Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts: A Book of Stories

Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts gathers Arthur Quiller-Couch‘s tales of uncanny visitation, maritime peril, rural memory, and historical romance, many rooted in the Cornish imagination. The collection moves with Edwardian elegance between fireside anecdote and crafted short fiction, using genial irony, antiquarian detail, and carefully delayed revelation rather than sensational horror. In the tradition of Stevenson, Kipling, and the Victorian ghost story, Quiller-Couch makes the supernatural less a shock than a means of recovering buried loyalties, regrets, and communal legends. Known to readers as Q, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch was born in Cornwall and made its harbours, dialects, and legends central to his imaginative world. A novelist, critic, anthologist, and later Cambridge professor of English, he combined scholarly command of literary tradition with a storyteller‘s ear for local speech and cadence. His lifelong interest in memory, place, and the moral afterlife of the past clearly informs these stories. This volume will reward readers who enjoy ghost stories that are atmospheric rather than merely frightening, and historical fiction alive to voice and landscape. It is especially recommended to admirers of late-Victorian and Edwardian storytelling, Cornish literature, and fiction in which romance, wit, melancholy, and mystery burn together like embers in a hearth.