Frederick Ignatius Cowles

Frederick Ignatius Cowles was born in Cambridge at the turn of the twentieth century and spent his early working life as a librarian at the city's Trinity College. In the course of his duties at the library Cowles met the famous antiquarian and ghost story author, M. R. James, whose work was to exert a strong influence on his own. Cowles left Cambridge to become librarian of Swinton and Pendlebury Library in Lancashire and it was there in 1931 that he began writing ghost stories for the library magazine. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a keen amateur antiquarian, Cowles was primarily a travel writer and often incorporated his detailed knowledge of European folklore and history into his fiction. Sadly, an exhausting series of lecture tours for troops during the Second World War led to the breakdown of the author's health and his premature death in 1948.

Several of Cowles' earliest stories were reworked versions of tales by other supernatural writers, including Bram Stoker, E. F. Benson, and his friend Dennis Wheatley. However, it was M. R. James who remained a constant influence, albeit less so as Cowles gradually developed his own voice. His individual style is most evident in his final collection, Fear Walks the Night, a work which remained unpublished for many years after his death. The stories in this work often reach beyond the antiquarian to incorporate new and varied influences.

After a long period of neglect Cowles' tales were rediscovered during the 1970s by Hugh Lamb who, together with fellow anthologist Richard Dalby, began to include examples of the author's work in their collections. The campaign to re-establish Cowles' reputation finally led to the long-awaited publication of a collected edition of his ghost stories in 1993 which included all the tales from the unpublished Fear Walks the Night.

-- from Shadows in the Attic: A Guide to British Supernatural Fiction 1820-1950, Neil Wilson (2000)