A Little Night Reading - Compiled by Dave Allen
First published in Great Britain in 1974 by Roger Schlesinger RHS (Publications) Ltd
First Orbit edition published in 1975 by Futura Publications Limited
Introduction
The Monkey's Paw - W W Jacobs
Oh, Whistle and I'll come to you, My Lad - M R James
The Signalman - Charles Dickens
The Open Window - 'Saki'
Clarimonde - Theophile Gautier
The Black Cat - Edgar Allan Poe
The Canterville Ghost - Oscar Wilde
Nobody's House - A M Burrage
Was it a Dream? - Guy de Maupassant
The Birds - Daphne Du Maurier
The Furnished Room - O Henry
The Withered Arm - Thomas Hardy
The Man with a Malady - J F Sullivan
Tcheriapin - Sax Rohmer
The Brown Hand - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Lottery - Shirley Jackson
The Inn of the Two Witches - Joseph Conrad
The Rose Garden - M R James
The Inexperienced Ghost - H G Wells
The Squaw - Bram Stoker
Here it is! I mean, you'd expect the likes of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, even Alfred Hitchcock to get involved in this sort of stuff, but 'Television personality and actor' Dave Allen?
'With his Irish background and lively imagination Dave Allen has always been interested in tales of suspense, and has been an avid reader of them since boyhood. He has a natural talent for recounting such stories as many who have seen him well know.'
The introduction (if you believe it, and I can't really see a reason not to) confirms the above, and, as publisher Roger Schlesinger was a friend of his, an evening of ghost story telling by a roaring fire in Dave's rambling house in Devon led to the pair of them deciding upon an antho.
I remember a few horror spoofs on Dave's show (and they were frightening as well as funny to my boyhood imagination) - his ultimate ghost story being the tale of how he lost his finger.