M.R. James

English · 1862 to 1936

Born Montague Rhodes James on August 1, 1862, in the village of Goodnestone, Kent, he was the youngest son of an evangelical clergyman and grew up in the rectory at Great Livermere in Suffolk, a flat country of churches and old houses that fed his lifelong taste for the antique. A precocious reader of medieval manuscripts, he won a scholarship to Eton and then to King's College, Cambridge, where he spent almost the whole of his life. He became a cataloguer of immense patience, producing descriptive catalogues of the medieval manuscripts in the libraries of Cambridge, Lambeth, and beyond, work that remains in use, and he edited apocryphal biblical texts that few others could read. He was Provost of King's from 1905 and Provost of Eton from 1918 until his death. The ghost stories began almost as a private game, read aloud by candlelight each Christmas to a small circle of friends and choristers in his rooms. Collected as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious (1925), they fixed the shape of the modern English ghost story: a quiet scholar, an old book or church, a careless act of curiosity, and something that should not be there. He distrusted explanation and trusted the half-seen, advising that a ghost should be malevolent and the reader allowed just one loophole of doubt. His best-known tales include "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" and "Casting the Runes," later filmed as Night of the Demon. He never married and disliked sentiment in fiction. He died on June 12, 1936, at Eton, aged seventy-three, and was buried in the town cemetery there.