Tony Walker

Allen, born 1883, 11th of November, as it turns out, died 13th of December 1941, was the pen name of Leslie Harrison Lambert, an English short story writer, stage magician, radio personality and intelligence officer.

He was born in Nottingham and later associated with foreign office work.

He led the sort of double life that seems almost too apt for a writer of uncanny tales.

Civil servant by day, performer and raconteur by night, and in wartime a cryptographer at Bletchley Park's Hut 8, the unit working on German naval ciphers.

He first came to public notice in the 1920s and 1930s through his radio broadcasts for the BBC, where he read his own short stories in a conversational, confiding tone that listeners remembered for its intimacy and dry humour.

These stories, many of them likely supernatural or macabre, are typically framed as anecdotes of stories, adventures he claims to have experienced himself, told in a casual, slightly self-deprecating voice that makes the oddness of events feel more plausible rather than less.

Pieces such as, as we just heard, My Adventure in Norfolk, My Adventure at Chislehurst, The Nineteen Club, The Suitcase and A Joyride built his reputation as a quietly distinctive figure in British popular fiction between the wars.

So, Alan's background as an amateur magician, so that close-up magic work, and his work in intelligence both leave their fingerprints on the stories.

There's a preoccupation with misdirection, which I think he does beautifully in this story.

and secrets and the borderline between what is seen and what is inferred.

He rarely goes in for explicit horror.

Instead, he specializes in the eerie coincidence, the inexplicable scrap of evidence, the twist of fate that remains only half explained.

The narrative effect is closer to a curious after-dinner speech than a formal ghost story, but the cumulative impression is one of the world being thinner and less reliable than we like to think.

In addition to the radio work, his stories appeared in print in several collections and later in omnibus volumes, such as But That's a Detail, collected stories of A.J.

Allen, which has helped to preserve his work for modern readers after a long period of relative obscurity.

Today he occupies a small but interesting niche in the history of British weird and humorous supernatural fiction, a writer whose modest output, conversational style and background in performance, anticipate later traditions of radio storytelling and audio drama.

His life ended in Norwich in 1941, in the middle of the Second World War, in Norfolk.

Norwich is in Norfolk, the capital of Norfolk.

But his best stories retained the peculiar charm of a man who knew how to make the strange sound like something that might have happened to you on your way home.

I've got a little bit more to say about that later on, but let's talk about the story.