Walpole, Hugh Seymour: Hans Frost. V1. 18 May 2012
 

Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE (13 March 1884 – 1 June 1941) was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death

Walpole wrote horror novels that tended more towards the psychological rather than supernatural, with a brooding underlying mysticism. Hans Frost begins: No one perhaps in the United Kingdom was quite so frightened as was Nathalie Swan on the third day of November, 1924, sitting in a third-class carriage about quarter to five of a cold, windy darkening afternoon. Her train was drawing her into Paddington Station, and how she wished that she were dead!