michaelbully
Entertaining Edwardian ghost story, involves a haunted empty house which nobody wants to stay in, let alone buy. And a ceiling starts dripping blood. Is this really crime fiction? Well read.
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Originally serialised in 'The Royal Magazine' between December 1905 and April 1906, but almost completely forgotten since, these five stories chart the adventures of Jack Hargreaves, an estate agent who specialises in dealing with haunted properties, and his "lady assistant" Alwyne Sargent, whose clairvoyant powers prove the key to unravelling the mysteries they encounter.
credits
released May 7, 2022
Read by Simon Stanhope.
There is not a great deal of reliable biographical information available about George Allen Upward (1863–1926). Born of Welsh parentage, he studied law at the Royal University of Ireland in Dublin in the early 1880s. He became a vocal supporter of nationalist causes including Irish Home Rule, composing poetry and journalism for the cause. He attempted to start a political career but was defeated in his attempts to stand for parliament in the Labour interest. Upward was the author of a number of popular but now-forgotten novels, including 'A Crown of Straw' (1896) and 'A Bride's Madness' (1897), and although highly prolific, indeed bestselling, in his day, his work has now fallen into comparative obscurity. (Incidentally he was a cousin of the rather better remembered novelist Edward Upward, 1903–2009.) Allen Upward died of a gunshot wound in November 1926 at the age of 63, apparently self-inflicted, although the exact circumstances are unclear and there has been some speculation as to whether it was suicide or accident, or if any third parties were involved.
Between December 1905 and April 1906, Upward published a series of five short stories in 'The Royal Magazine' under the banner title "The Ghost Hunters", rather grandiosely described as "A New Series of exciting Ghost Stories. They are entirely Different in Conception from Anything of the Kind that has ever been Published before." In fact they are not so very different from many of the ghost stories which were popular in the Edwardian era, but they are of interest inasmuch as they depict a male and female ghost-hunting duo in the shape of the narrator Jack Hargreaves, an estate agent who has ended up specialising in selling haunted houses (making a profit by laying the spirits to rest), and his "lady secretary" Miss Alwyne Sargent, who is a clairvoyant and "sensitive". Hargreaves and Sargent were thus an early example of the Edwardian vogue for "occult detectives", which culminated a few years later with the stories of Hope Hodgson's Carnacki and Algernon Blackwood's John Silence. However, although a couple of the individual stories have occasionally appeared in ghost story anthologies in the 20th century the series as a whole never appeared in book form, and the stories and characters have been rather overlooked.
