depictions of the author’s work include Clive Upton’s illustration accompanying “The Mezzotint” in the anthology
The Mammoth Book of Thrillers, Ghosts and Mysteries
(1936) and Ernest Wallcousins’ scene from “‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’” which was used as the frontispiece for the 1947 edition of
The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James
.

Charles Keeping produced nine lithographs for the Folio Society’s 1973 collection
Ghost Stories of M.R. James
, selected by Nigel Kneale.

M.R. James’ amusing
autobiography,
Eton and King’s: Recollections, Mostly Trivial 1875–1925
was published by Williams & Norgate in 1926, but there was more to be found in American history professor Richard William Pfaff’s privately-funded biography
Montague Rhodes James
(1980) and Michael Cox’s complimentary study,
M.R. James: An Informal Portrait
(1983).

In 1956, Gwendolen McBryde—the widow of the illustrator of
Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary
—edited
Montague Rhodes James: Letters to a Friend
, in which she collected approximately 300 letters that she and her daughter had received from the author between December 1904 and December 1935.

As unlikely as it may seem today, James’ final story, “A Vignette,” from the November 1936 issue of
The London Mercury and Bookman
, had languished in obscurity until editor Richard Dalby rediscovered it for his 1971 anthology
The Sorceress in Stained Glass and Other Ghost Stories
. Even more remarkably, there were more rediscoveries to come.

“The Experiment: A New Year’s Eve Ghost Story” was originally published in the December 31, 1931, edition of the
Morning Post
. Once again, probably because it was
published too late to be included in
The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James
, it remained mostly forgotten until anthologist Hugh Lamb reprinted it in
The Thrill of Horror
(1975).

“And to close this anthology of rare tales,” wrote Lamb in his introduction to the tale, “I am extremely proud to present a story by the great M.R. James, not included in his collected volume, as far as I can ascertain never before published in book form and certainly forgotten for over forty years … Though I would be the first to acknowledge that it is by no means the best story James ever wrote, it still makes an important addition to the available works of the undisputed master of the ghost story.”

The tale was apparently written under some editorial constraints: “The limits of space are tiresome,” complained James, “and I don’t know if they will take it—I’m not sure I would in their place.”

Even more obscure was “The Malice of Inanimate Objects,” which appeared in the first edition of a little Etonian magazine and then promptly disappeared for almost fifty years.

“In 1932 James compiled an incomplete list of his published writings on the back of an annotated Greek Testament whose interleaves served him as a rudimentary diary,” explained Michael Cox. “During the preparation of my biography of James, I consulted the ‘diary’ on several occasions and was puzzled by an item that seemed to indicate a connection with the ghost stories.