M.R. James (1862-1936) was a masterful writer of atmospheric ghost stories, all of which showed his distinctive and individual touch. Once you have read them (and you definitely should), you won't ever mistake them for anyone else's, nor will you fail to recognize his influence when you encounter it elsewhere.

As you will in The Collectors.

James's heroes (and victims) are usually academics and often found in scholarly settings and pursuits. They have supernatural encounters which they, being the narrators, narrowly survive (although they never come out unscathed).

Thus far, the similarities. But there is much, much more.

In a college hall in Oxford, two collectors, Horley and Grinstead, sit up exchanging anecdotes. "It was the December of 1970, and they were sitting in the senior common room of Horley's college after dinner." Their thoughts and conversation wander from the inferiority of the wine and cuisine, to the ancient phone system, to the eccentricities of antique dealers; in particular, they discuss two items that Horley has just acquired.

There is a portrait of a fair-haired young woman, whose plain clothes and surroundings are offset by her powerful expressions -- from cold and contemptuous to lost and hopeless. And there is a bronze sculpture of a monkey, equally gripping in its effect on the viewer: "Absolute savage greed and brutality. ... But beautifully sculpted, you know, every hair, every little fingernail in place, perfect."

They discuss the provenance of the two items, and Horley tells the following tale: "Now we come to the mystery. It seems that by chance, purely by chance, the bronze and the painting often ended up in the same collections. Someone would buy the painting, and a few months later the bronze would come up for auction, and they'd buy that. Or the other way round. Or they'd buy the one and then be given the other as a gift, or win it in a bet, or something." The wife of its previous owner hated it and called it "an embodiment of pure evil"; when her husband refused to get rid of it, she asked a priest to try to exorcise it. The priest spent the night in the room with the figure, and "when the wife came down in the morning, there was the priest dead on the floor, head bashed in, and the monkey on the sideboard, covered in blood."

They never found out who did it. The bronze monkey was kept as evidence and they never asked for it back. It was sent to auction and ended up in a gallery -- in the same room as the painting.

"And now ... they're both yours," said Grinstead. And the two walked to Horley's rooms though a "fine freezing rain." There Grinstead names the woman of the portrait as a former lover of his. An argument ensues when Horley points out the discrepancy between the age of the portrait (not to mention the woman) and Grinstead's age.

Grinstead moves the scene from the supernatural to the fantastic; he explains that the woman came from another world: "There are many worlds, Horley, many universes, an infinity of them, and none of them knows about any of the others. Except that at very rare intervals, a breach appears between one world and another. ... Time passes differently in different worlds."

And that, believe it or not, is just the beginning of the plot's twists and turns. There's a Chekhov mantelpiece -- you know, the one with a weapon that appears early in the story to become significant later on. I mentioned the cuisine and the phone system....

You don't have to read Pullman's Dark Materials series to appreciate this gem. But it does add to the enjoyment of the whodunit. Or is it a whatdunit? Or is the answer "Yes"?