Ray, Jean (1887-1964). Enjoying a spurious reputation as sometime pirate and smuggler, the Belgian Ray reached a wide public with dozens of crime-stories featuring the detective Harry Dickson, and a more serious output of weird tales, beginning with Les Contes du whisky (1925). Drawing on classic formulae of the Fantastic, he elaborated an idiom of dark yet seductive fantasy in the novel Malpertuis (1943), with its Chinese-box narrative structure, and in collections of macabre spook-stories such as Le Livre des fantômes (1947).
— Roger Cardinal
