H. Russell Wakefield
Herbert Russell Wakefield (1888-1964) was an English short-story writer, novelist, publisher, and civil servant chiefly remembered today for his ghost stories. He produced several short story collections during his lifetime such as THEY RETURN AT EVENING (1928), A GHOSTLY COMPANY (1935), THE CLOCK STRIKES TWELVE (1939) and STRAYERS FROM SHEOL (1961) and was an avowed believer in psychic phenomena and ghosts, although his final feelings about these things are conflicted (ultimately deciding that psychic sensitivity was a debilitating atavism that caused one to suffer for no reason, and that “the dead have nothing of importance to tell us”). He was a yeoman supernatural fiction author, equivalent to the American pulp writers, in that he turned out quite a lot of stories – some formulaic and some not. He is best understood as a modernizer of the classic M.R. James approach, bringing in details from the current culture, crime, and technology, while discarding stuffy antiquarianism.
