W. W. Jacobs

William Wymark Jacobs was born in Wapping, in London’s docklands, on 8 September 1863. His father managed a wharf on the Thames, and Jacobs grew up among the ships, warehouses and watermen that later filled nearly everything he wrote. He went to evening classes at Birkbeck College and, from 1879, worked as a clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank. He held that job for twenty years while writing in his spare time, and left only in 1899, once his stories were paying well enough.

His reputation was built on comedy. Many Cargoes (1896), his first collection, was a hit, and he spent the rest of his career writing humorous stories about sailors, bargemen and dockside layabouts, many of them told by a garrulous old night-watchman. They were hugely popular in The Strand and other magazines, and their dry, deadpan rhythm was admired by later comic writers, including P. G. Wodehouse. He died in London on 1 September 1943.

A small group of his stories are horror, and one of them is among the most famous short stories ever written. The Monkey's Paw appeared in 1902 in Harper’s Monthly and in the collection The Lady of the Barge, and was adapted for the London stage the following year. It is a three-wish fairy tale played straight: a mummified paw from India grants wishes, and each wish comes true in the worst way. Its last few pages, a knock at the door that the reader never sees answered, are a lesson in leaving things out.

The skills Jacobs used for comedy are the same ones that make his horror work: the plain, ordinary characters, the quick dialogue, the perfectly timed reveal. The Toll-House is a straightforward haunted-house dare among friends. In Jerry Bundler, commercial travelers swap ghost stories at an old inn just before Christmas, and a prank goes wrong in a very human way. The Well has no visible ghost at all, only money, blackmail and guilt. Three at Table is a seaman’s account, told over drinks, of one uncanny night in a house on the marshes.

All five Jacobs stories on the site are short. Read “The Monkey’s Paw” first, if you somehow haven’t, and then “The Toll-House.”