Mystery and Imagination...A Chilling Blast From The Past

OK, I accept I'm older than many of my readers - hopefully not all! But am I alone in remembering a brilliant TV series broadcast on ITV between 1966-70, called Mystery and Imagination?

 

Technically I was too young to watch it, but my love of the ghostly, Gothic and scary had already been well and truly awakened by an early reading (at school) of The Monkey's Paw.  The original three series of Mystery and Imagination were broadcast by ITV franchise holder, ABC, who created a format for the episodes. Irrespective of the story, each had a central character - called David Buck (played by Richard Beckett - who was transposed into adaptations of some of the most famous Gothic and ghostly stories ever written. Sadly, it is believed only two episodes of that era survive.

ABC lost the franchise and Mystery and Imagination moved into a new era with new franchise holder, Thames television. Gone was David Buck and they proceeded to adapt six more episodes, branching into feature length versions of Dracula and Frankenstein, The Curse of the Mummy and more. The series also moved from black and white to colour.

The series served to introduce me to the works of M.R. James - who has proved such a huge influence on me - Sheridan Le Fanu, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and even Oscar Wilde (The Canterville Ghost). Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher - about two Burke and Hare-like characters involved in stealing and dissecting bodies - had me gasping and holding my breath. The Tractate Middoth, Room 13, Casting The Runes and Lost Hearts sent me in search of anything and everything by M.R. James, and Edgar Allan Poe chilled and thrilled me with The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell Tale Heart. Along the way, I encountered Sheridan Le Fanu with Camilla, The Flying Dragon and the dark and sinister Uncle Silas.

Many famous names graced the screen including Denholm Elliott, Corin Redgrave, Susan George, Ian Holm, Joan Hickson and the late, great Jack Hawkins to name but a few.

Sadly, little remains of the original 24 episodes. Just eight appear to have survived, along with a few scenes from Casting The Runes. You can find them here Mystery and Imagination Box Set  I live in hope that, one day, someone deep in the bowels of some long forgotten basement archive, will open a drawer and find some rusting cans of film. With trepidation they will open them and the ghosts of Mystery and Imagination will rise again. In the meantime, here are a couple of the surviving clips for you to enjoy:

The Reckoning - A Tale with A Twist

This short story won me a prize in a competition a year or two ago. Sit back, relax and read all about...

The Reckoning

‘I knew you’d come back.’

Karen jumped at the sound of the familiar voice behind her. All she could see were the branches of the sycamore trees bending in the stiff breeze, scattering the first leaves of autumn. She could hear their papery frailness as they fluttered down around her.

‘I knew you’d come back.’  Who had said that? What did they mean? She had never been along this road before. She couldn’t have been. This was Herefordshire and she’d never been here in her life. In fact, Karen had never been south or west of Birmingham before. She wouldn’t even be here today if it weren’t for her sister. Come to think of it, that voice she had just heard sounded a little like Steph’s, but that was ridiculous. Karen had driven down alone and Steph would be waiting in the little cottage near Ross which she had rented for them for the week. No, she must have imagined it. Probably the breeze playing tricks with her hearing. But just in case…

Karen reached in her bag and rummaged around until she found her phone.

She dialled her sister’s number.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m here’, her sister said, ‘at the cottage waiting for you. How long do you think you’ll be? I’ve got the Chardonnay nicely chilled.’

Karen breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I just stopped to stretch my legs for a bit. I think I’m about half an hour away but I couldn’t stand the motorway any longer, so I’ve taken a different route. There are some really pretty villages we could explore if the weather holds.’

‘I’ll look forward to it,’ Steph said, ‘and there’s a quaint little pub just a short walk from here. They serve food too, so I thought we might have a meal there later if you fancy it.’

‘Sounds good to me.’ Karen ended the call and wandered back to the car.

Then sheheard it. She stopped dead in her tracks.

‘We were here five years ago. Don’t you remember, Karen?’

She whipped around. No-one there. Panic seized her and she ran the last few metres to where her car was parked in the lay-by. She fired up the engine, revving hard before swerving into the road, to the blare of horns and the screech of brakes. She was oblivious to them, only aware of the voice that had spoken to her.

She was so sure someone had stood at her shoulder - their hot breath on her neck. Her heart pounded. She caught sight of her blanched face in the rear view mirror. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead. She could barely breathe

She must calm down. It had been a long drive down from Carlisle, after a busy week. Four hundred new students at the college and she’d registered every single one. No wonder she felt shattered. Not surprising that her mind was playing tricks on her.

Karen reached forward and switched on the radio. Goldfrapp’s latest was playing. She gave herself up to the music and relaxed a little. She glanced at her hands, still white-knuckled as they gripped the steering wheel. Alison Goldfrapp's breathy voice wafted over her and worked its calming magic.

.***

‘So what do you think?’ Steph asked when she arrived.

‘Oh it’s lovely, really lovely.’ Karen gazed appreciatively round the cosy room, the inglenook fireplace and the original oak beams.

‘I think it will do us very nicely for a relaxing week of no work and lots of chilling out. Speaking of which…’ Steph disappeared into the kitchen, and returned ith two glasses of chilled white wine.

‘Cheers!’ she said and they clinked glasses. ‘I thought, after you’ve unpacked, we would go down to that pub I mentioned. I don’t know about you but I’m starving.’

The thatched inn was quiet, with just a handful of locals around the bar and some couples seated at tables by the windows.

‘Two white wines please.’ Karen saw the barman give her a slightly odd look. He seemed about to say something but decided against it and took two glasses off the shelf.

Steph and Karen exchanged glances.

‘I’ll get these. You go and sit down.’ Karen got her purse out ready to pay. Steph nodded and selected a vacant table by the front window.         

Presently Karen brought their drinks over. ‘He’s a strange one,’ she said, indicating the barman. ‘Never spoke a word to me, just handed me the wine, took my money and gave me the change. And he kept looking at me in this really weird way.’

‘Don’t look now, but I think he’s talking about us to his mate,’ Steph said.

As soon as she dared, Karen glanced over her shoulder and saw the barman and an older man immediately turn away.

‘Inbreeding, I reckon,’ Karen said, under her breath. Steph giggled. ‘Now,let’s have a look at these menus. What shall we eat?’

Two hours later, feeling the benefit of cottage pie, followed by lemon meringue, Steph and Karen put their feet up in the living room of the cottage.

Karen stretched. ‘That was an interesting evening to say the least. They’re a strange lot around here. Did you see the way they kept staring at us? I mean, not just the barman, but some of the others as well. It was a bit unnerving at times.’

Steph poured out more wine. ‘I don’t think they get all that many strangers here. It’s a bit off the beaten track after all.’

‘Well that’s what we wanted. Peace and quiet away from the bustle, but why did you choose here, Steph? I mean neither of us has been here before—’ The memory of the voice stopped her.

 ‘What’s the matter Karen? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

Karen told her about the voice and what it had said. ‘But I know I’ve never been there, or here, before today.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ Steph said, ‘but I have.’

‘When?’

Steph sighed. ‘About five years ago.’

‘Five years? But that’s when the voice said I'd been here.’

‘Yes, well it got it wrong, didn’t it? I was here, but you weren’t. I was on my own and that’s when it happened. That’s when—’

Steph burst into tears, great heaving sobs that seemed to be torn from her body.

‘Oh Steph, what is it, love? You can tell me. You know you can tell me anything.’

Steph raised tear-filled eyes. ‘Not this, Karen. Not now. I can’t now, but tomorrow. I promise. Tomorrow I’ll tell you everything.’

But in the morning, Steph wasn’t there and her bed hadn’t been slept in.

Karen raced from her sister’s room, down the stairs and out into the garden.

She saw Steph standing under a pear tree, tears streaming down her face.

‘Come on, come inside. It’s going to rain any minute.’

Her sister shook her head. ‘Karen, I need you to do something for me. I need you to take me to the police station. There’s something I have to do.’

‘Steph?’

‘No, Karen, please don’t ask any questions. You’ll find out everything when we get there.’

They drove in silence to the police station in Ross and Karen didn’t even notice the bemused look on the desk sergeant’s face. In just a few minutes, they were in an interview room, opposite two detectives. Karen listened in horror as Steph spoke calmly and quietly.

‘I want to confess to the murder of Andrew Steele five years ago.’

‘Andy?’ Karen screamed. ‘You killed my boyfriend Andy?’

‘But he was my boyfriend too. I couldn’t share him anymore and he said he would never leave you for me.’

Karen fell silent. In that moment, she felt as if she had never truly known her sister. Here she was, calmly confessing to the murder of the only man Karen had ever loved. But there was more. Much more.

‘I buried him in some woods about half an hour’s drive from here. I could take you there. I remember there were sycamore trees and I parked in a lay-by. It was the middle of the night so no-one saw me.’

Karen saw the frowns on the detectives’ faces.

Steph finished her confession and the two men exchanged glances before turning back to the distraught woman in front of them.       

‘We need the psychiatrist here,’ one of them said and the other one left immediately.

‘Now,’ said the detective as he took a deep breath, ‘who am I speaking to? Karen or Stephanie?’

M.R. James - Master of the Ghostly Tale

On a stormy day last week, with the wind howling and the rain battering the windows, I settled myself down in the warmth and snug comfort of my living room, and picked up The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James.

I can't remember the last time I read one of his stories. They are short - sometimes only a couple of pages - but he packs more into those few pages than many authors manage in an entire novel. He has been the inspiration for many a writer of Gothic, ghostly and horror stories and it's easy to see why. Many were written with an eye to being read aloud, in small intimate gatherings, with the candlelight flickering and the fire crackling. His style is in keeping with that of an author writing in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, yet is perfectly accessible to us now. His stories are original, lacking the cliched settings of some of his contemporaries. He puts ordinary people (man of them academics like himself) in extraordinary situations and sets the scene around them. 

Rather than presenting graphic descriptions of the 'monsters', he evokes terror with just a few words and lets us, his readers, give vent to our imaginations:

http://mickit.deviantart.com/

It stood for the moment in a band of dark shadow, and he had not seen what its face was like. Now it began to move, in a stooping posture, and all at once the spectator realized, with some horror and some relief, that it must be blind, for it seemed to feel about it with its muffled arms in a groping and random fashion. Turning half away from him, it became suddenly conscious of the bed he had just left, and darted towards it, and bent and felt over the pillows in a way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible. In a very few moments it seemed to know that the bed was empty, and then, moving forward into the area of light and facing the window, it showed for the first time what manner of thing it was.

(from 'Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You, My Lad')

Montague Rhodes James was born on 1st August 1862. He was an academic - medieval scholar, provost of King's College Cambridge (1905-1918) and subsequently of Eton (1918-1936). He grew up in Suffolk, which he subsequently used as a location for many of his stories. To this day, he is widely respected for his academic work.This included his discovery of a fragment of manuscript which led to excavations of the ruins of the abbey at Bury St Edmunds, where the long lost graves of a number of twelfth century abbots were discovered. He also catalogued many of the manuscript libraries of the colleges of Cambridge University and translated the Apocrypha of the New Testament.

But the wider world remembers him for those wonderful short stories, which were originally published in four collections: 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 and Other Ghost Stories (1925). In 1931, they were first collated into one volume: The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James from which the above extract was taken.

The stories cry out to be filmed and many adaptations have been made - both for screen and TV. One of my favourite films, Night of the Demon is adapted from Casting The Runes. But probably the most famous adaptations, certainly in the UK, were provided by the BBC between 1968-1978. These half hour episodes were broadcast late at night on Christmas Eve and became a 'must-watch'. While not exclusively M.R.James stories, the series could hardly have existed without him. They are now collated into a 5 DVD collection with some fascinating extra features: Ghost Stories for Christmas.

I am looking forward to February, when we have tickets to see Oh Whistle And I'll Come To You, My Lad in a stage production at Venue Cymru in Llandudno , where it is presented in tandem with The Signalman by Charles Dickens (also included as one of the Ghost Stories For Christmas - and very chilling it is too!)

M.R.James died 8th June 1936 in Eton and is buried in the town cemetery. His work lives on - perfect examples of the British ghost story at their most chillingly entertaining.

Now, click on the link below, sit back and enjoy A Warning to the Curious:

 

From Michigan to Tel Aviv - Yael Politis

 I recently reviewed  The Lonely Tree by Yael Politis, and described it as 'the most moving story I have read in a long time'. Now she is back with a stunning new series, and the first two books -  the award winning Olivia, Mourning and The Way The World Is - have just been published on Kindle. 

Yael's life has been something of an epic in itself. Today, she is my guest and I'm delighted to welcome her:

 

  

Toward the end of my freshman year in Ann Arbor my roommate dropped The Michigan Daily on my bed and pointed at an ad. For $400 the Israeli Students Association would arrange your flight to Tel Aviv and place you as a volunteer on a kibbutz for the summer. 

“You’re forever talking about Israel,” she said. “Why don’t you go?” 

So I did. Back then when an El Al flight landed in Tel Aviv its audio system blared the Theme from Exodus. I felt ridiculous when it brought tears to my eyes and even more so when I got off the plane feeling as if I had come home. 

I know the next question. Why? Reincarnation? I have no rational explanation and never spent much time searching for one. The feeling was simply too strong to ignore and I accepted that Israel was where I was meant to be. And the older I get, the more I believe that none of us are as rational as we would like to believe. The important decisions - who we marry, where we live, how we make a living - are often leaps of faith, based on feelings we can’t ignore.

I grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that enjoyed exceptionally good schools and city services -- and was infamous for having the most segregationist mayor in a northern state. One of his oft-repeated quotes: "I’m not a racist. I just hate those bastards". When I went back for my 12th high school reunion one of my former classmates confessed to being Jewish. While she was growing up in Dearborn her mother had strictly forbidden her to reveal that fact to anyone. 

So, yes, it was an eye-opening journey from Dearborn to Tel Aviv.

Since coming to Israel I have had many jobs, lived in a lot of different places (cities, kibbutzim, and moshavim), and been married to and divorced from two husbands. Life was seldom easy, but I have never regretted making my home here.

The place I lived the longest - and where I raised my children - was in the Katif Bloc in the Gaza Strip. It was there I started to write, on an old Smith-Corona typewriter. I knew the tragic story of what had happened decades earlier, on the eve of Israel’s independence, in a similar bloc of settlements - the Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem. No one had ever written a fictional account of it, but I felt it was “too big” for me to attempt and turned to other stories. 

Then the first intifada broke out and we were - like the settlers of Kfar Etzion - attacked on the roads and under constant threat. But I felt fairly safe; the IDF was there. It made me think again about the people who had chosen to live in Kfar Etzion - and hundreds of other settlements like it - when a Jewish state had seemed like a wild dream. How could they have lived like this but without an army, protected by only a few men and youths with little training and not enough obsolete weapons to go around, and so soon after the Holocaust had made it all too clear that threats of intent to wipe a nation of the face of the earth are not empty? That’s when my first novel, The Lonely Tree, was born. I don’t agree with its heroine, Tonia Shulman, but I understand her perfectly.

I have always kept a strong connection with my family and in writing the Olivia Series am revisiting my roots in Michigan. My ancestors were savers and I finally sifted through the big red box of diaries, letters, deeds, marriage certificates, etc. that for decades had moved with me from apartment to apartment but sat neglected in the corner.

The next book in the series will take me back to Dearborn and I know I will have a great time writing it.

So that’s my schizophrenic life - from the Midwest to the Middle East and back again.

Thank you Yael. I thoroughly enjoyed the first two books in the Olivia series and can't wait for the third. Here's the cover description for Olivia, Mourning :

  

Olivia wants the 80 acres in far off Michigan that her father left to whichever of his offspring wants to stake a claim. As Olivia says, "I'm sprung off him just as much as Avis or Tobey."

The problem: she's seventeen, female, and it's 1841.

Mourning Free knows how to run a farm and Olivia has complete trust in him.

The problem: he’s black, the orphaned son of runaway slaves, and reluctant to travel and work with a white girl. He especially fears the slave catchers who patrol the free states, hunting fugitive slaves.

Not without qualms, they set off together. All goes well, despite the drudgery of survival in an isolated log cabin. Incapable of acknowledging her feelings for Mourning, Olivia thinks her biggest problem is her unrequited romantic interest in their young, single neighbor.

Then her world falls apart.

Strong-willed, vulnerable, and compassionate, Olivia is a compelling protagonist on a journey to find a way to do the right thing in a world in which so much is wrong.

2013 Quarter-Finalist ABNA
2010 Book of the Year YWO

You can buy Olivia, Mourning here: 
 Amazon 
 Barnes and Noble

Now here's the cover description for The Way The World Is:

Detroit Michigan, 1842  -  After the devastating trauma she suffered in Olivia, Mourning and finally knowing the reality with which she must deal, Olivia strives to rebuild herself – emotionally, socially, and financially.

She starts a new life in Detroit, the young and exciting city on a river where she has come to feel at home. New friends help the healing process, while she continues her search for the two people she loves, who have disappeared from her life. She finds the greatest solace in helping fugitive slaves escape over the river to Canada. She believes, as one of her new friends says, “In this time and place it is the most worthy thing a person can do.”

Olivia remains a compelling protagonist on a journey to find a way to do the right thing in a world in which so much is wrong.

You can buy The Way The World Is here: Amazon

You can find out more about Yael HERE