The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938) … Around the World in 80 Days (1956) … Treasure Island (1950) … The Prisoner of Zenda (1937) … The Man Who Would Be King (1975) … Lost Horizon (1937) … ibid.
Tales of crime grab your attention like little else. The people who inhabit the criminal underworld have always made fascinating literary characters. Classic Literature & Cinema III: Crime
One of the earliest pieces of crime fiction is from the 1,001 Nights, the collection of folk tales from the Middle East. ibid.
Edgar Allan Poe: The Murders in the Rue Morgue. ibid.
Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone, which deals with the unexplained theft of a diamond. ibid.
It would be a doctor named Arthur Conan Doyle who created the greatest detective of all time with Sherlock Holmes. ibid.
In 1929 Agatha Christie introduced another of the great literary detectives – Hercule Poirot. ibid.
Little Caesar (1931) … Scarface (1932) … High Sierra (1941) … Maigret Sets a Trap (1958) … Double Indemnity (1944) … The Big Sleep (1946) … Brighton Rock (1948) … The Third Man (1949) … Strangers on a Train (1951) … The Godfather (1972) … The Firm (1993) … ibid.
Maigret would go on to feature in an astonishing 84 novels. ibid.
‘Hemingway was a writer who happened to be American. But his palate was incredibly wide, and delicious, and violent, and brutal, and ugly. All of those things.’ Hemingway I, Michael Katakis, writer, BBC 2021
Ernest Hemingway remade American literature. He pared story-telling to its essentials. Changed the way characters speak. Expanded the worlds a writer could legitimately explore, and left an indelible record of how men and women lived in his lifetime. ibid.
Behind the public figure was a troubled and conflicted man who belonged to a troubled and conflicted family with its own drama and darkness and closely held secrets. ibid.
‘The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.’ ibid. Hemingway
‘You see, I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across. Not to just depict life, or criticise it. But to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well. Hemingway II
With the help of sympathetic friends, Hemingway would publish two slender books, three stories and ten poems, and In Our Time. ibid.
By the time A Fairwell to Arms topped the best-seller list in 1929 colourful stories had already begun to circulate about Ernest Hemingway, many of them told by the writer himself … It became harder and harder to tell the real Hemingway from the one he had created. Hemingway III
‘All stories if continued far enough end in death.’ ibid.
What was happening in his beloved Spain was beginning to change his mind. It was now being torn apart by a civil war. Early in 1936 reactionary elements of the army eventually led by a fascist general named Francisco Franco and supported by wealthy industrialists, great landowners and the Catholic Church joined forces to try to overthrow the duly elected socialist government. Hitler provided Franco and his rebels with bombers and fighter planes and German pilots to fly them. Their goal was to terrorise the civilian population. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini dispatched tanks and nearly 80,000 troops. Within weeks, Franco’s forces had seized one third of the country from those faithful to the government … Between 30-40,000 men from more than 50 countries would answer the call. ibid.
When the writer Martha Gellhorn, a family friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, introduced herself to Ernest Hemingway at the bar in Sloppy Joe’s in December 1936 she was 28 years old, 9 years younger than he. Hemingway IV
Hemingway’s sons would come to visit and begin to get to know the woman with whom their father was openly living. ibid.
When For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, Marxist critics attacked the novel as a betrayal of their cause because it showed sympathy for the war’s victims on both sides. ibid.
On May 17th 1944 Ernest Hemingway arrived in London, assigned by Collier’s magazine to cover the Allied invasion of France, now less than three weeks away. He was 44 years old but seemed much older, and felt that the luck that had kept him alive through two wars would likely not continue through another. Hemingway V
‘Nothing is mine’, she [Mary Welsh] wrote. ‘The man is his own with various adjuncts: his writing, his children, his cats. The strip of bed where I lie is not mine’. But she stayed. ibid.
The Old Man and the Sea he wrote in just eight weeks. Hemingway VI
For many readers A Moveable Feast, a combination of what had really happened and what Hemingway wished had happened, would be his final masterpiece. ibid.
The most satirical novelist of the 1930s … ever popular with readers to this day. Waugh was born into a comfortable literary middle-class family in London … He then stumbled into teaching. Evelyn Waugh: Face to Face, BBC 2021
What an extraordinary journey from a poor cottage in Dorset to being buried twice: once in Westminster Abbey with his coffin held aloft by Rudyard Kipling, the prime minister and once with his heart being buried in Dorset. Thomas Hardy: Fate, Exclusion & Tragedy, Sky Arts 2021
Hardy is irrevocably associated with his creation of the region of Wessex. ibid.
Dominated by a sense of being between classes, he loved London society but never felt part of it. ibid.
He found the cruelty of the world unbearable … But deep in his inner self, Thomas Hardy remained that raging wounded self who chastised the values of the world he inhabited. ibid.
Frankenstein, made infamous by the classic Boris Karloff films of the 1930s, was written by a 19-year-old girl nearly 200 years ago. Frankenstein: A Modern Myth, Channel 4 2013
Mary Shelley raised larger questions about our own origins and mankind’s place in the universe. ibid.
Mary and her married lover, Percy Shelley, were a scandalous couple. ibid.
‘Every creature has a mate’. ibid. monster
The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. Chinua Achebe
Last Monday, publishers Proof, Rock & Limpet announced that as of midnight they were laying off 259 major characters from Dombey & Son. And will be seeking a further 300 voluntary redundancies from Bleak House and Barnaby Rudge over the next 18 months. Alexie Sayle’s Stuff s1e6: How to Point at Chickens, BBC 1988