Please note: this event has been postponed, we will announce the new date soon

Alumni and guests are invited to join the Cambridge Society of Dorset for a talk by Michael Cook on M R James and ‘Ghost Writing’, followed by lunch. Michael Cook is a former National Trust Director.  He has made a lifelong study of the Ghost Story and Detective Fiction, publishing two non-fiction works as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Crime File series: Narratives of Enclosure (2011), a full length critique of the locked room mystery, and Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story (2014).  Michael now devotes his time to research and writing, producing a number of short stories and he is currently working on the final part of a fictional Ghost Story Trilogy.

Monty Rhodes James (1862-1936) was the outstanding medieval scholar of his day with an international reputation, yet he is best remembered for his thirty or so Ghost Stories, considered by many to be the finest in the canon.  What started as a diversion for friends and colleagues would transform the entire course of the supernatural tale. 

Michael will trace James’s early life in Suffolk and his progression as a student at Eton then King’s, to his subsequent elevation as Provost of both institutions and Vice-Chancellor of the University.  He explores, too, the recurring themes in James’s work through his most celebrated stories, many of which have been adapted for television, including ‘Oh,Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’ and ‘A Warning to the Curious’, as well as texts by Poe, Dickens, Le Fanu and Conan Doyle. The talk concludes with an assessment of James’s legacy.