About a year and a half ago, I sought to interview him for Between the Covers, but the cancer that finally killed him had rendered Cox incapable of a phone interview. I had planned to ask him if he believed in ghosts. His biography of ghost-story master M.R. James is the standard, his ghost-story anthologies are comprehensive (and decidedly English; I wish he had edited a collection of American writers), and his end-of-life novel The Meaning of Night is, well, a book that I’d love to have the time to read. May he find a more restful peace than so many of the spectres who haunted his literary life.