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My wise and venerable old friend Alfred Knopf, the American publisher, had a half-brother called Edwin Edas a filo, back in 1958, I went to hiether of nothing but ghost stories I pointed out that no one had done this before I said there existed a whole world of ghost stories to choose fro batch of tales All one needed for a series like this enty-four stories

Eddie Knopf thought it over He talked with his associates and everyone agreed that it was a splendid idea Ereed to be the introducer of each episode My own prihost stories I was also to write the screenplay for the first one (the pilot) and for several others

On the face of it, my job didn’t appear too onerous In the second half of the last century and in the early part of this one, ghost stories were very much the fashion Dickens had written one J M Barrie had done several So had Bulwer Lytton and D K Broster and George Eliot and Anatole France and Mrs Gaskell and Théophile Gautier and L P Hartley and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Tho and Henry Jaham and Maupassant and Poe and Sir Walter Scott and Mark Twain and H G Wells and Elizabeth Bowen Even Oscar Wilde had written one called The Canterville Ghost Great na my selections

One of the first things I did was to call on Lady Cynthia Asquith as an acknowledged expert on ghost stories and had published several anthologies She was old and frail and she was in bed when she received ood advice about how to start the great search

After a tre several visits to the British Museuhost story that had ever been written My house was filled with books and piles of old an to read

I got a bit of a shock The first batch of fifty or so stories I read were so bad it was difficult to finish them They were trivial, poorly written and not in the least spooky Spookiness is, after all, the real purpose of the ghost story It should give you the creeps and disturb your thoughts The stories I was reading did none of this Some of the worst ones ritten by the most famous writers I read on I couldn’t believe how bad they were Nevertheless, I carefully recorded every single story I read in a notebook and I gave each one of theht out of ten

Then suddenly a bright star flashed across the ave me the shivers It was called Harry by Rosemary Timperley That bucked me up and I went on with my labours

I read another hundred or so bad ones Then I found a second good one It was The Open Door by Mrs Oliphant

After I had read altogether some three hundred published stories, I had succeeded in discovering six good ones That was notthe two just mentioned by Rosemary Tiold, Afterward by Edith Wharton, Spinsters’ Rest by Clemence Dane and The Four-Fifteen Express by Amelia B Edwards

Hang on a second, I thought What was going on here? Every single one of these stories ritten by a woan to wonder whether the really good ghost story belonged solely to the female Was she perhaps more sensitive in that s to look like it

With a feeling that I was perhaps hed on And by golly, if the next good one wasn’t also by a woman! It was Cynthia Asquith’s God Grante That She Lye Stille I got rather excited

But alas, the next excellent one was by a ood one it was After that, there followed a whole group of men, L P Hartley, Dickens, E F Benson, John Collier and the rest Theup

At the end of thissession, I counted that I had read seven hundred and forty-nine ghost stories I was coered away froazines, I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had found twenty-four good ones and another ten possibles for Eddie Knopf’s television series

The host story writers did eventually catch up with the females, but only just Out of my best twenty-four (there is not room to include all of them in this book), the final score was thirteen to theand I’ll tell you why Many people have been fascinated and perplexed by the failure of women to reach the top rank in two of the threeit is different Ever since the Brontës and Jane Austen got the there have been plenty of fine women novelists around But this is not true ofand sculpture In the whole of history there has never been a woman musical composer anywhere near the top rank There hasn’t really been one in painting or sculpture either The greatest woman painter was probably Popova, followed by two other Russians, Goncharova and Exter There was also Mary Cassatt, Barbara Hepworth and possibly Georgia O’Keefe But none of thereat , from Dürer to Picasso

But to go back to women as writers For about a hundred and thirty years they have been producing good novels, even soreat ones But they don’t seem to be able to write plays or top-rate short stories I don’t think a woman has ever written a classic play And as for short stories – no, not really By this I reatest twenty-five short stories ever written (if it were possible to agree on which they were) ht conceivably include one by Katherine Mansfield, one by Willa Cather and one by Shirley Jackson But that would be all The score would be twenty-two to three in favour of the men

And yet – and here is the interesting thing – ghost stories, at least the kind I a about, are short stories And in that particular and very special category the women run the men very close indeed, a lot closer even than in the novel, with the score at thirteen to the men and eleven to the women But it is the women who have written some of the very best ones

So perhaps there is so after all in the theory that wo about the supernatural Who can forget Shirley Jackson’s host story But i