W. F. Harvey
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William Fryer Harvey (1885–1937) was an English writer of short stories, most notably in the mystery and horror genres. Among his better-known stories are "August Heat" and "The Beast with Five Fingers".
Born into a wealthy Quaker family in Yorkshire, he attended the Quaker schools at Bootham in Yorkshire and at Leighton Park in Reading before going on to Balliol College, Oxford. He took a degree in medicine at Leeds. Ill health dogged him, however, and he devoted himself to personal projects such as his first book of short stories, Midnight House (1910).
During World War I, he joined a Friends' Ambulance Unit, later serving as a surgeon-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and received the Albert Medal for Lifesaving. Lung damage received during the rescue that resulted in this award was to trouble him for the rest of his life, but he continued to write both short stories and his cheerful and good natured memoir, We Were Seven.
Before and after the war, he showed his interest in adult education, working at the Working Men's College at Fircroft, near Birmingham. After the war, he returned to Fircroft in 1920, becoming Warden, but by 1925 ill-health forced his retirement. In 1928, he published a second collection of short stories, The Beast with Five Fingers, and in 1933 he published a third, Moods and Tenses. He lived in Switzerland with his wife for much of this time, but nostalgia for his home country caused his return to England; he died in Letchworth in 1937, at the age of 52.
The release of the movie The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), directed by Robert Florey, starring Peter Lorre, inspired by what was perhaps his most famous and praised short story, caused a resurgence of interest in Harvey's work. In 1951, a posthumous fourth collection of his stories, The Arm of Mrs Egan and Other Stories, appeared, including a set of twelve stories left in manuscript at the time of his death, "Twelve Strange Cases."
In 2009, Wordsworth Editions printed an omnibus volume of Harvey's stories titled The Beast With Five Fingers in its "Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural" series (ISBN A978-1-84022-179-4). The volume contains 45 stories, and an introduction by David Stuart Davies, the source of much of the biographical data given in this article.
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