The Grey Room is a novel about whether the world is rational. That is its actual subject, more than the deaths or the detective or the house on Dartmoor. The characters gather and argue, at length and with genuine intelligence, about whether science has an answer for everything and whether the dead can reach back into the world of the living. Phillpotts lets each position be serious. Nobody is made into a fool for what they believe.

For most of the novel the room remains unexplained. When the explanation comes, it is rational — but the rational explanation turns out to be a record of human malice so patient and so architecturally embedded that it has been killing people for four hundred years. There was a mechanism in the room, engineered in the sixteenth century, waiting. The ghost would have been simpler. The rational answer is the more haunting one.

Phillpotts published this in 1921. He published 250 books in total. He encouraged a young Agatha Christie in her early career. She went on to become the most widely read English-language fiction writer of the century. He continued publishing, in Devon, and is today almost entirely unknown.

Down here, I find I can sit with the open question longer than I used to be able to. Some things are easier to hold as questions than as facts.

— G. H. Schreiber

31/05/2026