The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Richard Middleton

Richard Barham Middleton was born in 1882 in Middlesex, England and began his career as a banker, a profession for which he was ill-suited and which made him deeply unhappy. Craving an unconventional and artistic lifestyle he joined the New Bohemians Club, where he met and was influenced by several literary personalities including Arthur Machen. Becoming an editor at Vanity Fair, Middleton eventually developed into a talented writer of prose. Despite asserting that his main interest was poetry, his reputation today is based on his expertise as a writer of short fiction, especially supernatural stories. The most well-known of these is the outstanding and frequently anthologised, 'The Ghost Ship' which originally appeared in a collection published after Middleton's death in 1912 with an introduction by Machen. A young Raymond Chandler made Middleton's acquaintance and admitted that he was in awe of his talent, despite his lack of commercial success, to the degree that he postponed starting his own writing career. Having moved to Brussels, Middleton became increasingly depressed and in 1911 committed suicide by poisoning himself with chloroform.