- "Who was A.M.Burrage?" at Great War Fiction (wordpress.com)
- Memoir War is War at FirstWorldWar.com
- A. M. Burrage at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Alfred McLelland Burrage at Library of Congress, with 7 library catalogue records
Alfred McLelland Burrage (1889–1956) was a British writer. He was noted in his time as an author of fiction for boys which he published under the pseudonym Frank Lelland, including a popular series called "Tufty".[1] After his death, however, Burrage became best known for his ghost stories.[1]
Burrage was born in Hillingdon, London, in 1889. His father, Alfred Sherrington Burrage, and his uncle, Edwin Harcourt Burrage, were both prolific writers of magazine stories for boys. Burrage attended St Augustine's Abbey School in Ramsgate. After his father died in 1906, A. M. Burrage began writing fiction, partly to support his family.[2] Burrage's main market for his fiction were British pulp magazines, such as The Grand Magazine, The Novel Magazine, Cassell's Magazine and The Weekly Tale-Teller.[2]
He served in the Artists’ Rifles in the First World War.[2] Burrage's publisher, Victor Gollancz Ltd., later published a memoir of his war experiences, War Is War, as by "Ex-Private X". War Is War received several good reviews, although it did not sell as well as Gollancz had hoped it would.[2] ' For children, Burrage wrote a humorous novel, Poor Dear Esme (1925), about a boy who disguises himself as a girl and attends a girls' school. Poor Dear Esme was described by Jack Adrian as a "comic classic", and the book was often reprinted.[2] Burrage also wrote historical and romance fiction.[2] Burrage's historical fiction was often set in seventeenth-century England, as in the 1936 story "Mr. Codesby's Behaviour".[3]
Burrage is now remembered mainly for his horror fiction, some of which was originally collected in the books Some Ghost Stories (1927) and Someone in the Room (1931, as by "Ex-Private X"), and much of which has been reprinted by Ash-Tree Press.[1]
Burrage was a lapsed Roman Catholic.[4] He died at Edgware General Hospital at the age of sixty-seven on 18 December 1956.
M. R. James praised Burrage's book Some Ghost Stories, saying that the book "keeps on the right side of the line and, if about half his ghosts are amiable, the rest have their terrors, and no mean ones".[5] James later included Burrage among a list of contemporary writers who had "best realized" the possibilities of the ghost story.[6]
E. F. Bleiler has described Burrage's work thus: "The best stories in Some Ghost Stories and Someone in the Room are intelligent, well crafted and imaginative."[1] Richard Dalby has ranked Burrage as "one of the finest English ghost story writers, alongside Benson, Wakefield and James".[7] Neil Barron has stated, "Burrage's underrated short stories are deft and subtle, and include a number of poignant posthumous fantasies."[8]
