Classic Ghost Stories

Minuke by Nigel KnealeNigel KnealeNigel Kneale was born in Barrow in Furness in 1922, which was then part of Lancashire “North of the Sands”, and since 1974 part of the modern county of Cumbria. He died in 2006 in London. Neale’s family came from the Isle of Man, which is clearly visible from the coast of Cumbria. I saw it yesterday but not today as it was too rainy.The family went back to the Isle of Man when he was six (finding Barrow too rich for their blood no doubt) and was educated in Douglas, the island’s capital. His father was editor of the local newspaper.Kneale went to study law but got bored with the legal profession. Apparently he tried to join the British army at the start of the Second World War but was declared medically unfit due to photophobia. He wrote short stories and read out his own story Tomato Cain on the BBC in 1946. Inspired by the reception his story got, he went to London to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.  He then got involved in a voice acting and writing melange of a career on the broadcast media, writing his first script in 1950.His most famous work was the Quatermass Series, a horror science fiction drama series on the BBC which was a massive success. You can find this and his later great success The Stone Tape on Youtube.He did an adaptation of Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black in 1989. He adapted some of the Sharpe novels in the 1990s which were also a great success.He was invited to write for the X-Files but declined that job.So, Neale was a big cheese up until recent times. His work, particularly Quatermass and The Stone Tape are canons of British hauntology these days.MinukeOr, if I hadn’t done it northern ‘my nook’. But ‘nook’ it is to us. This story is from the collection Tomato Cain and Other Stories published by Collins in 1949.The book is out of print and second-hand copies are going for nearly £400. I didn’t buy one.It was requested by a listener and I was only too happy to oblige.The story is told as a frame story. It begins in media res where a man has gone to an estate agent (a realtor) interested in a property. By the end we learn that not only is the property cursed and haunted an on an old Norse burial site, but it is demolished and its site occupied by a scrap metal yard, so why would the guy be interested in it? He clearly doesn’t know it’s a scrap metal yard because the estate agent has to tell him.This does seem to a plot hole, but we shall forgive Nigel Kneale this. It is also possibly that someone cleverer than me will point out how I have misunderstood this point.It seems like a poltergeist story. We remember the Enfield Poltergeist from the 1970s which received a lot of publicity, but this story pre-dates that case, so couldn’t be influenced by it.There was a recent long documentary on BBC Sounds about the Battersea Poltergeist, but that dates from the 1950s, so again can’t have influenced Neale.The other hint is the old Norse (or even older) burial ground that underlies Minuke.This idea was picked up and used in several Hollywood horror movies. It features in The Shining where the Overlook Hotel is built on an old Native American burial ground. But this came out in 1980, so again cannot be an influence on Neale.We see this idea of archaeology creating apparitions and other supernatural events in Neale’s classic TV programme The Stone Tape which I recently watched. This came out in 1972, but the idea of archaeology holding records of strongly emotional events and replaying it, is hinted at in Neale’s story “You Must Listen” about a haunted telephone line.There is a haunted telephone line in this story, as well as a Support the show

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A Dog in Dürer’s Etching “The Knight, Death and the Devil”Albrecht DürerAlbrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg, a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire in 1471. He died aged 58, also in Nuremberg. He was a famous printmaker in his time and travelled across Europe. His work mainly consists of engravings and woodcuts. The Knight, Death & The Devil was printed in 1513, though apparently Durer called it simply “The Knight”.The engraving shows an armoured knight on a horse, leading another horse. The knight is flanked by a rotting corpse holding an hourglass and the Devil. Behind him on a hill is a fortress and beside the horse is a dog. The knight looks straight forward, undistracted by the corpse, the devil or even the dog. The elements in the picture represent a Medieval European morality. The knight is not tempted or swayed by the Devil or cowed by his inevitable death. He continues on his journey. The critic Gary Shapiro said the knight signified resolute determination in the absence of hope.Marco DeneviMarco Denevi was born in 1922 in the town of Sáenz Peña a suburb of Buenos Aires in Argentina. He died in Buenos Aires in 1998. He studied law but went to work in an insurance office where he wrote his first novel in snatched hours. His writing bought him enough success that by 1968 when he was 46, he gave up the insurance trade and became a full time author and essayist. Denevi was the author of novels and short stories, some of which were made into films. He won several prizes for his work.  Alberto ManguelAlberto Manguel is the translator of this piece by Denevi. He was born in Buenos Aires in Argentina, but moved to Canada. He is an award winning author of both fiction and non-fiction as well as a translator, editor and essayist. When he was young he worked in a bookshop in Buenos Aires and there met Jorge Luis Borges. A Dog in Dürer’s Etching “The Knight, Death and the Devil”This is a wonderfully Gothic story. It mainly concerns a knight returning home from a nameless war (as Denevi says: all wars are basically the same war), coarsened and wizened looking forward to days of peace with his wife, his salmon and his lute in his castle, apparently under the pleasant illusion that all will be waiting for him much as it was before he left.We have a nice interlude where the band of soldiers are travelling through a gothic forest where the trees are all bearing the terrible, but appealing to some, fruits of war. The minstrel imagines that the knight’s suit of armour its empty and that the knight whom the soldiers had trusted to save them from death is not really there.But then we return to the main point. Wars are games of chess played by little kings, popes and emperors to advance their petty ambitions. The knight will be forgotten by history, we are told. Then we are given access to the knight’s musings that perhaps his otherwise pointless efforts in the war in which he has spent his life will be remembered and honoured with land and titles by the little kings. As he thinks of this, the dog approaches.The knight, or Denevi, considers that peasants and dogs do not even really know there was a war, much less what it was about, and in fact it was about nothing other the game of chess played by little kings and popes.The knight considers how he may have, by his actions, have spun a web to snare the fly kings to make them help him. He ponders that God may be pretty similar to the dog, in that he does not even know there was a war and is oblivious to the aims and ambitions of the popes and kings.The theme of the story seems to be about perspective and how those who are considered lowly, like thSupport the show

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Joseph Sheridan Le FanuLe Fanu was an Irish writer born in Dublin in 1814 and who died in Dublin in 1873. In his time he was the leading writer of ghost stories and macabre tales. On the podcast, we have read out his masterwork, Carmilla, but Green Tea is an equally well-known story.He was judged by the master ghost story writer of a later generation, M R James as being absolutely first rank. His family were of French protestant (who fled France because of persecution) and English descent. His family were writers, and his grandmother Alice Sheridan Le Fanu and his great-uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were famous playwrights. His mother was a writer of biographies.Le Fanu’s father was a protestant clergyman in the Church of Ireland. He was a rector of a protestant church in Ireland and the family were disturbed by the 1830s Tithe War where the majority Catholic population objected to paying tithes to the Protestant minority church. Le Fanu studied law at Trinity but as early as 1839 (when he was twenty-four) he wrote ghost stories for the Dublin newspapers. In 1847 Le Fanu was active in the campaign against the cruel indifference of the British government which did little to relieve the suffering during the Irish famine. Le Fanu’s wife had significant mental health problems and his married life was less than happy. He wrote ghost stories set in Ireland, but due to the influence of his publisher, began to write stories with an English setting because they felt they would sell better. He died of a heart attack in Dublin aged only 58.Green TeaLe Fanu produced a collection of supernatural stories called In A Glass Darkly which was published in 1872. This was ostensibly the collected papers of the occult German medical-philosopher Dr Hesselius. Think of Sherlock Holmes cases ostensibly recorded by Dr Watson. There is little doubt that no publisher would look at Green Tea now. It is full of ‘telling’ rather than showing. Most of the action happens at third hard. There are frames to the story: it is edited by the editor who got the papers at the death of a professor and much concerns Hesselius’s reports of things he has heard.There are philosophical ramblings about Swedenborg’s metaphysics which are of very little interest to the modern reader. However, we know these things were of intense interest to Le Fanu and possibly to his contemporaries. It does introduce Swedenborg’s idea that a man can be conjoined with an evil spirit, however. Sometimes these evil spirits, or even two evil spirits, take animal form. Hint. hint. Le Fanu does dialogue well and the dialogue was smooth to narrate and quite naturalistic. It is quite unclear whether the story reports an actual haunting by a devil monkey or a psychosis. Hesselius diagnoses the end as a hereditary suicidal mania. I’m not sure we believe such things are heritable, though suicide can run in families, though more likely through a nurture rather than nature cause. But who knows?The story that asks: was it madness or was it a monster? Has a strong pedigree. On The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast we have read The Horla by Guy de Maupassant and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins-Gilman both of which can be interpreted either way.I was recently reading the critic Mark Fisher’s book https://amzn.to/3o546Yl (The Weird and The Eerie) in which he draws a distinction between weird and eerie elements (and also uncanny components) of a story.The ‘weird’ Fisher says is about the juxtaposition of the normal with things that should not be there. The devil monkey is therefore distinctly weird. He talks about how this juxtaposition, as beloved by the surrealisSupport the show

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A gothic story of a wronged bride who returns from beyond the grave to right the injustice visited upon her. Written by Paula Readman an award-winning living writer from England.The story reading is followed by an interview with Paula ReadmanAuthor of Seeking The Darkhttps://mybook.to/seekingthedark Stone Angels, https://mybook.to/stoneangelsThe Funeral Birds https://mybook.to/thefuneralbirdsDays Pass Like a Shadowhttps://mybook.to/dayspasslikeashadowBlog: https://paularcreadmanauthor.blogFacebook: https://facebook.com/paula.readman.1Twitter: Paula R C Readman@Darkfantasy1If you want to support the channel to keep me going, become a Patreon for bonus storieshttps://www.patreon.com/barcudFor a one time thank you, you can buy me a coffee https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker Music is by The Heartwood Institute https://bit.ly/somecomebackSupport the show

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Fergus HumeFergus Hume was born in Powick, Worcestershire in England in 1865. He died in Essex in 1932.  His given first name was Ferguson, which was his mother Mary’s maiden name.His Glaswegian father Dr John Hume , was the doctor at the County Pauper and Lunatic Asylum there. Hume was only three when his father emigrated to Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand, where he set up a lunatic asylum, Ashburn Hall.Hume went to Otago boy’s school and then studied law at the University of Otago in Dunedin. (Otago is the name of the region). He became a barrister in 1885 but then moved to Melbourne in Australia where he became a barrister’s clerk.All the while , he had literary ambitions, primarily as a playwright, but was repeatedly rejected. The first time he came to public notice was when a play he had written was put on by someone else under their name.He turned then to writing mystery novels, and his first and most famous novel was The Mystery of a Hansom Cab which was set in Melbourne, in the poor areas that Hume himself lived in around Little Bourke Street. Because he couldn’t get a publisher to look at it, he printed five thousand copies at his own expense. This first edition sold out in three weeks.Even though the book was very popular he made no money from it because he sold the rights before it became the best -selling mystery novel of the Victorian era. It was this novel that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. However, Doyle was not complimentary about The Mystery of A Hansom Cab. Hume went back to England in 1888. He lived in Thundersley in Essex and wrote over a hundred and fifty novels. Hume never married and avoided publicity. He was said to be very religious. Despite his prolific output, he lived very modestly.The Sandwalkerhttp://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks17/1700531h.html#TheSandwalker (Link) to the ebook on Project Gutenberg The Sandwalker is the last story in Hume’s collection The Dancer in Red. It’s a bit of a yarn. In theme it is a fairly straightforward revenge ghost story. Those who do wrong are punished by the dead. There is a nice twist at the end which delivers a satisfying ending. Young Lottie was not disgraced by Amber and therefore it was in no sense just that Mrs Jarzil killed him in revenge. The twist is that she is a very religious woman with the emphasis on Old Testament style justice where sinners are punished and cast into the pit and it is always an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Despite her protestations, she does not leave vengeance to the Lord but takes it into her own hands.I am guessing it is set in either Norfolk or Lincolnshire though I used the narrator’s job working for a Yorkshire woollen firm to allow me to be slightly more northern in accent than Norfolk certainly. It was nice that the hero was a plain man working for a living: a commercial traveller or ‘bagman’. We had a bagman appear in one of M R James’s stories that we read recently.So his preoccupations are pleasantly down to earth. He does not have weekends in the country or houses in London, he has to work for a living.The characters are caricatures. The writing is clearly accomplished. It is easy to read and unambiguous with clever rhetorical use of repetition (anaphora and epistrophe) so Hume was clearly a smart man. I presume then that the one-eyed wicked schoolmaster Abrams and the Lurch-like Mrs Jarzil are drawn so boldly on purpose. They are almost comic, but we must remember that this is exactly what Dickens did too so there was public taste for it.All in all a fun yarn. I hadn’t read any of Humes’ work before. He reminded me a little of R H Malden, thougSupport the show

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Nathaniel HawthorneHawthorne was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachussetts. He died in Plymouth New Hampshire. One of his ancestors was John Hathorne who was the only judge in the witch trials who never repented his involvement.His ancestors who came from England in 1630 were Puritans. It is thought that Hathorne added the -w- to his name to make it Hawthorne in his twenties in order to distance himself from these fervent ancestors.He published his first work in 1828 when he was twenty-four. He published a series of short stories. He was a Transcendentalist, a Romantic philosophy which believes in the goodness of human nature and a reliance on intuition and other promptings of the spiritual or natural person rather than relying on reason.Despite his puritan ancestors, Hawthorne liked to take pot shots at puritanism. He is a Romantic and technically what is known as a dark Romantic. He is most famous for his novel The Scarlet Letter which was published in 1859. Also famous is the House of the Seven Gables. His books often feature themes of sin and the inherent evil of humanity.Young Goodman BrownUnless I’ve missed it, we are not told what is special about this night that Goodman Brown is going out to have his tryst with the Devil. His wife, Faith, wants him to be there with her on this night ‘of all nights in the year’, but he has to go out on this night of all nights in the year.  He is clearly expecting to meet the Devil and has some business with him, but it’s not clear to me what that business is.It turns out that all the people he thought pious, including his father and grandfather as well as various deacons and goodies and goodmen of the town and state are wicked to the core.But what was his own mission exactly? I’m not clear. He clearly needs to do his dirty deed on this particular night and afterwardsHe discusses meeting the Devil and then a man appears who has the look of his grandfather, it transpires. This man was in Boston only fifteen minutes previously and that seems pretty fast travel for the Seventeenth Century. The Devil says that Brown is late, and Brown answers that, ‘Faith kept me back a while.’ Ah, yes indeed. Faith has two meanings here, I think.We hear from Good Cloyse that a young man is to be taken into communion with the witches that night, and we hear from Deacon Gookin that a young woman is to be inducted. We realise that this is Faith of course as Hawthorne intends us to, but of which poor Goodman Brown is ignorant. This is called Dramatic Irony according to Robert McKee, where the audience knows more than the character.However, the story is well done. We are led step by step as our Goodman falls deeper into temptation and then, the scales are removed from his eyes and the Devil tells him that evil is the basic currency of human nature. He believes it and henceforth mistrusts the virtue of his own dear wife and his own pastor. This is foreshadowed by Hawthorne at the outset of the journey when, after Faith has failed to convince him to stay home, she hopes that he finds all well on his return, to which he replies: ‘Amen’.  But when he returns has changed all due to his change in attitude, because as Hamlet says, ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Goodman Brown is a lukewarm Satanist at the best. He begins by telling Old Nick that he has scruples in the matter that ‘thou wots’t of’. (You know of. English used to have two verbs for to know, like French and German an Welsh and Irish and other languages I know. One was ‘to wit’ which was to know a thing, and the other ‘to ken’ which is to be familiar with or know a person or place. German keeSupport the show

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This is the cleaned up audio of a Youtube Video I did. The audio isn't as good as when I do the podcast purely as an audio project. The video of me reading this is to be seen on my Youtube Channelhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9o9Vf0G92Pu2MCgKr73vhQIf You Appreciate The Work I’ve Put In Here https://www.patreon.com/barcud (Become A Patreon) For Bonus StoriesOr https://ko-fi.com/tonywalker (buy me a coffee) , if you’d like to keep me working. https://bit.ly/somecomeback (Music) by The Heartwood InstituteSupport the show

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Pickman's Model by H P LovecraftThis story was written in September 1926 and first published in the October 1927 edition of Weird Tales. The narrator opens by disclosing that he is frightened to go underground, into the subway or even into a cellar. Then he explains why.It's to do with Pickman, an artist with an unsavoury reputation.There are hints that Pickman, whose ancestor was a witch, is related in some sense to the ghouls. Pickman's ancestor was a Salem witch and in the painting where the changeling is being read to by the Puritan, the narrator suggests that the changeling's ghoulish features are reminiscent of Pickman's own. This suggestion of cursed ancestry is also found in other Lovecraft stories like the case of Charles Dexter Ward.Lovecraft's ghouls appear in other stories as well. The ghouls honeycomb the hills of Boston are like the Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. In this story, which was written later, we find Pickman the artist now a fully-fledged ghoul. These ghouls come up through wells and into cellars and basements. Ghouls in Arabic folklore haunt the graveyards and feed on the newly dead.In The Music of Erich Zann, an artist can summon the creatures of this devilish world that underlies our reality. There is something about the super-sensitive artist who can see into more rarefied worlds than ours. Erich Zann was trying to drive out the evil things from other worlds while Pickman welcomes them, or at least tolerates them. He feels himself superior to them I think because he takes his pistol to one of them at least. In the Music of Erich Zann the narrator cannot find the house again, and this is so in this story. These strange parts of modern cities lurk like shadows, over a river, or in a little-visited and hazardous neighbourhood. Boston's North End is like Brooklyn's Red Hook. These neighbourhoods are populated with foreigners and honeycombed with tunnels. These edge places are clearly manifestations of Lovecraft's Shadow. These monsters come from places that are liminal and other.The narrator suggests that Pickman is a relentless enemy of all mankind to take such pleasure in the torture of others as depicted in his art, yet he is a true artist because his art was the art that convinced. Like Lovecraft himself, Pickman is no sentimental friend of mankind and sees no kindness or joy amongst his fellow humans, only torture and disgust. Lovecraft appreciates that others shun people with this vision, though he depicts them as small-minded and unappreciative of great art and thought. It's a little bit Nietzschean, the superman or Uber-mensch.The narrator Thurber says that as well as being monstrous, Pickman was a great artist because he painted the truth. The implication is that the truth is that our daylight world lives on a foundation of terrible evil. That is of course a very Lovecraftian view. It's the opposite view of the Romantics like Wordsworth and Thoreau and Voltaire, and if fact the Green movement, who believed that our technological world is the aberration and that the natural world is the source of purity and joy. Of course for most of human history, survival has been a battle against the horrors of the natural world and in a sense then Lovecraft is a traditionalist and anti-Romantic. Lovecraft's escape is not through nature but through imagination and at times, though not here, his fantasies have a great beauty to them.The story form is a classic short story with a twist. We, the readers, realise ahead of the narrator (who only twigs when he looks at the photo) that Pickman's monstrous images were not imagination but reality. He presumed that the ghoul was paiSupport the show

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Edgar Allen PoePoe was an American writer born in 1809 in Boston who died aged only forty in Baltimore in 1849. He is one of the best-known American writers of his generation and famed all over the world for his Gothic and macabre tales. This is the third of his stories we've done on The Classic Ghost Stories Podcast.Others are https://player.captivate.fm/episode/08a6766c-18ad-4ec7-9c1c-a6918e7306a6 (The Tell-Tale Heart) and https://player.captivate.fm/episode/704f4f35-a5c5-44f6-b4c2-f08313ac3870 (The Fall of the House of Usher)The Black Cat by Edgar Allen PoePoe sets up his character as a mild, animal-loving child and I guess this is to show how out of character his later muderous rage is. When he talks of an animal as a brute it is not a derogatory term and merely equivalent to the word animal. Beast is the same though in the intervening years both beast and brute have become tainted by usage connecting them with the vilest of human beings rather than dumb animals. Did you see what I did there?Near the beginning he mentions his wife's joking belief that all black cats are witches in disguise. This is a little foreshadowing the for the supernatural powers of the black cat that are revealed towards the end of the story.We aren't far into the story before the narrator reveals the cause of his change of character: it is through intemperance with drink. Remember the Temperance Movement (of which my grandmother was a proud supporter). Poe himself had a problem with alcohol. His death was very likely related to his alcohol abuse. In 1849, he was due to catch a ferry from Richmond, Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. He visited a doctor in Richmond the night before he was due to travel, complaining of a fever. He arrived in Baltimore and is next seen in a tavern three days later when he was found in an alcoholic stupor wearing someone else's clothes: a cheap suit and a straw hat, not his usual black wool suit. Perhaps he had sold his own clothes for money for drink?He was admitted to hospital and died four days later. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and talking nonsense. This sounds to me like Delirium Tremens from alcohol withdrawal. For people who drink heavily over a long period they can develop Wernicke-Korsakoff's syndrome which is a neurological condition caused by deficiencies of B vitamins, particularly Thiamine. It is also known as Korsakoff's Dementia.At the time of his death Poe had recently joined a temperance society. The doctor who saw him in the tavern thought he had been on a bender and was intoxicated, but the doctor in the hospital stated Poe had not been drinking. Of course, that is what causes the withdrawal: heavy drinking with a sudden stop. The most common causes of sudden death in people who abuse alcohol are through a seizure induced by the withdrawal, or by the bursting of blood vessels in the throat leading to catastrophic loss of blood. There is no report of a seizure, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Other theories are that Poe was assaulted and had a head injury in the tavern or that he was in late stage syphilis. This late stage syphilis filled mental institutions in the days before antibiotics and was very common—known as General Paralysis of The Insane. The doctors would have recognised this condition easily.Getting back to the story. He mentions that Pluto was becoming old, "And consequently peevish". On the eve of my sixtieth birthday I know exactly how Pluto felt. He is very nasty to the old cat though, and like others of Poe's protagonists, but not all (I quite like the protagonist from the House of Usher) he loses our sympathy. Support the show

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His Beautiful Hands by Oscar CookThis will be the second of Oscar Cook's stories we have read, the first being Boomerang. Boomerang is https://player.captivate.fm/episode/f7098556-f342-4667-b9f2-65424796b616 (here)It was danged hard to find a copy of His Beautiful Hands, but I succeeded. HBH is rated as one of the best horror stories in those inevitable lists that pop up on the Internet, almost certainly compiled by people who never read it because print copies of the anthologies it was in are either out of print or cost hundreds of cash units (dollars, pounds, euros, roubles, take your pick). Cook's work, I realise now, is characterised by graphic body horror rather than the supernatural so it is a horror story rather than a ghost story. He deliberately sets out to shock us, but shocks modern listeners most probably by accident.What I mean is that we have become inured to graphic horror, after all we have had The Saw and The Human Caterpillar (neither of which I've seen) and the horrid bit in Midsommer when the old folks jump off the cliff and are then finished off... but let's not go into that. Then he throws in a bit of incest. That's never nice and I think even modern listeners find that shocking. As an aside, I actually deplore the race for shock that you see in detective series on TV. Once theft was enough (if you go back far enough), then murder became a staple, then we had serial killers, serial rapists and now we have a regrettably frequent addition of paedophilia sometimes with incest thrown in. I prefer Miss Marple personally, and I'd say to the TV companies: don't pander after these most base shock-jock tactics, you're better than that. I saw the Dig on Netflix recently with Ralph Fiennes. How brilliant that was. And I like the Detectorists also. But back to Oscar Cook.Oscar Cook BiographyRichard Martin Oscar Cook was born in London in 1888 and died also in London in 1952. His father owned an athletic goods company and they were fairly well-off. He seems to have been brought up in Broxbourne just outside London and his first job was a clerk there but very shortly afterwards he went to make his fortune in a rubber planation in Borneo. Unfortunately he did not get on well and was sacked, but remained in Borneo and got another job in the British Colonial Service.He was an administrator of the British Empire and worked in North Borneo from 1911 until 1918 and then had District Officer posts. This was a position in the British Colonial Service and these administrators and often magistrate was at the heart of colonial administration in the British colonies.He was married in 1924 to Christine Campbell Thomson but got divorced in 1938.When he returned to England he wrote an autobiography of his time in Borneo and thereafter wrote supernatural stories, many of which appeared in various anthologies. This story appeared in the 2nd Pan Book of Horror. I used to read those books when I was a kid, which may explain a lot.Cook bought a controlling interest in a publishing company which produced a series of horror anthologies called Not at Night which ran to twelve books.His Beautiful HandsStarts like Boomerang I think with the device of the urbane Englishman in his club in the Far East. This fellow has few adventures and relies on his unsteady journalist friend Warwick to tell him the ghastly tales. He even warns us it is going to be horrible. And it is. As the story goes structurally, it's pretty neat. It has at least two twists, probably three: that the manicurist poisoned him so his fingers drop off (ideal revenge on a violinist); that she is his daughter; and that the child is his. It is gSupport the show

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