Despite the success of his original stories, many of James’s most ardent admirers will have first become aware of his unique style through the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas. 1968’s Whistle And I’ll Come to You (an adaptation of ‘Oh, Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’), directed by Jonathan Miller and featuring a memorable performance by Michael Hordern as the terrified Professor Parkin, is perhaps the first to spring to mind. However, it wasn’t officially part of the series, which began in earnest with 1971’s The Stalls Of Barchester. This time, a cast featuring several actors now better known as comic foils – Clive Swift of Keeping Up Appearances and Thelma Barlow, Coronation Street’s Mavis Wilton – brought to life a grisly tale of greed and murder. Five more adaptations followed during the same decade, with James’s works creeping into the public imagination alongside other chilling tales like Charles Dickens’ truly haunting depiction of psychological trauma framed as a ghost story, The Signalman. Attempts to revive the tradition have been made on a number of occasions, most recently with Mark Gatiss’s deliciously unsettling version of The Tractate Middoth in 2013. A radical reworking of Whistle And I’ll Come To You in 2010 had previously demonstrated the flexibility of James’s techniques even when his story was transferred to the modern day, with the panicking professor of the original replaced by a lonely and grief-stricken husband (John Hurt) mourning the loss of his wife to dementia. If, in the noble tradition of the diligent investigator of matters spectral – or that of the bungling berk destined to be offed first, depending on your preferred variety of horror – we look beyond the best-known examples of his work, we’re rewarded with some gems far beyond the reach of your average doomed treasure hunter. A few of my personal favorites are considered sub-par offerings when ranked alongside James’s more renowned tales. One of these is Two Doctors, in which our unnamed narrator recounts his discovery of odd, incomplete fragments of what appears to be an inquest into the mysterious death of a Dr Quinn in the eighteenth century. The gaps in the narrative caused by the partial information we’re given are only made more glaring by a strange and seemingly unrelated news item with which the story concludes. It takes us a few careful readthroughs, with a bit of assistance from deep within the bowels of Wikipedia, for the logical leaps to be made. The shudder of dawning realization is worth the effort. Other, more widely appreciated stories also make use of what is left untold to chill our blood. The Mezzotint is all the more disturbing for the snapshot movements of its creeping, vengeful revenant that are not seen by the protagonists as the picture changes on each viewing to tell its full, horrifying story. When the corpse of a woman executed for witchcraft is discovered inside the ash tree that gives one memorable tale its name, the whole truth behind her connection with the fanatical ancestor of the man killed by her arachnid familiars remains unexplored. The complex haunting uncovered by the removal of an apparently innocuous post in The Rose Garden sees that story’s likeable but clueless central couple plagued by both the memory of an unjustly persecuted man, conveyed to them through their dreams, and by terrifying visions of the ghost of his persecutor, forever bound to him in death by way of punishment for his crimes. The 1968 TV version of Whistle And I’ll Come To You is set to screen at the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge this Wednesday, while a new graphic novel has recently appeared to mark the eightieth anniversary of James’s death. One truth emerges afresh as winter nights draw in. In this season of fairy lights and tinsel, the hint of a chill in the air will be as welcome as ever.
