Hugh Lamb - The Thrill Of Horror

A. E. Ellis - The Life-Buoy: A collision on the Clyde, a small motor-boat taken out by a liner. Both passengers are thrown into the river and in his panic, the man, Potherington, drowns his wife to secure a grip on the life-buoy that would easily have supported them both. Unable to forget his craven actions, he's as good as doomed from that day forth, so perhaps it is a mercy when Mrs. P - she makes for an impressive, slimy corpse -rises from the deep to pay him in kind.

A. E. Ellis is among our most under-rated ghost story writers. Sure I read somewhere (The Second Star Book of Horror?) that he'd written The Life-Buoy & Co. some decades before they were published, so maybe there are more where they came from?

Robert Haining - Montage Of Death: Convinced he is going insane, twenty-five year old artist Gerald Miller commits spectacular, gory suicide in an East London flat. Immediately prior to his death he'd been working on a figure constructed from the best bits hacked from twelve waxwork dolls. Unfortunately, his creative self knows nothing of a second, darker personality given to hanging around in graveyards after dark.

Robert is the late Peter Haining's younger brother. A scientist, his career doesn't leave much free time to write fiction which is the genre's loss as he's a gifted horror author. Think a morbid, Poe-enthused Tim Stout and you're almost there, though The Wall is plain weird (in a good way).

M. R. James - The Experiment: More trouble at t' rectory. After the unexpected death of Squire Francis Bowles, the Rev. Hall is preparing to open the family vault when he learns that the deceased has left specific instructions that he be buried in a freshly dug grave in the churchyard - and no coffin. There is also some business as to how his corpse should be arranged, but that's for his widow and stepson to see to.

A mystery. The Squire was known to be fabulously wealthy, so his widow is irked that no-one seems to know where the money is. It transpires that he had long been in contact with an Oxford scholar and collector of black magic 'recipes' who knows a thing or two about Necromancy. Bowles was keen to participate in a macabre experiment to test his theories: if capable, once his surviving family have dug him up, he will reveal the means by which they can get their grasping hands on his considerable fortune. Unfortunately for them, the two had been too busy poisoning him to pay scrupulous attention to detail, and ...

A real surprise, this, as for all the scholarly touches, it's not entirely dissimilar in tone to E.C. comic strip, though i guess you could say the same of Lost Hearts (that is, if you didn't want your head kicked in by a Ro Pardoe hit squad you could). Hugh writes that finding an uncollected MRJ story fulfilled a lifetime's ambition. I am falling in love with this collection all over again.