“The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.”
The Stark Munro Letters (1895)
James Machin is an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, and an Associate Tutor at the Royal College of Art, where he teaches on the Critical and Historical Studies programme. He also teaches the MA and BA Victorian Literature units at the University of Bedfordshire. He is the author of Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. James is co-editor of Faunus, the Arthur Machen journal, and has recently co-edited Of Mud and Flame (Strange Attractor/MIT, 2019), a critical anthology of writing on cult 1970s television drama Penda’s Fen. Other recent publications include two essays in the Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic (2020). He also writes short fiction, with stories published most recently in The Shadow Booth, Weirdbook, and Supernatural Tales. A long-standing fan of Conan Doyle’s supernatural and detective fiction, James developed a keen interest in his medical fiction when working on a short postdoctoral research project for the Wellcome Trust in 2017, and is delighted to now be working on this new edition of The Stark Munro Letters for Edinburgh UP.
The Edinburgh Conan Doyle Project 