David Blaize

Edward Frederic Benson (24 July 1867 - 29 February 1940) was an English novelist biographer memoirist archaeologist and short story writer known professionally as E. F. Benson. Benson's first book was Sketches from Marlborough. He started his novel writing career with the (then) fashionably controversial Dodo (1893) which was an instant success and followed it with a variety of satire and romantic and supernatural melodrama. Benson was also known as a writer of atmospheric oblique and at times humorous or satirical ghost stories which were often first published in story magazines such as Pearson's Magazine or Hutchinson's Magazine 20 of which were illustrated by Edmund Blampied. These spook stories as they were also called were then reprinted in collections by his principal publisher Walter Hutchinson.