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The Occult Files of Francis Chard: Some Ghost Stories
This is the second of Ash-Tree Press's series of the collected supernatural fiction of A.M. Burrage, who has long been one of the most popular ghost story writers of the century. This volume contains all thirteen tales from Burrage's first collection, 1927's Some Ghost Stories'. Also included are a further thirteen stories, none of which have been published in book form before. Two of the stories feature Derek Scarfe, the man who made haunted houses his hobby', while ten chronicle the adventures of the occult detective Francis Chard. There is also a 10,000-word novella, The House by the Crossroads', set at the time of the Crimean War. The volume is introduced by Jack Adrian, and features a cover illustration by Douglas Walters. An Ash-Tree Press Limited Edition.
278 pages, Hardcover
First published December 3, 2013
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About the author
A.M. Burrage
134 books31 followersAlfred McLelland Burrage (1889-1956) was a British writer. He was noted in his time as an author of fiction for boys which he published under the pseudonym Frank Lelland, including a popular series called "Tufty". Burrage is now remembered mainly for his horror fiction.
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Source: Wikipedia
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January 28, 2022I've been reading a bunch of Burrage recently as we prep for next year's PSEUDOPOD podcast "Public Domain Showcase" and Burrage had a number of stories go into the PD next year. Burrage strikes me as an English ghost story writer in the Benson/Wakefield mold - not as consistent as the former but not as formulaic as the latter. Well, I say "not as formulaic" but then, we have to deal with a whole book of the adventures of his "series character" Francis Chard, occult detective/ghost hunter.
Francis Chard is that most typically unsatisfying of characters, the "Occult Detective/Ghost Hunter" - not as annoying as Quinn's Jules De Grandin (the peppery and punch-able little Frenchman), Chard is more colorless and milquetoast - he's not as vaguely proactive as Hodgson's Carnacki (no obscure occultic BS and electric pentacles here), nor a Spiritualist/Theosophist like Fortune's Tarvener. He's more like Blackwood's John Silence - a low-key know-it-all who rarely succeeds in directly effecting any change. As I say in my reviews below - "psychic detectives never solve things, they just explain them..."
"The Hiding Hole" - Chard is asked by a member of a wealthy family to try and solve why one bedroom of their manor home (where many Catholic priests had hidden during the "bad old times") causes those who sleep there to wake feeling as if they are suffocating. The answer won't surprise you! No, no it won't - not only did I figure this out about 3 pages in, after the extended discussion of the presumed "escape tunnel" from back in the day that can't be located. 2+2 = 4, but, as always, the story places its weight on solving the supposed mystery, and none on building any atmosphere. Poor.
In "The Pit In The Garden" - Chard and his characterless "Watson" Torrance, are invited to a country inn by a working class couple who are experiencing odd phenomena (like a spectral force that peeks in at them and tries to assault them), even though they don't believe in ghosts. As usual, Chard figures it out easily... Slightly better but still pretty average. The frustrating thing about these occult detective tales is that they play like ghost detective stories but the ghost stuff is never presented atmospherically, so it's not effective or scary, and the detective stuff is perfunctory and not-so-much "solvable" as easily guessed at. The worst of both worlds?
"The Affair At Penbilo" - Chard & Torrance are called to remote Cornwall to investigate the residence of a man who, in attempting to alleviate his loneliness (after having lost his sister), opened his house and invited spirits in hopes her ghost would return, but something malignant seems to have come in instead - and this invisible, hateful force (that makes him dream of monkeys) may be tied to the house's history. Well, this is a little better than the previous, mostly because the "threat" (while never direct) is effectively brought across as scary and a little time is at least spent on making the reader understand how disconcerting it would have to be to deal with such a thing. In the end, of course, the solution is not anything we could have known, but, again, at least there is a confrontation at the climax. A solution, as always, comes after the end of the story, because psychic detectives never solve things, they just explain them...
"The Third Visitation" - Chard and Torrance investigate a man whose family has a legend of a female death-specter - see her 3 times and adios - and as his extended family has recently seen the ghost twice already, he's thinking of killing himself before the third appearance... Eh. It seems that every late 19th/early 20th Ghost Hunter series must feature a story like this (much like William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki The Ghost Finder in "The House Among The Laurels"), a story that proves their bona-fides as logical detectives and not just credulous dupes. Eh.
"The Woman With Three Eyes" - a very modern house is being haunted by two very modern looking specters - a leering man with a big mustache and an overly made-up peroxide blonde with a third eye in the middle of her forehead. Chard and Torrance investigate (sigh)... Well, this was okay, in that the figures themselves seem somewhat frightening (it's not a "third eye", btw) and Torrance even encounters one - but the ending is one of these "I've figured it out, it's [fill-in-blank]... now... let's leave this to professionals" [exorcists, we assume] and so the duo just bolt. Eh.
"The Soldier" - a man retires to a new coastal home where he watches ships with his telescope, until one night he spies an obviously dead man, a ghost, knocking at the door of his servant's cottage. So he calls in Chard, who shows up and gets kind of an answer... So, there's two things wrong with this story - one, it follows the usual pattern of "occult detective" stories where an "expert" is called in to solve a "mystery," so the "story" is already prescribed in a sense and there's not much atmosphere. Second, the reason Chard isn't any help is which is a little too reactionary old-school even for me. Eh.
"The Tryst" - a popular young singer/actress/entertainer contacts Chard because the boy who she had a fling with (who later committed suicide after she wouldn't marry him) has appeared to her and said he would come to take her with him in one week at midnight. So one week later, they sit and wait. This is, in one sense, slightly better because the climax is effective. On the other hand, you also get the stiff moralizing of "the better class" (the "cheap young woman" is little more than a harlot/prostitute in the eyes of Chard and Torrance) and, once again, this weird impotence of Chard - essentially admitting early on that if the dead suitor isn't a hallucination or manifestation of a guilty conscience (but, our lowly starlet "HAS no conscience," being that type/who she is, of course) than there's really nothing he can do. What a mish-mosh.
"The Bungalow at Shammerton" - Chard & Torrance are deliberately left in the dark as to what form a haunting at a riverside bungalow in a sinful vacation spot takes, so as to investigate and decide for themselves. They do, it does, they are told a story about the previous owner - end of story. While the water-soaked, bloated drowned ghost in this is quite effectively done - Torrance flees the room and collapses at Chard's bed! - and the setting is nicely evoked (backwater party spot), this has a bit of casual antisemitism and the usual, weirdly impotent ending (in the "well, there's your answer" mode).
"The Protector" - a school seems to be haunted by the benign ghost of a student with no family who died on the rugby pitch. But Chard and Torrance discover the ghost boy is actually trying to protect his school from a dangerous interloper. Once again, occasional nice atmosphere, some good details (the intermittent sound quality of phone calls seems to have been a recurrent annoyance for Burrage) but, I swear, it's like these stories are calculated to make you wonder why the hell anyone calls Chard, since he can never seem to DO ANYTHING, even when he figures out the problem. Still, not terrible.
"The Girl In Blue" - Chard reveals how he first came to believe in, and become interested in ghosts - which comes down to a period of illness in his young adulthood wherein he was attended by a nurse and pretty nurse's assistant, who then didn't seem to exist... Sentimental ghost story, but at least slightly interesting for humanizing our main Chard, somewhat.
Eminently missable!
Francis Chard is that most typically unsatisfying of characters, the "Occult Detective/Ghost Hunter" - not as annoying as Quinn's Jules De Grandin (the peppery and punch-able little Frenchman), Chard is more colorless and milquetoast - he's not as vaguely proactive as Hodgson's Carnacki (no obscure occultic BS and electric pentacles here), nor a Spiritualist/Theosophist like Fortune's Tarvener. He's more like Blackwood's John Silence - a low-key know-it-all who rarely succeeds in directly effecting any change. As I say in my reviews below - "psychic detectives never solve things, they just explain them..."
"The Hiding Hole" - Chard is asked by a member of a wealthy family to try and solve why one bedroom of their manor home (where many Catholic priests had hidden during the "bad old times") causes those who sleep there to wake feeling as if they are suffocating. The answer won't surprise you! No, no it won't - not only did I figure this out about 3 pages in, after the extended discussion of the presumed "escape tunnel" from back in the day that can't be located. 2+2 = 4, but, as always, the story places its weight on solving the supposed mystery, and none on building any atmosphere. Poor.
In "The Pit In The Garden" - Chard and his characterless "Watson" Torrance, are invited to a country inn by a working class couple who are experiencing odd phenomena (like a spectral force that peeks in at them and tries to assault them), even though they don't believe in ghosts. As usual, Chard figures it out easily... Slightly better but still pretty average. The frustrating thing about these occult detective tales is that they play like ghost detective stories but the ghost stuff is never presented atmospherically, so it's not effective or scary, and the detective stuff is perfunctory and not-so-much "solvable" as easily guessed at. The worst of both worlds?
"The Affair At Penbilo" - Chard & Torrance are called to remote Cornwall to investigate the residence of a man who, in attempting to alleviate his loneliness (after having lost his sister), opened his house and invited spirits in hopes her ghost would return, but something malignant seems to have come in instead - and this invisible, hateful force (that makes him dream of monkeys) may be tied to the house's history. Well, this is a little better than the previous, mostly because the "threat" (while never direct) is effectively brought across as scary and a little time is at least spent on making the reader understand how disconcerting it would have to be to deal with such a thing. In the end, of course, the solution is not anything we could have known, but, again, at least there is a confrontation at the climax. A solution, as always, comes after the end of the story, because psychic detectives never solve things, they just explain them...
"The Third Visitation" - Chard and Torrance investigate a man whose family has a legend of a female death-specter - see her 3 times and adios - and as his extended family has recently seen the ghost twice already, he's thinking of killing himself before the third appearance... Eh. It seems that every late 19th/early 20th Ghost Hunter series must feature a story like this (much like William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki The Ghost Finder in "The House Among The Laurels"), a story that proves their bona-fides as logical detectives and not just credulous dupes. Eh.
"The Woman With Three Eyes" - a very modern house is being haunted by two very modern looking specters - a leering man with a big mustache and an overly made-up peroxide blonde with a third eye in the middle of her forehead. Chard and Torrance investigate (sigh)... Well, this was okay, in that the figures themselves seem somewhat frightening (it's not a "third eye", btw) and Torrance even encounters one - but the ending is one of these "I've figured it out, it's [fill-in-blank]... now... let's leave this to professionals" [exorcists, we assume] and so the duo just bolt. Eh.
"The Soldier" - a man retires to a new coastal home where he watches ships with his telescope, until one night he spies an obviously dead man, a ghost, knocking at the door of his servant's cottage. So he calls in Chard, who shows up and gets kind of an answer... So, there's two things wrong with this story - one, it follows the usual pattern of "occult detective" stories where an "expert" is called in to solve a "mystery," so the "story" is already prescribed in a sense and there's not much atmosphere. Second, the reason Chard isn't any help is which is a little too reactionary old-school even for me. Eh.
"The Tryst" - a popular young singer/actress/entertainer contacts Chard because the boy who she had a fling with (who later committed suicide after she wouldn't marry him) has appeared to her and said he would come to take her with him in one week at midnight. So one week later, they sit and wait. This is, in one sense, slightly better because the climax is effective. On the other hand, you also get the stiff moralizing of "the better class" (the "cheap young woman" is little more than a harlot/prostitute in the eyes of Chard and Torrance) and, once again, this weird impotence of Chard - essentially admitting early on that if the dead suitor isn't a hallucination or manifestation of a guilty conscience (but, our lowly starlet "HAS no conscience," being that type/who she is, of course) than there's really nothing he can do. What a mish-mosh.
"The Bungalow at Shammerton" - Chard & Torrance are deliberately left in the dark as to what form a haunting at a riverside bungalow in a sinful vacation spot takes, so as to investigate and decide for themselves. They do, it does, they are told a story about the previous owner - end of story. While the water-soaked, bloated drowned ghost in this is quite effectively done - Torrance flees the room and collapses at Chard's bed! - and the setting is nicely evoked (backwater party spot), this has a bit of casual antisemitism and the usual, weirdly impotent ending (in the "well, there's your answer" mode).
"The Protector" - a school seems to be haunted by the benign ghost of a student with no family who died on the rugby pitch. But Chard and Torrance discover the ghost boy is actually trying to protect his school from a dangerous interloper. Once again, occasional nice atmosphere, some good details (the intermittent sound quality of phone calls seems to have been a recurrent annoyance for Burrage) but, I swear, it's like these stories are calculated to make you wonder why the hell anyone calls Chard, since he can never seem to DO ANYTHING, even when he figures out the problem. Still, not terrible.
"The Girl In Blue" - Chard reveals how he first came to believe in, and become interested in ghosts - which comes down to a period of illness in his young adulthood wherein he was attended by a nurse and pretty nurse's assistant, who then didn't seem to exist... Sentimental ghost story, but at least slightly interesting for humanizing our main Chard, somewhat.
Eminently missable!
July 31, 2025
✭✭✭
“The Affair at Penbillo” (1927) ✭✭
“The Pit in the Garden” (1927) ✭✭½
“The Woman with Three Eyes” (1927) ✭✭½
“The Third Visitation” (1927) ✭½
“The Girl in Blue” (1927) ✭✭✭½
“The Bungalow at Shammerton” (1927) ✭✭✭✭
“The Protector” (1927) ✭✭½
“The Soldier” (1927) ✭✭½
“The Hiding Hole” (1927) ✭✭
“The Tryst” (1927) ✭✭½
“Playmates” (1927) ✭✭✭✭
“The Room Over the Kitchen” (1923) ✭✭✭½
“The Green Scarf” (1926) ✭✭
“The Wrong Station” (1916) ✭✭✭✭
“The Gamblers’ Room” (1926) ✭✭
“The Summer-House” (1922) ✭✭✭
“The Yellow Curtains” (1927) ✭✭✭✭
“Nobody’s House” (1927) ✭½
“Between the Minute and the Hour” (1922) ✭✭✭✭
“Footprints” (1912) ✭✭✭
“Browdean Farm” (1927) ✭✭✭½
“Furze Hollow” (1923) ✭✭✭
“Wrastler’s End” (1926) ✭✭✭
“The House by the Crossroads” (1913) ✭✭✭
“The Severed Head” (1920) ✭✭
“The House of Treburyan” (1920) ✭✭
“The Affair at Penbillo” (1927) ✭✭
“The Pit in the Garden” (1927) ✭✭½
“The Woman with Three Eyes” (1927) ✭✭½
“The Third Visitation” (1927) ✭½
“The Girl in Blue” (1927) ✭✭✭½
“The Bungalow at Shammerton” (1927) ✭✭✭✭
“The Protector” (1927) ✭✭½
“The Soldier” (1927) ✭✭½
“The Hiding Hole” (1927) ✭✭
“The Tryst” (1927) ✭✭½
“Playmates” (1927) ✭✭✭✭
“The Room Over the Kitchen” (1923) ✭✭✭½
“The Green Scarf” (1926) ✭✭
“The Wrong Station” (1916) ✭✭✭✭
“The Gamblers’ Room” (1926) ✭✭
“The Summer-House” (1922) ✭✭✭
“The Yellow Curtains” (1927) ✭✭✭✭
“Nobody’s House” (1927) ✭½
“Between the Minute and the Hour” (1922) ✭✭✭✭
“Footprints” (1912) ✭✭✭
“Browdean Farm” (1927) ✭✭✭½
“Furze Hollow” (1923) ✭✭✭
“Wrastler’s End” (1926) ✭✭✭
“The House by the Crossroads” (1913) ✭✭✭
“The Severed Head” (1920) ✭✭
“The House of Treburyan” (1920) ✭✭
August 4, 2017
I'm a huge fan of A.M. Burrage's ghost stories and was happy to get ahold of more. A great little collection for sure.
February 21, 2018
Modest-scale spooky mystery tales from a short story master.
May 8, 2023
No more than a stisfactory collection; certainly nothing like the calibre of The Little Blue Flames and other uncanny tales.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews