Authors Electric

I'm really looking forward to June because something wonderful is going to happen. Harefield Hospital will celebrate its centenary. What a place. It was first founded in 1915 as a hospital for Australian and New Zealand troops and thus came under immediate and overwhelming pressure during the Gallipoli campaign. After the First World War it was for many years a TB sanatorium, where stricken Londoners could at last breathe some clean air in the Middlesex countryside. And finally it was chosen as the place for what has become one of the world's very top specialist heart hospitals. Once, when heart transplants were still headline news, miracles happened there every day, including the world's first heart-lung transplant. Now yesterday's miracles are almost routine and surgery has advanced to the utmost point of what seems credible. Thousands have cause to be thankful to Harefield Hospital. And I'm one of them. 'Abandon hope, all ye who enter here' ...

          Someone once said that the invention of electric light spelt the end of the ghost story.  And I see what she or he meant.  After all, the invention of the mobile phone has led to a significant increase in the number of fictional locations where you can't get a signal.  Progress seems inimical to fiction.            I used to write a lot of ghost stories.  People actually used to refer to me as 'Ah, Dennis Hamley, the ghost story writer.' It's the genre which taught me how to write short stories.  The light was definitely switched on as I wrote them but then there were no mobiles to make what was a 'present day' story when I wrote it, credible for today's readers.  Even so, I'm making an ebook selection of those of mine which I think may be worth resurrecting. They appeared in a variety of books, starting with a collection The Shirt off a Hanged Man's B...