H. Russell Wakefield

Herbert Russell Wakefield (1888 – 2 August 1964)[1] was an English short-story writer, novelist, publisher, and civil servant chiefly remembered today for his ghost stories.

A series of collections comprising his complete output of published ghost stories were produced in the 1990s by Ash-Tree Press in limited editions that quickly went out of print.

He was greatly interested in the criminal mind and wrote two non-fiction criminology studies, The Green Bicycle Case (1930) (about a 1919 death in Leicestershire) and Landru: The French Bluebeard (1936).

In 1968, BBC Television produced a dramatization of Wakefield's supernatural story "The Triumph of Death", starring Claire Bloom and now thought to have been wiped, for the series Late Night Horror.

August Derleth called him "the last major representative of a ghost story tradition that began with Sheridan Le Fanu and reached its peak with Montague Rhodes James".

"[6] M. R. James himself was slightly more reserved in his praise, calling They Return at Evening "a mixed bag, from which I should remove one or two that leave a nasty taste" but also saying the book had "some admirable pieces, very inventive".

The majority of it exists in reprints of his collections, in brief articles in reference books, and in surveys such as Jack Sullivan's Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (1978).