I’m one of those actors who can’t be myself. This goes back to childhood because when playing out I much preferred to invent people rather than be me. And perhaps that constant pretending of my youth explains my preference now for writing stories in first person character voices. I like first person as well because it allows the writer a bond with the reader that’s direct and intimate, plus for a ghost story collection, the different tones of voice, from the comic and endearing to the austere and macabre, offers variation.

Traditional first person is seen as restricted in that a character narrator can’t usually go inside someone else’s head and know how they’re feeling. This works in spooky mystery stories such as The Ghost Light, where the theatre’s ghost light is very much the outside observer keeping his distance. However, the narrator of Under the Mistletoe is supernatural – a famous diviner of dreams in fact – and so he does have the power to go inside hearts and minds. Visiting Hattie is narrated by the spirit of Kenneth Williams, and, since Adam and Calvin are fans of the Carry On series, it seems right enough that Kenny has a way into how the couple think and feel. But that idea doesn’t stretch to the ghost of Lady Thatcher in The Return of the Handbag, who’s only ever concerned with herself. Besides, Mrs T wasn’t exactly known for her empathy when alive.

First person can become a bit of a jigsaw puzzle when it’s the narrator’s job to piece together different narrative elements. This is the case with The Portrait of a Looking-Glass, which uses the structure of M.R. James’ Count Magnus as its model. James in turn was probably influenced by the tales of Sheridan Le Fanu, such as Borrohomeo the Astrologer and the cases of Dr Hesselius that make up the collection called In a Glass Darkly, which use found documents in the narration of the story.

The Oath of Aesculapius is different again in that, as with one of those Russian dolls, it’s a story within a story within a story – and specifically an after dinner armchair story. Classic examples in the ghost story tradition include Francis Marion Crawford’s The Upper Berth (1894), Thomas Street Millington’s No Living Voice (1872), Mary Louisa Molesworth The Story of the Rippling Train (1887) and Perceval Landon’s Thurnley Abbey (1908). A journalist is the narrator of The Final Fake, so you’d expect he’d be able to tell a good yarn and not reveal the twist until the end, even though he knows from the first line what it is. As for Who Fed the Cat?, well, that’s more complicated as it’s a first person narrator who uses the second person ‘you’ for the narration which is directly addressed to a named police officer in the tale.

Of course not all the stories in the collection are written as first person narratives. ‘It’s What She Would Have Wanted’ is told through an exchange of emails, The Strange Case of The Unaccountable Shadow is presented in diary form and the story of For the Hell of It is written as a screenplay. Yet the point is they all have individual character voices and these I would often act out as I did as a child. Only nowadays I write down what they all say – and that becomes the tale.

It’s my belief then that a story is simply a game of pretend that takes place on in your head and heart. For me stories are a form of play that prepare you not only for life when you’re a child but also help you deal with the continuing problems that life so often throws at you as you get older. Yes, ideally a tale should be about something, and I’d say my themes range from loneliness and redemption to the joys of sex and food. But whatever they are about, my primary aim in telling the ghost tale is simply to offer an entertaining yarn. And when making them up – or pretending them in my head – my watchwords have been plot, character, humour… with, I hope, a surprise twist or turnabout at the end.

I’ve certainly been inspired by the many classic ghost stories I’ve read, but the scenarios of the majority of the tales originate from somewhere in my mind, be it an image, a phrase, an idea, a half remembered incident. It’s what Stephen King talks about in his foreword to Night Shift as the ‘sludge’ that never gets filtered away. All I would add is that when your storyteller ‘radar’ is on high alert, your brain somehow spots its potential and whatever it is begins to turn itself into something worth finding.

I don’t think all ghost stories have to be creepy or even scary. I’ve always enjoyed, for example, those quirky playful tales of Oliver Onions such as The Ether Hogs and The Mortal, both written in 1926, which tell the tale from the perspective of the ghost. Sometimes, like him, I just want to make the reader laugh and smile. But if there are those stories which freak you out along the way, well, I’ll take that too.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy them!