Six of the Best by W F Harvey

By W F Harvey

Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number.

Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best.

In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words.

These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Six of the Best
• Release date: Feb 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781835474266

Book preview

Six of the Best by W F Harvey

Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number.

Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best.

In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words.

These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master. 

W F Harvey - An Introduction

William Fryer Harvey AM was born on 14th April 1885 into a wealthy Quaker family in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

He was educated at the Quaker Bootham School in Yorkshire and Leighton Park School in Reading before university at Balliol College, Oxford.

His health was fragile and he poured his energies into writing short stories and in 1910 published his first collection ‘Midnight House’.

In the Great War he was with the Friends' Ambulance Unit and then served as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy.  There he received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving but lung damage received at that time troubled him for the rest of his life.

He continued to write short stories, and even a memoir, but by 1925 ill health had forced his retirement to any outside work.  Three years later he published his second collection which contained his macabre classic ‘The Beast with Five fingers’, only one more collection would come from his pen in his lifetime.

For many years of his life he now lived in Switzerland with his wife but a yearning to be home saw them come back to England in 1935.

W F Harvey died in Letchworth on the 4th June 1937. He was 52.

Index of Contents

The Beast With Five Fingers

The Ankardyne Pew

Across the Moors

August Heat

The Arm of Mrs Egan

Midnight House

The Beast With Five Fingers

I had often seen the name on the ordnance map, and had as often wondered what sort of a house it was.

If I had had the placing, it should have been among pine woods in some deep, waterless valley, or else in the Fens by a sluggish tidal river, with aspens whispering in a garden half choked by poisonous evergreens.

I might have placed it in a cathedral city, in a sunless alley overlooking the narrow strip of graveyard of a church no longer used; a house so surrounded by steeple and belfry that every sleeper in it would wake at midnight, aroused by the clamorous insistence of the chimes.

But the Midnight House of cold reality, that I had found by chance on the map when planning a walking tour that never came into being, was none of these. I saw no more than an inn on an old coaching road that crossed the moors as straight as an arrow, keeping to the hill-tops, so that I guessed it to be Roman.

Men have a certain way of living in accordance with their name that one often looks for in vain with places. The Pogsons will never produce a poet, whatever may be the fame they may achieve as lawyers, journalists, or sanitary engineers; but Monckton-in-the-Forest, through which I passed last week, is a railway junction and nothing more, in the middle of a bare plain; not a stone remains of the once famous priory that gave to the place its name.

I expected then to be disappointed, but for some reason or other I made a resolve, if ever chance should leave me within twenty miles of the inn, to spend a night in Midnight House.

I could not have chosen a better day. It was late in November and warm—too warm I had found for the last five-mile tramp across the heather. I had seen no one since noon, when a keeper on the distant skyline had tried in vain to make me understand that I was trespassing; and now at dusk I stood again on the high road with Midnight House below me in the hollow.

It would be hard to picture a more desolate scene—bare hills rising on every side to the dull, lead sky above; at one’s feet heather, burnt black after last spring’s firing, broken in places by patches of vivid emerald that marked the bogs.

The building of stone, roofed with heavy, lichen-covered flags, formed three sides of a square, the centre of which was evidently used as a farm-yard.

Nowhere was there sign of life; half the windows were shuttered, and, though the dim light of afternoon was fast waning, I saw no lamp in the tap-room, by the door which overlooked the road.

I knocked, but no one answered; and, growing impatient at the delay, walked round to the back of the house, only to be greeted by the savage barking of a collie, that tugged frantically at the chain which fastened it to the empty barrel that served it as kennel. The noise was at any rate sufficient to bring out the woman of the