I have always enjoyed a mystery ~ anything from conjuring tricks to ghosts.  Growing up I was much drawn to writers of strange or ‘spooky’ tales.  Inevitably, M.R. James was an early interest, and Saki (the pen name of Hector Hugh Monro), whose stories, Srendni Vashtar, The Music on the Hill, and Gabriel-Ernest made a particular impact. 

Later Edgar Allan Poe and three other American writers, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury and Frederic Brown all came into the mix.  Brown’s gift for writing tales with a twist never failed to impress me and his ability to write a compelling story in only one or two pages inspired me to attempt the same.  Then came Dennis Wheatley, William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and several others.

Two other writers impressed me in quite different ways.  Lewis Carroll, introduced me to the notion of being able to grow bigger or smaller, to enter through keyholes, to disappear like the Cheshire Cat, and to meet such zany and challenging characters as the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, suggesting that anything is possible in fiction.  And the great Oscar Wilde made an impact with the sheer charm of his magical shorter prose works in such timeless gems as The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince.  

Finally, there is what I regard as the finest ghost story of all, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.  I am grateful that William Archibald decided to adapt The Turn of the Screw into a play, which he called The Innocents, which morphed into Jack Clayton’s superb film of the same name.  I think what makes this story so compelling is that the ghosts are not just there to scare you ~ they have a purpose.

I wrote four stories in quick succession when I was 20, the longest of which drew on my own strange preoccupation from a very early age with ancient Rome.  Alongside all those ghost and horror stories on my bookshelves was The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius.

I find the whole process of writing can be quite unpredictable but one principle is certain: so long as the internal logic of a story is consistent, almost anything can be made believable.  Some stories are meticulously planned while others almost seem to write themselves.

Whenever I have ideas for stories, I invariably see them in my mind’s eye as if they were scenes in a film and when I’m engaged in the writing process this is still the case. Whether a scene is set in a garden or a dining room, I simply describe the mental image I have, insofar as it is relevant to the story or simply to create an atmosphere. Several people have commented that my stories would make good TV films.

My interest in music and fine art has sometimes prompted ideas for stories, or has sown seeds that I can trace back to certain paintings or symphonies.  An example of this is the Symphony No.6 by the contemporary French composer, Jacques Charpentier, entitled Already the sun had reached the horizon… [which is the second line of the second canto of Dante’s Purgatorio].  Out of this brooding symphony came the idea for my story, The Kiss, at the end of which I quoted the same line from Dante.  And the music of Alan Hovhaness inspired the story, Tower Song.

Similarly with paintings.  One of my favourite artists is the Swiss Symbolist painter, Arnold Böcklin, who is probably most famous for his imaginary scene, The Isle of the Dead.  He painted five versions of this powerful, dreamlike scene, of which only four remain.  [One was appropriated by Adolf Hitler and destroyed during the second world war.]  The Russian composer, Serge Rachmaninov, saw a black and white reproduction of Böcklin’s painting, which resulted in his writing his tone poem of the same name.  Böcklin also painted various representations of the nature god, Pan, some quite humorous, others more serious, but always portraying him in his original Pagan context as a benign entity in harmony with the natural world, which is how he was until the Christian church, presumably unsettled by his priapic nature, demonised him by turning him into Satan.

Another artist whose works have always inspired me is the 19th century English landscape painter, Samuel Palmer.  Palmer’s mystical landscapes merge humanity with the natural world, glowing with an intense numinous light.  Like Böcklin, Palmer pays homage to the significance of nature and both, in very different ways, seem to be saying that God is to be found, not in churches or religious dogma, but in the beauty of nature and the life force that animates everything around us.

The works of the 20th century painter, Harold Hitchcock, share a similar mystical luminesence. I believe the art world will one day come to appreciate again the more representational and mystical works of contemporary painters like Hitchcock.