
Episode 5 – Number 13
12/17/11 • 47 min
In this episode Mike and Will pack their portmanteaus for a holiday in HELL (well, Denmark actually) as they tackle ‘Number 13’ by M.R. James! Thanks to our reader this week Kirsty Woodfield.
Also in this episode Will and Mike:
- Coin ‘The Jamesian Wallop’
- Tackle the schleswig-holstein question
- Discuss hellish subjects such as alchemy, German sunlounger etiquette, and Toploader
- Inexplicably find something funny about the phrase ‘the Danish area’
Show notes & links:
- Viborg on Wikipedia and Googlemaps.
- ‘The Shadow of the Occupant of Number 13’ by Helen Grant (at Ghosts and Scholars)
- The Significance of Number 13 (at Squidoo)
- ‘Warnings to the Curious’ by S.T. Joshi & Rosemary Pardoe (ed) (at Amazon)
Don’t forget to join us for our next episode when we will be looking at ‘Count Magnus’!
In this episode Mike and Will pack their portmanteaus for a holiday in HELL (well, Denmark actually) as they tackle ‘Number 13’ by M.R. James! Thanks to our reader this week Kirsty Woodfield.
Also in this episode Will and Mike:
- Coin ‘The Jamesian Wallop’
- Tackle the schleswig-holstein question
- Discuss hellish subjects such as alchemy, German sunlounger etiquette, and Toploader
- Inexplicably find something funny about the phrase ‘the Danish area’
Show notes & links:
- Viborg on Wikipedia and Googlemaps.
- ‘The Shadow of the Occupant of Number 13’ by Helen Grant (at Ghosts and Scholars)
- The Significance of Number 13 (at Squidoo)
- ‘Warnings to the Curious’ by S.T. Joshi & Rosemary Pardoe (ed) (at Amazon)
Don’t forget to join us for our next episode when we will be looking at ‘Count Magnus’!
Previous Episode

Reading: Stories I Have Tried to Write
Mike is away on holiday at the moment so in lieu of a full episode we are pleased to present a full reading of M.R. James’s essay ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’, read by Tom Hemmings!
Regular service will resume in a few weeks when Mike returns from his reckless galavanting.
Notes
‘Stories I have Tried to Write’ was written by M.R. James in November of 1929 and first published at the end of that month in ‘The Touchstone 2’, a publication of Eton College where James was Provost at the time. The editors would no doubt have preferred to have received a completed ghost story of the sort James had produced for the Eton Boy Scouts two years previously (‘Wailing Well’, one of the last James ghost stories to find print during his lifetime) but instead they received a short essay in which James runs briefly through a number of story ideas that never saw completion.
Some of these stories are the merest hint of an idea (the Christmas cracker, the tap on the shoulder) while others provide the outline of an almost completed story, with settings, characters, names and so on all prepared. As James mentions in the essay, some of these stories he not only tried to write, but did write, only later deciding they were not good enough for publication. A draft of the Marcilly-le-Hayer story can be found among James’s papers in King’s College Library and was publishes in Ghosts & Scholars 22 in 1996. Likewise, the draft of the story involving two students at King’s was found and published in Ghosts & Scholars 12 as ‘The Fenstanton Witch’.
Other story elements James mentions in the essay hint at plot devices that James did actually use in some of his published stories, for instance the mask that appears amongst the curtains brings to mind the leering face that peers through the hedge in ‘The Rose Garden’ and similarly in James’s story ‘A Vignette’, a story written in 1935 and not published until after his death in 1936. James’s reference to ‘common objects being vehicles of malice’ was an idea he later fleshed out into the macabrely humorous fable ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’ which was printed in another Eton publication, ‘The Masquerade 1’ in 1933.
The essay saw wider publication when it was included in The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James (Arnold 1931), and since that time many authors have yielded to the temptation to flesh James’s ideas out into complete stories. The most notable being Sheila Hodgson who produced not only a series of stories based on the ideas (published by Ash Tree Press in 1998 as ‘The Fellow Travellers and Other Ghost Stories’), but a highly enjoyable series of radio plays which were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 between 1976 and 1992. As far as I am aware these radio plays have never seen the light of day on cassette or cd but can be tracked down by anyone with a search engine, bit torrent client and ‘relaxed’ attitude towards copyright law. Or so I am told. *cough*.
More information on the essay and the various stories it has inspired can be found in the excellent ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’ story notes at Ghosts & Scholars.
Next Episode

Episode 6 – Count Magnus
In this Christmas Special* Will and Mike get stuck into Count Magnus by M.R. James, and explore some startling questions:
- What is the connection between Count Magnus and Ghostbusters 2?
- Will sewing your corpse into the carcass of a deer save your soul from the devil?
- Would Mr Wraxall prefer to have been shot in the balls by Robocop?
Answers to these questions and much, much more can be found in this bumber festive edition of the greatest and only M.R. James podcast! This episode features readings by Chris Savory.
Show notes:
- About the real Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie (Wikipedia)
- An image and map of the real manor at Råbäck
- Varnham Abbey, the site of the mausoleum of Count Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie (Wikipedia)
- ‘The Familiar’ by J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Full text at Gaslight)
- The Black Pilgrimage to Chorazin by Rosemary Pardoe and Jane Nicholls (Ghosts & Scholars)
- Dark Devotions – M.R. James and the Magical Tradition by Ron Weighell (Ghosts & Scholars)
- About Chorazin (Wikipedia)
- The Tale of the Witch of Berkeley by Rob Hardy (twistedtree.org.uk)
* This edition may or may not feature Mike and Will singing an exclusive acapella rendition of ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’, accompanied by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge (spoiler alert: it doesn’t).
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