What Agatha Christie Knew About Sin: You Don't Start With Murder.

Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, and what better way to do that, than to corrupt the nuptial union - to turn it from something fertile, into something sterile, depopulate heaven.

Around this time, every year, my youngest daughter and I usually turn to the ghost stories of M.R. James. They are chilling, unsettling, and supernatural unlike the Hollywood movies attempting to scare us today. James originally read his stories to friends for Christmas Eve entertainments and later published them as a collection of Ghost Stories, whereupon they received wider attention.

James McBryde’s illustration for Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad from M R James’ Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

There is something about the shortened days, crunching of leaves underfoot and the flickering of a fire that calls for a good old fashioned unnerving story. My own father used to read to us as we sat around the fire eating bowls of bread and warm milk. If anyone wants the recipe, its;

Ingredients:

• Bread (stale, if memory serves)

• Milk

Method:

• Warm a bowlful of milk

• Throw in bits of bread

One never knows how odd one’s upbringing was until one gets older and observes the raised eyebrows during polite conversation.

Well this is how it was for us. We did have a television, but until I was about 15, it was a very small black and white box that sat, overlooked but for Coronation Street (mum’s guilty pleasure), in the corner of the living room. And so dad, a natural storyteller, would either weave his own stories or read to us from Dickens, Dumas, James, Chesterton and often Agatha Christie. I don’t think I knew (at the time) who wrote the stories, I just sat slurping bread and milk like the garden hedgehogs, captivated.