The Alabaster Hand (1949) by A.N.L. Munby

 

M.R. James remains the greatest writer of the classic British ghost story. He also influenced a whole group of writers in what is often called the Jamesian tradition. Except for those by James himself, I haven’t read many better short stories in this tradition than those by A.N.L. Munby in his collection The Alabaster Hand (1949). Like many ghost stories in the Jamesian tradition, these stories are about England’s bad history. It won’t stay dead and keeps revealing its ghosts, with unpleasant consequences for the present.

As the brief foreword makes clear, all the stories were written while Munby was a prisoner of war in a German POW camp. Several of them first appeared in a magazine produced in the camp called Touchstone. I imagine that writing about dangers in the history of your own country might help take your mind temporarily off being imprisoned in the dangers of the present in another country.

The stories maintain a high level of quality throughout. A few of the ones that made the most impression on me are “Herodes Redivivus,” “The Alabaster Hand,” “The Topley Place Sale,” “The Tudor Chimney,” “The Negro’s Head” (nearly the only classic British ghost story that deals with racism), “An Encounter In The Mist”  (with one of the more original ghosts in this kind of tale), and “The Lectern.”

Sadly, I can’t recommend the quality of this $15 2023 Incunabula edition. It’s poorly copy-edited, in an obvious rush for whatever small cash grab might be found from reissuing a dusty book of ghost stories. Typos are everywhere, several a page sometimes, although none of them really make the stories less possible to read. But they’re very annoying. Still, this is the only edition of The Alabaster Hand that’s currently easy to get, and I’d rather read these stories in this flawed volume than not at all. They are a very significant piece of the history of British ghost stories.