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Double Eye
William Fryer Harvey (1885-1937), a Leeds-born Quaker and World War One hero, is remembered today for a handful of superlative uncanny and enigmatic tales, notably 'August Heat', 'Miss Cornelius', 'The Ankardyne Pew' and 'The Beast with Five Fingers', the latter made into a classic horror film in 1946 starring Peter Lorre. Harvey was acclaimed in the Times Literary Supplement in 1955 as one of the greatest ghost story writers of the twentieth century alongside M.R. James and Walter de la Mare.
A doctor of medicine by profession, Harvey drew heavily on the new psychiatric lore of the irrational subconscious, creating a lingering uncertainty in the reader's mind. Harvey is a master of the inconclusive or psychological ghost story, and his sardonic fantasies often come close to the genius of Saki. He occasionally attempted a more traditional ghost story, the earliest example being 'Across the Moors'.
This volume brings together all thirty of Harvey's uncanny tales, and his curious Introduction to Moods and Tenses. The collection is a feast of thrills, chills and uneasy entertainment for lovers of the supernatural story.
A doctor of medicine by profession, Harvey drew heavily on the new psychiatric lore of the irrational subconscious, creating a lingering uncertainty in the reader's mind. Harvey is a master of the inconclusive or psychological ghost story, and his sardonic fantasies often come close to the genius of Saki. He occasionally attempted a more traditional ghost story, the earliest example being 'Across the Moors'.
This volume brings together all thirty of Harvey's uncanny tales, and his curious Introduction to Moods and Tenses. The collection is a feast of thrills, chills and uneasy entertainment for lovers of the supernatural story.
- GenresHorrorShort Stories
303 pages, Hardcover
First published June 29, 2009
2 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
About the author
W.F. Harvey
214 books31 followersWilliam Fryer Harvey was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the macabre and horror genres. Among his best-known stories are "August Heat" and "The Beast with Five Fingers", described by horror historian Les Daniels as "minor masterpieces".
Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Yorkshire, he attended the Quaker schools at Bootham in Yorkshire and at Leighton Park in Reading before going on to Balliol College, Oxford. He took a degree in medicine at Leeds. Ill health dogged him, however, and he devoted himself to personal projects such as his first book of short stories, Midnight House (1910).
In World War I he initially joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but later served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving.[4] Lung damage received during the rescue leading to the award troubled him for the rest of his life, but he continued to write both short stories and his cheerful and good-natured memoir We Were Seven.
Harvey was a practicising Quaker.
Before the war he had shown interest in adult education, on the staff of the Working Men's College, Fircroft, Selly Oak, Birmingham. He returned to Fircroft in 1920, becoming Warden, but by 1925 ill-health forced his retirement. In 1928 he published a second collection of short stories, The Beast with Five Fingers, and in 1933 he published a third, Moods and Tenses. He lived in Switzerland with his wife for much of this time, but nostalgia for his home country caused his return to England. He moved to Letchworth in 1935 and died there in 1937 at the age of 52. After a funeral service at the local Friends Meeting House Harvey was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin in Old Letchworth.
The release of the film The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), directed by Robert Florey and starring Peter Lorre, inspired by what was perhaps his most famous and praised short story, caused a resurgence of interest in Harvey's work. In 1951 a posthumous fourth collection of his stories, The Arm of Mrs Egan and Other Stories, appeared, including a set of twelve stories left in manuscript at the time of his death, headed "Twelve Strange Cases".
In 2009 Wordsworth Editions printed an omnibus volume of Harvey's stories, titled The Beast with Five Fingers, in its Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series (ISBN 978-1-84022-179-4). The volume contains 45 stories and an introduction by David Stuart Davies.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._F....]
Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Yorkshire, he attended the Quaker schools at Bootham in Yorkshire and at Leighton Park in Reading before going on to Balliol College, Oxford. He took a degree in medicine at Leeds. Ill health dogged him, however, and he devoted himself to personal projects such as his first book of short stories, Midnight House (1910).
In World War I he initially joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit, but later served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving.[4] Lung damage received during the rescue leading to the award troubled him for the rest of his life, but he continued to write both short stories and his cheerful and good-natured memoir We Were Seven.
Harvey was a practicising Quaker.
Before the war he had shown interest in adult education, on the staff of the Working Men's College, Fircroft, Selly Oak, Birmingham. He returned to Fircroft in 1920, becoming Warden, but by 1925 ill-health forced his retirement. In 1928 he published a second collection of short stories, The Beast with Five Fingers, and in 1933 he published a third, Moods and Tenses. He lived in Switzerland with his wife for much of this time, but nostalgia for his home country caused his return to England. He moved to Letchworth in 1935 and died there in 1937 at the age of 52. After a funeral service at the local Friends Meeting House Harvey was buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin in Old Letchworth.
The release of the film The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), directed by Robert Florey and starring Peter Lorre, inspired by what was perhaps his most famous and praised short story, caused a resurgence of interest in Harvey's work. In 1951 a posthumous fourth collection of his stories, The Arm of Mrs Egan and Other Stories, appeared, including a set of twelve stories left in manuscript at the time of his death, headed "Twelve Strange Cases".
In 2009 Wordsworth Editions printed an omnibus volume of Harvey's stories, titled The Beast with Five Fingers, in its Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural series (ISBN 978-1-84022-179-4). The volume contains 45 stories and an introduction by David Stuart Davies.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._F....]
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 16, 2020
42 SHORT STORIES IN 42 DAYS*
DAY 38: The Beast With Five Fingers
I expected an old-school supernatural tale, but this was stranger than I bargained for, with an atmosphere that was most peculiar.
*The rules:
– Read one short story a day, every day for six weeks
– Read no more than one story by the same author within any 14-day period
– Deliberately include authors I wouldn't usually read
– Review each story in one sentence or less
DAY 38: The Beast With Five Fingers
I expected an old-school supernatural tale, but this was stranger than I bargained for, with an atmosphere that was most peculiar.
*The rules:
– Read one short story a day, every day for six weeks
– Read no more than one story by the same author within any 14-day period
– Deliberately include authors I wouldn't usually read
– Review each story in one sentence or less
May 17, 2023
3.5⭐
A medical doctor by profession, William Fryer Harvey wrote stories which drew heavily on the irrational subconscious, which create a lingering uncertainty in the reader's mind. Harvey is a proponent of the inconclusive or psychological ghost story.
Introduction by Richard Dalby ✔️
Midnight House 2⭐
The Star 2.75⭐
Across the Moors 4⭐
August Heat 5⭐
Sambo 5⭐
Unwinding 3.5⭐
Sarah Bennet’s Possession 2⭐
The Tortoise 3.5⭐
The Beast with Five Fingers 4⭐
Six to Six-Thirty 3.5⭐
Blinds 3.5⭐
Miss Cornelius 3.25⭐
The Heart of the Fire 4⭐
Peter Levisham 3.5⭐
The Clock 4⭐
Ghosts and Jossers 2⭐
The Sleeping Major 2.25⭐
The Ankardyne Pew 2.5⭐
The Tool 4⭐
The Devil’s Bridge 4⭐
Two and a Third 2.5⭐
Miss Avenal 3.5⭐
The Double Eye 4⭐
The Dabblers 2.75⭐
Mrs. Ormerod 4.5⭐
The Follower 2.5⭐
The Man Who Hated Aspidistras 4.5⭐
Double Demon 4⭐
The Arm of Mrs. Egan 4⭐
Account Rendered 4⭐
The Flying Out of Mrs. Barnard Hollis 3.5⭐
The Habeas Corpus Club 3⭐
A medical doctor by profession, William Fryer Harvey wrote stories which drew heavily on the irrational subconscious, which create a lingering uncertainty in the reader's mind. Harvey is a proponent of the inconclusive or psychological ghost story.
Introduction by Richard Dalby ✔️
Midnight House 2⭐
The Star 2.75⭐
Across the Moors 4⭐
August Heat 5⭐
Sambo 5⭐
Unwinding 3.5⭐
Sarah Bennet’s Possession 2⭐
The Tortoise 3.5⭐
The Beast with Five Fingers 4⭐
Six to Six-Thirty 3.5⭐
Blinds 3.5⭐
Miss Cornelius 3.25⭐
The Heart of the Fire 4⭐
Peter Levisham 3.5⭐
The Clock 4⭐
Ghosts and Jossers 2⭐
The Sleeping Major 2.25⭐
The Ankardyne Pew 2.5⭐
The Tool 4⭐
The Devil’s Bridge 4⭐
Two and a Third 2.5⭐
Miss Avenal 3.5⭐
The Double Eye 4⭐
The Dabblers 2.75⭐
Mrs. Ormerod 4.5⭐
The Follower 2.5⭐
The Man Who Hated Aspidistras 4.5⭐
Double Demon 4⭐
The Arm of Mrs. Egan 4⭐
Account Rendered 4⭐
The Flying Out of Mrs. Barnard Hollis 3.5⭐
The Habeas Corpus Club 3⭐
August 29, 2016
W F Harvey’s most famous tale is “The Beast With Five Fingers”, about a man hounded by a severed hand. It’s not his most characteristic offering, though, in that it’s about something that’s explicitly horrific, and surely supernatural, even if its prime victim doesn’t seem to think so:
“There’s nothing supernatural about that hand, Saunders. I mean it seems to be governed by the laws of time and space. It’s not the sort of thing that vanishes into thin air or slides through oaken doors. And since that’s so, I defy it to get in here.”
It’s a surprisingly unghostly tale, perhaps because nobody bothers themselves wondering about the forces that may be behind a severed human hand scuttling about the place — it’s not so much about the undead nature of the hand, as its physicality. The reaction the hand (and the tale) provokes is familiar to arachnophobes the world over, that combination of squeamishness, terror, and pity you feel when faced with a sudden spider, and you swipe at it in a panic with the nearest implement, or watch helplessly as it disappears behind a bookcase:
“About ten yards in front of him, crawling along the floor, was a man’s hand. Eustace stared at it in utter astonishment. It was moving quickly, in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crab-like motion to the whole.”
Harvey writes tales rather than stories — things that hinge on twists of plot rather than subtleties of character. Some of the early tales have a wonderfully lean efficiency, ending in such a way as to leave you thinking a moment before the penny drops (as opposed to the Lovecraftian ending spelling it out in lurid italics!). The tales tend to be clever rather than moving, but there are a few poignant ones. “Ghosts and Jossers”, for instance, in which three boys take shelter in a ruined tower and find a man there who invites them to play a word game. All three lose their bouts, but are left with a losing word that means nothing to them at the time, but whose meaning is both obvious and chilling to the reader.
Generally, Harvey is interested in psychology — obsessions and fears — rather than the supernatural, though he often uses ghosts and the like to get at that psychology. In “Miss Cornelius”, the protagonist is brought into a house experiencing poltergeist activity, and quickly accuses the titular old lady of producing it by sleight-of-hand, though not necessarily consciously. Afterwards, feeling sorry for hurting her feelings, he encourages his wife to befriend the old lady, and soon the poltergeist activity starts up in his own house. (Old ladies persecuting the protagonists is a bit of a Harvey theme.) Meanwhile, there’s a Machen-ish air of debased but surviving ritual to “The Dabblers”, about a perennial tradition of weird nightly singing among schoolboys.
A lot of Harvey’s tales are about conventional ghosts (murder victims, mostly) haunting unconventionally (as a tortoise, for instance), or the lengths the haunted victims will go to avoid their persecuting ghosts. Others are about coincidences, predictions and blank spots in memory, usually centring around deaths and murders. Harvey isn’t often creepy so much as clever or darkly funny; there’s no sense of a supernatural order behind his ghosts and strange happenings, but he’s fun and readable, for those who like a twisted tale. And there are a few that hit a genuine weird note.
“There’s nothing supernatural about that hand, Saunders. I mean it seems to be governed by the laws of time and space. It’s not the sort of thing that vanishes into thin air or slides through oaken doors. And since that’s so, I defy it to get in here.”
It’s a surprisingly unghostly tale, perhaps because nobody bothers themselves wondering about the forces that may be behind a severed human hand scuttling about the place — it’s not so much about the undead nature of the hand, as its physicality. The reaction the hand (and the tale) provokes is familiar to arachnophobes the world over, that combination of squeamishness, terror, and pity you feel when faced with a sudden spider, and you swipe at it in a panic with the nearest implement, or watch helplessly as it disappears behind a bookcase:
“About ten yards in front of him, crawling along the floor, was a man’s hand. Eustace stared at it in utter astonishment. It was moving quickly, in the manner of a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crab-like motion to the whole.”
Harvey writes tales rather than stories — things that hinge on twists of plot rather than subtleties of character. Some of the early tales have a wonderfully lean efficiency, ending in such a way as to leave you thinking a moment before the penny drops (as opposed to the Lovecraftian ending spelling it out in lurid italics!). The tales tend to be clever rather than moving, but there are a few poignant ones. “Ghosts and Jossers”, for instance, in which three boys take shelter in a ruined tower and find a man there who invites them to play a word game. All three lose their bouts, but are left with a losing word that means nothing to them at the time, but whose meaning is both obvious and chilling to the reader.
Generally, Harvey is interested in psychology — obsessions and fears — rather than the supernatural, though he often uses ghosts and the like to get at that psychology. In “Miss Cornelius”, the protagonist is brought into a house experiencing poltergeist activity, and quickly accuses the titular old lady of producing it by sleight-of-hand, though not necessarily consciously. Afterwards, feeling sorry for hurting her feelings, he encourages his wife to befriend the old lady, and soon the poltergeist activity starts up in his own house. (Old ladies persecuting the protagonists is a bit of a Harvey theme.) Meanwhile, there’s a Machen-ish air of debased but surviving ritual to “The Dabblers”, about a perennial tradition of weird nightly singing among schoolboys.
A lot of Harvey’s tales are about conventional ghosts (murder victims, mostly) haunting unconventionally (as a tortoise, for instance), or the lengths the haunted victims will go to avoid their persecuting ghosts. Others are about coincidences, predictions and blank spots in memory, usually centring around deaths and murders. Harvey isn’t often creepy so much as clever or darkly funny; there’s no sense of a supernatural order behind his ghosts and strange happenings, but he’s fun and readable, for those who like a twisted tale. And there are a few that hit a genuine weird note.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews