WHO FED THE CAT? – At the wake of a friend recently murdered, those gathered slowly come to realise that what they are experiencing through their senses of touch, feel, sight, sound and taste is the spirit of the victim attempting to point the finger at one who perpetrated the wicked deed.

I noted as I was reading the ghost stories of E.F. Benson how cleverly Edward Frederic makes use of nearly all the human senses in his tales. Certainly far more than any other writer. As he writes in The Terror by Night, ‘Some ghosts are seen, some heard, some felt, and though I know of no instance of a ghost being tasted, yet it will seem in the following pages that these occult phenomena may appeal at any rate to the senses that perceive heat, cold, or smell.’

But why should a spirit, if it wants to reveal something to the living, simply not communicate by speaking? Ah! Suppose the ghost through some misfortune in life lost the capacity to talk. Suppose its larynx has been damaged, perhaps as a result of gunshot wound through the neck. That means the ghost would have to make themselves known not only by sound but by the other senses too. And that’s essentially the murdered woman’s task in Who Fed the Cat?

It should be said that although I knew what the plot would be Scott Brooker’s illustration for Who Fed the Cat? was, unlike the other stories in the collection, created before I wrote the actual tale itself. His femme fatale in the casket was so startling that I realised I would have to find a writing style to match. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Damon Runyon obviously came to mind. Although the narrative style of Who Fed the Cat? may be seen as pastiche, there is a logic for it being so – but that, dear reader, is the final twist of the tale.

"Our narrator channels the hard-boiled style of Raymond Chandler to unfold a supernatural story of how a domestic pet unlocks a murder-mystery. Welcome to the world of ghost-noir."

Dick Fiddy, archivist at the British Film Institute and author of Missing Believed Wiped: Searching for the Lost Treasures of British Television