Perceval Landon

Perceval Landon (1869–1927) was an English writer, traveller and journalist, now best remembered for his classic and much reprinted ghost story "Thurnley Abbey".

His own family of Landon was of French Huguenot descent, having migrated to London in the 1680s at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

This South African experience launched a career of world travel, journalism, and other writing, so that he described himself in Who's Who as "special correspondent, dramatist, and author".

At a meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in 1915, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, former Viceroy of India, described Landon as "a writer of exceptional ability on Eastern and other questions" and "an authority second to none on the geography and politics of what was commonly called the Middle East.

[10] He was also the author of a book of 13 original short stories, Raw Edges, published by William Heinemann, London, in 1908, with lithograph illustrations by Alberto Martini.

In 1903 he was special correspondent of the Daily Mail at the Delhi Durbar, in China, in Japan and in Siberia; in 1903–1904 he was special correspondent of The Times on the British military expedition to Lhasa, Tibet; in 1905–1906 he was special correspondent of The Times for the Prince of Wales' visit to India; and after that he was in Persia, India, and Nepal, 1908; Russian Turkestan 1909; Egypt and Sudan 1910; on the North Eastern Frontier of India and at the Delhi Durbar, 1911; in Mesopotamia and Syria, 1912; in Scandinavia and behind the British and French lines in 1914–1915; behind the Italian lines and to the Vatican in 1917 (the war and Vatican visits with Kipling[12]); at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919; in Constantinople, 1920; in India, Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine 1921; on the Prince of Wales' tour of India and Japan, 1921–1922; in China and North America 1922; at the Peace Conference in Lausanne, 1923; in China, Nepal and Egypt 1924; and in China in 1925[13] (source except where noted: Who Was Who).

[15] On 22 January 1927, his old friend Rudyard Kipling wrote to his former employer Lord Beauchamp saying Landon had "crocked badly", blaming "exposure and over-work".

He asked Beauchamp to "keep a kindly eye on him" while Kipling was sailing to South America and added, in a postscript, "If when he gets better, he has to go on a milk and egg diet, you could see that he gets good country stuff.

The tale's masterful development of atmosphere is a model of how even clichéd material can be given a new lease of life in the hands of a skilled writer.

Locals believe it, and though the new owner makes light of it, he seems not to be entirely convinced that it is not true, and after arranging for Colvin to stay overnight, asks him to "talk to it" [22] if he sees a ghost.

Raw Edges also included the ghost story "Mrs Rivers's Journal" which Hugh Lamb has reprinted in his anthologies Gaslight Nightmares 2 and "Gaslit Horror".