Edward Frederick Benson (1867-1940) was one of three famous brothers who wrote ghost stories. Arthur Christopher was the eldest while Robert Hugh the baby. Freddy, as E. F. was known, was the middle child and by far the most prolific of the bunch. He wrote over 100 ghost stories, most collected in seven volumes during his lifetime. (He also wrote the highly successful Mapp and Lucia novels.) Among them are classics of the horror genre of which H. P. Lovecraft said in Supernatural Horror in Literature:
“The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the versatile E. F. Benson, whose “The Man Who Went Too Far” breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan’s hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson’s volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular power; notably “Negotium Perambulans”, whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and “The Horror-Horn”, through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks. “The Face”, in another collection, is lethally potent in its relentless aura of doom.”
The collections include:
Benson started in 1893 with the stories collected in Six Common Things. he published some of the stories in his books in English magazines like The Pall Mall Magazine and Pearson’s but as the new century brought more publications into the market, Benson began to use them to promote his books. His publication of choice was Hutchinson’s Magazine, that had a reputation for literary but using fantastic material from H. R. Haggard, Achmed Abdullah, H. deVere Stacpoole and later Sax Rohmer. Beginning with “the Outcast” (April 1922), Benson published twenty-eight stories there, creating contents of several of his books.
Hutchinson’s began as a Pulp, became a respectable slick, then ended again as a Pulp in an era filling up with Pulps. And it should be no surprise other Pulps wanted Benson stories (even reprints) too.
These fell to four main periodicals. First Munsey’s Magazine and its later incarnations as Cavalier and Argosy All-Story.
“The Confession of Charles Linkworth” was published for the first time in The Cavalier and the Scrap Book, January 13, 1912.
“The Outcast” appeared in Hutchinson’s Magazine, April 1922 but Argosy All-Story Weekly, October 7, 1922 reprinted it only six months later.
“The Horror-Horn” also appeared first in Hutchinson’s Magazine, September 1922 but Munsey’s Magazine it only two months later in November 1922.
“Mrs. Tilly’s Seance” appeared initially in Munsey’s Magazine, December 1922.
Next was Weird Tales that featured Benson, perhaps a mark of its distinction in the weird literature field. Or it may have been the fact that Hutchinson’s Magazine folded that year, switching to a publisher of anthologies. We don’t know if Farnsworth Wright paid extra for the stories, though he was known to have done so for a batch of stories by Gaston Leroux that ran at the same time. The first to appear was a reprint, “The Wishing-Well” (Hutchinson’s Magazine, February 1929) appearing four month’s later in Weird Tales, July 1929.
“The Hanging of Alfred Wadham” was the first of the originals, appearing in Weird Tales, August 1929.
“The Witch-Ball (Weird Tales, October 1929)
“The Bed by the Window” (Weird Tales, November 1929)
“The Shuttered Room” was another reprint. (Hutchinson’s Magazine, August 1929), appearing in Weird Tales, December 1929.
“James Lamp” (Weird Tales, June 1930)
“Monkeys” (Weird Tales, December 1933)
One of Weird Tales competitors, the McFadden Pulp, Ghost Stories, got two of Benson’s stories. This pulp was a natural since it had a narrow focus on ghosts, much as Benson himself did.
“Dark and Nameless” (Ghost Stories, May 1929)
“The Flint Knife” (Ghost Stories, May 1930)
Lastly, and perhaps best of all, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, reprinted a number of Benson tales with art by Virgil Finlay and Lawrence. All these appeared after Benson’s death in 1940.
“The Outcast” was reprinted for the second time in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, August 1942.
“Roderick’s Story” (1923) (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, April 1946)
“Caterpillars”(1912) (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1947)
“Mrs. Amworth” appeared originally in Hutchinson’s Magazine, June 1922 but was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, June 1950.
E. F. Benson’s last original collection was 1934’s More Spook Stories. That year he became mayor of Rye in East Sussex and he died of throat cancer six years later. This could have been the end of his fame but the anthologies reprinted him from the 1930s (Dorothy L. Sayer’s Omnibus of Crime (1937) for instance) through the paperback 1960s and 1970s to modern collections like E. F. Benson Megapack (2013). Benson’s status as a premiere ghost story writer is set, along side writers such as M. R. James, Walter de la Mare and H. R. Wakefield.
