Seasons greetings James fans! In this episode, Will and Mike take a further turn towards the Victorian by pairing up James with his great literary love, Mr Charles Dickens.  Just what influence did he have on James? Lest their amateur speculations take a less than academically rigorous turn, they are joined by James expert Jane Mainley Piddock (@jmainpidd), to tell us all about Monty’s strange fascination with Dickens’ unfinished tale, Edwin Drood.

Show notes:

• Jane’s website contains fascinating articles on MRJ and Edwin Drood, spiders, cats and much much more!
• Charles Dickens’ Ghost Stories: your hosts mentioned The Haunted House, The Trial for Murder and of course the Signal Man, available as a single download from Project Gutenburg.  The Signal Man was one of Lawrence Gordon Clarke’s best Ghost Stories for Christmas and is available in the BFI box set.
• Edwin Drood – do explore the mystery for yourself.  Our money is on Jasper having done it, or tried to do it, or… well, you decide! You can learn more about MRJ’s Drood-inspired tale “An Episode of Cathedral History” in episode 18.

And lest we forget, Will and Mike found time for Christmas gifts:

• Curious Warnings, the most sumptuous edition of MRJ’s tales currently  in print.
• Alisdair Wood’s (@alisdair_wood) illustrations have graced many an episode of the podcast and his MRJ postcards were one of the highlights of last year.  Will is particularly excited by his postcards of houses from horror movies.  The bloody envelope is a nice touch.
• The Christmas edition of Eerie (#6), published this month, came with an unsettling adaptation of the Ash Tree courtesy of Kelley Jones.  It also promises “sickening stories of festive phantoms and pernicious pastries”.  Available to buy as a download if you can’t make it to a comic shop.
• “I See A Shadow Coming – the Illustro Obscurum Yuletide Compendium Volume I”.  A lovely looking new zine, limited to 40 copies and now sadly SOLD OUT!  But do watch that space, they clearly have plans for more wierd fic wonderfulness in the coming year. Mike found the whole URL rather a tongue twister: just to clarify that it is yog-blogsoth.blogspot.com.
• AN Donaldson’s (@ANDauthor) new Lovecraft-meets-Solzhenitsyn novel Death Sentence, which will give you second thoughts about pining for snow this Christmas. If you haven’t already, do read Alisdair’s first novel Prospero’s Mirror, and listen to our interview with him from May last year.
• Helen Grant’s (@helengrantsays) new novel Silent Saturday will make you think twice about this newfangled interest in urban exploration.  You might also like Helen’s Jamesian novel The Glass Demon.  Helen joined us to discuss Marcilly-le-Hayer earlier this year.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

An episode of two parts this week.  In part one, Will and Mike open their box of James ephemera to play the “dreadful Game of Bear”.  We only have the opening pages of this unfinished tale, but fortunately three leading Jamesians have tried to finish the story. Big thanks to Kirsty Woodfield who returns to read for us this week.

In part two, we speak with Antonia Christophers and Noel Byrne of theatre company Box Tale Soup  about their brilliant new production of Casting the Runes.  They have just finished their run at the Edinburgh Fringe and will be in Cheltenham from 8-11 October.

Show notes:

• The Ghost and Scholars text of Game of Bear and Rosemary Pardoe’s notes can be found here.
• The stories written by Helen Grant, Jacqueline Simpson and Clive Wright were published in G&S Newsletter #15.  It’s now unavailable, but Rosemary has very kindly offered to send listeners a electronic copy if they get in touch by email.
• We didn’t get chance to talk about the amazing music in Box Tale Soup’s Casting the Runes, by musician Dan Melrose.
• Finally, picture credit. Not sure why the US military stores pictures of bears, but there you go.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Specially for Halloween, we’ve profiled MR James for the excellent biographical site The Fertile Fact.

#21. “Something of this kind may happen to me!”: MR James

Mike Taylor and Will Ross host A Podcast to the Curious, a podcast dedicated to the ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936). With components that might include (but not limited to) desolate Suffolk coastlines, eerie European cathedrals and (almost invariably) sleeping ghosts of an antiquarian nature, James’ fiction casts the past as a Pandora’s box of horrors best left alone (a strange stance given his day job as a medieval scholar). To many, he’s also usurped Dickens as laureate of ghoulish Christmas (thanks in no small part to the BBC’s yuletide tradition of screening adaptations of his stories during the 1970s). A writer more comfortable with the past than the present, he’d be looking for kindred bookish spirits were he around today say Mike and Will, who select five things about the modern world he might have found to his archaic tastes.

Read the rest of our profile at The Fertile Fact – let us know what you think!