Of Ghosts and Greatcoats:

M.R. James and the Detective Story

My dear literary spirit,

It’s no accident that the modern ghost story and the detective story emerged together—sharing a birth-century, a fireside, a readership—and an undeniable link to Edgar Allan Poe! But it’s also no accident that Montague Rhodes James, antiquary and master of the supernatural tale, never turned his pen to a Sherlock Holmes-style investigation. That absence tells us as much about James as any specter in his fiction.

Both the ghost story and the detective story are tales of interruption—a sudden break in the pattern of the world. In the Holmes canon, that interruption must be resolved. A mystery arises, and a man in a greatcoat follows a thread until the world knits itself back together. Justice is served (usually); the order is restored (mostly). M.R. James followed the same pattern only to the moment of confrontation—and then stopped. The thread does not lead to comfort but to contact, and once touched, the world is never the same.

This is one of the crucial differences: where the detective story restores equilibrium, the ghost story shifts it. And James knew it. In fact, he said so more than once.

The biography I’m writing, M.R. James: The Chance of a Ghost, outlines James’s own understanding of genre. He dismissed his stories, rather famously, as “light fare for a winter’s evening”—a sincere modesty as distinct from Doyle’s rather grumpy dismissal of Holmes—but James was clear-eyed about structure. He understood that the ghost story, like the detective tale, had to be constructed with precision. He prized the slow revelation, the epistolary fragment, the letter half-burned. Yet unlike the detectives, James’s protagonists are rarely prepared to interpret what they find. They are antiquarians, scholars, wanderers—and often in immediate fear of their lives. Furthermore, the clues are not logical—they are numinous.

The structure resembles detection, but it undermines the very premise. In “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book,” the protagonist uncovers a strange manuscript. He reads, senses something lurking, tries to decipher its meaning—and then nearly dies of fright. There is no resolution. The uncanny persists. The mystery, once opened, cannot be shut. Even when a Jamesian hero manages an act of successful ratiocination, as occurs in “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” the cleverness of the solution is sicklied over with the pale cast of something with legs or arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body.

And yet, for all this divergence, James was a devoted admirer of Sherlock Holmes.

In 1902, as The Hound of the Baskervilles reached its final serialized installment, James—invigilating the Classical Exam at Caius College—wrote to his father with gleeful prediction:

Only one more number of the Hound. You will see that Stapleton will end his days in the Grimpen mire & Sir Henry will marry the widow.

This letter, unpublished until my discovery of it, reveals a Holmes reader not merely entertained but engaged—and almost correct (Sir Henry does not marry the widow).

Eleven days later, with the last chapter still pending, Monty bought the volume edition of The Hound (pictured) and, decades later, remembered with clarity the naughty-guilty moment of playing hooky: slipping away from the university procession on Lady Day (25 March) with a colleague to hide out in his rooms in order to read the conclusion. The episode remained vivid a quarter century on when he delighted in recollecting it in his autobiographical Eton and Kings.

James would, six years later, nod to Conan Doyle in a subtler but unmistakable way. In “Casting the Runes,” written in 1908, he names the servants’ attending physician “Dr. Watson, a rather recent settler” to the area. The name stands unadorned, but its resonance is hard to miss. That same autumn, Doyle had published “The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge” in The Strand—in two parts, during September and October—just when Monty would have been composing his own tale. The overlap is too alluring to ignore. (We can dream, can’t we, that the redoubtable John H. Watson made a cameo appearance in one of Monty’s most celebrated ghost stories?)

This admiration was not ironic. James delighted in the economy of the Holmes tales, their elegance of construction. He shared Conan Doyle’s distaste for excessive sentimentalism and his preference for the clipped phrase, the dry detail, the quiet man stepping forward with a problem no one else can solve.

But James refused the finality of solution. That was the point.

In a Holmes story, the supernatural is always a red herring. The glowing hound, the vampire of Sussex, the spectral, yellow face at the window, Bartholomew Sholto’s uncanny rictus and fixed, unnatural grin—these dissolve under Holmes’s lens. There is always a trick. Always a man behind the curtain (except when it is a creeping man, but we’ll not go there).

James reverses this. In his stories, it is the rational explanation that is false, and the supernatural that endures. Holmes reveals the order behind the illusion; James reveals the illusion behind the order. And there is no summing up as found in Baker Street—only the chilling realisation at a seaside inn or lamp-dark chamber.

The scholar in the James tale is not a logician. He is not master of events. He is more often a reader—sometimes literally—who turns a page and finds that the ink has bled into something living. He is as the hapless wanderer who, innocently turning a stone, finds a coiled serpent wagging a threatening tail.

It is not, as some critics suggest, that James lacked interest in detection. He simply recognized that detection closes a door, while haunting leaves it uncomfortably ajar.

In this way, James’s stories are no less constructed than Doyle’s—quite the contrary—but they are constructed to unnerve, not to resolve. Consider, for example, his “Rats” wherein the only gesture towards resolution is reclosing the door—but too late. Both authors wrote tales best read aloud. Both men built narrative devices around quiet rooms and long shadows. But, where Doyle seeks justice, James seeks judgment. That is not the same thing.

So if the detective story is about what happened, the ghost story, in James’s hands, is about what cannot be undone. He leaves us there, just beyond the glow of the lamplight, where something rustles softly that ought not to be moving at all.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan