Julian Maclaren-Ross, Selected Stories
With an introduction by Paul Willetts
Enthusiastically endorsed by the likes of Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and John Betjeman (who hailed him as a genius), Julian Maclaren-Ross was one of the leading writers of the 1940s. His world is dingy, down-at-heel; a world of smoke-veiled bars, rented lodgings, blacked-out streets, and wartime army garrisons, first-hand experience lending his work a frisson of authenticity. Whether narrated in the breathless, slangy voice of an uneducated soldier, or the clipped cadences of a colonial expat’, whether set on the French Riviera or wartime England, his stories are imprinted with his unmistakable literary logo, their tone casual, matter-of-fact and laconic, with characteristically caustic, humorous asides failing to conceal a melancholy that seeps through their hardboiled surfaces.
Praise for this book
“…the stories are vividly told in a manner that brings Maclaren-Ross’s various worlds alive for us more than half a century on.”—Nicholas Royle, The Guardian
“…very good indeed.”—Peter Parker, The Daily Telegraph
“Along with Waugh’s [Sword of Honour] trilogy, his stories are the best and most accurate rendering of the military existence of the day…”—Walter Allen, The Sunday Times
“He presents the military-medical bureaucracy as something out of Kafka rewritten by the Marx Brothers.”—Bernard Bergonzi