How The Inn Closes for Christmas and Other Dark Tales
Returned to the Light
The Inn Closes for Christmas has inhabited our family bookcases for decades, appearing in various editions and translations from the 1940s to the mid-1970s. Now, a lost classic rediscovered, it is back in a beautiful hardback edition ready for Christmas 2025!
For the two of us, Cledwyn Hughes’s daughters, there have been tears, laughter and more than a few surprises along the way.
Starting Out on the Journey
The “Hughes Girls” began a deep dive into the Cledwyn Hughes archive at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth a few years ago. Invariably, every visit to the Reading Room revealed unexpected treasures, guiding us to a deeper awareness of our father and his writing practice. Looking back, each step along the way feels serendipitous and what we uncovered filled in many gaps left by a man who kept his dark imagination deliberately separate from family life.
John Cledwyn Hughes—to use his full name—was born in 1920 into a line of farming families in mid-wales and our paternal ancestors can be traced back to the late 1600s living, marrying and dying within a thirty-mile radius of the farm where he grew up. It must have been surprising, therefore, when, at about fourteen, our father announced his intention to become a writer. His mother had hoped he would take over the local chemist shop in nearby Oswestry, but, devoted to her only child “Jim”, bought him his first typewriter that very year. He went on to study pharmacy at Liverpool University, but the typewriter remained his true companion, and writing his vocation.
From his early teens until the end of his life, Cledwyn, as he became known, wrote every day. Rejection letters arrived, as they do for any fledgling author, but his self belief and relentless graft saw his short stories appear increasingly in magazines throughout the 1940s.
A Bold Leap Across the Atlantic
One of the most moving discoveries in the archives was tracing the audacity of a young man from a farming background with few literary connections or mentors who wrote to a New York literary agent, Marion Saunders, asking her to represent him. After a brief exchange, a little like a blind date that goes surprisingly well, Saunders agreed. Within a year (late 1946) she was sending the telegrams we can see in the archives to his family farm that The Inn—originally titled “Obsession”—had been accepted for publication by A. A. Wynn in New York under the new title He Dared Not Look Behind. The publisher later altered the title for the UK market to The Inn Closes for Christmas.
The original authorial title survived only under a yellowed, gummed strip that we later discovered on the galley proofs of the American edition. Peeling back that strip felt like having sight of a private conversation between our father and his first editor.
Our research also uncovered four previously unpublished short stories, now among the “Dark Tales” in the new volume. These pieces demonstrate four more cracking experiments with the unsettling atmospheres that defined Cledwyn Hughes’s earlier work.
Gratitude to Those Who Made the Return Possible
Many individuals and institutions helped us on this rediscovery project of a fine Welsh writer, and we are so grateful to them for recognising his qualities and his relevance to modern readers. It is not within the scope of this piece to list them all, but we would like particularly to thank:
The National Library of Wales for safeguarding the Cledwyn Hughes papers, noting especially the four unpublished stories that have a home in the new 2025 edition.
Curtis Brown Heritage, and especially Norah Perkins for her brilliant insight and support in developing a publishing strategy.
The Baskerville team for treating the manuscript with reverence, restoring the original title in the acknowledgements and producing a beautifully designed volume that honours both the story and the author’s literary legacy.
Closing Reflections
Holding the new edition feels like standing on a bridge between two worlds: the private, imaginative realm our father inhabited and the public sphere where his stories now live again. The journey of republishing has run parallel to a personal pilgrimage. A profound and satisfying process. Learning about a father who inhabited a creative world apart from his everyday self; discovering new stories; and meeting the people who are helping to bring his work back into the light.
The Inn Closes for Christmas is by Cledwyn Hughes (John Murray Press) Out Now
Discover the lost masterpiece from the father of Celtic noir. The Inn Closes for Christmas is a deliciously dark and haunting tale of one man's nightmarish obsession and how far he'll go to escape it. For fans of Shirley Jackson, MR James, and Andrew Michael Hurley, rediscover this forgotten classic. The Bank manager, as he had done for so many Christmases now, opened the file. And as always, as he opened it he wondered why he must do this each year. For the man had asked him that he should do this every Christmas for as long as he should live. In the file, the bank manager sifts through some papers - local newspaper cuttings, a pathologist report, a statement from the town's dentist William Sterrill, and a death notice for his wife, Mrs Doreen Sterrill. But it is the last paper that stops him in his tracks. It is the confession of William Sterrill. In William's confession we learn about the terrible accident that caused his wife to have her leg amputated, the prosthetic leg she then had to wear, how this leg slowly drives William to murder, and then the descent into madness as we walk through William's nightmares, visions, and thoughts. The Inn Closes for Christmas is also accompanied by a selection of short stories, full of the uncanny and creepy where Hughes points us towards the darkest places in the human psyche with the lightest of touches.
Born in Llansantffraid, Montgomeryshire, he
worked as a hospital pharmacist in the north of England before settling down in
Wales to write full-time. His work has been featured in magazines such as Suspense,
as well as in collections like Woodrow Wyatt’s English Stories. He was also a regular
contributor to the BBC.
He is best known for the novel The Civil Strangers (1950) and the macabre novella The Inn Closes for Christmas (1947), which remained in print until shortly before his untimely death.
More information about Cledwyn Hughes and
his work can be found on the Cledwyn Hughes website.
You can also email them directly- estate@cledwynhughes.com.
They can also be found on Instagram @literaryestate_cledwynhughes
All photographs and copyright courtesy of Rebecca
and Janet (daughters of Cledwyn Hughes).