COMBINING REALISM WITH THE supernatural does not come easily to most authors of horror and fantastic fiction, as they are, by definition, diametrically opposed to one another. Nonetheless, the British poet and short story writer A(lfred) E(dgar) Coppard (1878–1957) managed this as well, or better, than most of his more famous contemporaries, smoothly slipping back and forth in his narrative between the mundane world and the ethereal one. In how many tales of terror and suspense do the characters need to worry about earning a living or think about filling their bellies? This foothold in reality is commonplace for many of the characters in Coppard’s stories, even while they are enmeshed in occult happenings.
Having to work in a tailor shop at the age of nine, Coppard was totally self-educated, learning to be an accountant for an ironworks firm in Oxford until he became a full-time writer in his forties. He went on to write more than a hundred short stories, which he preferred to call modern folk tales, as well as poetry and children’s stories. He was proud of his stories, going so far as to write a descriptive bibliography of his own work, and often inserted his own “fictive self,” as he described it, into it.
In 1967, the British television series Omnibus filmed The World of Coppard, which adapted three of his stories: “The Field of Mustard,” “Dusky Ruth,” and “Adam and Eve and Pinch Me,” which was produced and directed by Jack Gold and adapted by Kit Coppard.
“Adam and Eve and Pinch Me” was first published in Adam and Eve and Pinch Me Tales (Waltham Saint Lawrence, Berskshire, U.K., Golden Cockerel Press, 1921).