There’s a famous case from 1930 known as the ‘Burning Car Murder’: Alfred Rouse was hanged for killing an unidentified man whose body was found in Rouse’s Morris Minor, which had been set alight. It was suggested at trial that Rouse had offered a lift to a tramp and then committed the crime, thinking that the body would be mistaken for his own, and that he’d be able to start a new life under an assumed name. (Rouse, having initially confessed, later claimed that his passenger’s death was accidental. Attempts at identifying the victim using DNA have so far failed.) Bowen’s tiny story, no more than half a page long, seems uncannily to pre-echo that case – as well as anticipating the recent popularity of flash fiction. We don’t know what’s gone on between Murchison and Bargrave, and Murchison himself, escaping from the burning car, can’t remember why they argued: “the fright had seared his memory”. But immediately, this micro-drama takes a supernatural turn, managing, in its short space, to raise big questions about subjectivity and masculinity.

First published in the Mathematical Gazette, 1923. Collected in The Virago Book of Ghost Stories, ed. Richard Dalby, 1987