Herbert Russell Wakefield
Life and career
Herbert Russell Wakefield (1888–1964) was an English author and publishing editor best remembered for supernatural short fiction. He studied modern history at Oxford, worked as a secretary to Lord Northcliffe, and served in the Royal Scots Fusiliers during the First World War. They Return at Evening, published in 1928, was his first ghost-story collection and included stories that helped establish his reputation. He also wrote crime fiction and radio drama. His ghost stories invite close attention to the point at which familiar social routines cease to protect a character from danger, and to the evidence through which an unsettling possibility becomes credible.
The uncanny beside confident respectability
Wakefield can begin with a voice that considers itself reasonable and let its own account expose a disturbing gap. Supernatural expectation does not replace social observation. Reputation, local standing and the desire to justify oneself can all become sources of unease. The collection's separate stories invite comparison among different ways an apparently secure ordinary world begins to lose its authority.
They return at evening A book of ghost stories
They Return at Evening gathers ten stories, including That Dieth Not, The Red Lodge and The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster. The opening of That Dieth Not immediately complicates the trust a first-person voice might invite: its narrator admits killing his wife while presenting himself through the assurances of local respectability and personal decency. Wakefield does not need an unfamiliar setting to make the account unsettling. The distance between an action and the explanation offered for it already creates pressure. The 1928 collection can be read one story at a time, with attention to how each establishes a witness and a plausible world before disturbing the relationship between them.
Listen to the assurance
When a narrator insists on being decent or sensible, compare that description with the action just admitted. What does the voice expect the reader to excuse? Let the opening establish its own terms rather than anticipating a particular supernatural explanation. Across the collection, notice whether uncertainty arises from an event, a witness or the confidence with which an interpretation is offered.