H. Russell Wakefield

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

Wakefield was the third of four children of the clergyman Henry Russell Wakefield, who would become bishop of Birmingham in 1911. Born in Kent, he was educated at Marlborough College before attending University College, Oxford, where he took second-class honours in modern history and played first-class cricket, golf, hockey and football. From 1912 to 1914 he was secretary to Viscount Northcliffe; he then served with the Royal Scots Fusiliers in France and the Balkans during World War I, attaining the rank of captain. During the war Wakefield called on the British government to use Chinese workers to assist the UK war effort.

Wakefield served as his father's secretary in 1920, when he accompanied the bishop on a lengthy tour of America. There he met and married Barbara Standish Waldo, an American woman whose parents were reputed to be wealthy. The Wakefields settled in London, where Wakefield went to work as a chief editor for the book publisher William Collins, Sons and Co., and she worked as a nurse. They were divorced in 1936, and in 1946 Wakefield was married again, to Jessica Sidney Davey. His experiences in the publishing world provided him with background material for several unusual and eerie tales, including "Messrs Turkes and Talbot."

Shortly before he died, Wakefield's wife wrote August Derleth that her husband had destroyed his correspondence files, manuscripts and all photographs of himself.

Wakefield's ghost stories were published in several collections during the course of his lengthy writing career: They Return at Evening (1928), Old Man's Beard: Fifteen Disturbing Tales (1929), Imagine a Man in a Box (1931), Ghost Stories (1932), A Ghostly Company (1935), The Clock Strikes Twelve: Tales of the Supernatural (1940), and Strayers from Sheol (1961). In 1946, August Derleth's Arkham House issued an expanded version of The Clock Strikes Twelve for the U.S. market; they were also the publishers of Strayers from Sheol. In 1978, John Murray published The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield, edited by Richard Dalby, which spanned Wakefield's career and featured some previously uncollected tales. A series of collections comprising his complete output of published ghost stories was produced in the 1990s by Ash-Tree Press in limited editions that quickly went out of print. Ash-Tree also published a volume of previously unpublished stories, Reunion at Dawn and Other Uncollected Ghost Stories, in 2000.

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