I have, as you well know, always had a sincere admiration for your work and consider you to be a great literary craftsman. These facts alone would make your name at the head of this dedicatory letter appropriate. But it is as a token of our friendship I ask you to accept this book which, with all its failings, may amuse you.
The late Dr Montague Rhodes James once told me that his ghost stories—in my opinion the best of their kind—were written, in the first place, solely for the amusement of himself and his friends. Fortunately, he was persuaded to give them to the general public, and, in doing so, made many new friends.
An author who can amuse himself with his own stories has a fair chance of entertaining other people. But a ghost story is a thing apart. Its success depends upon a physical reaction termed a shudder, and this type of tale is judged by a standard outside the realms of ordinary literary criticism.