(When Lieutenant Alastair Lynch shoots young Drummer Malco...)
When Lieutenant Alastair Lynch shoots young Drummer Malcolm Harley in the back for desertion in the face of an enemy attack, his action seems to be clearly justified by military precedent. But after a court-martial is convened to examine the facts of the case, a different story emerges. A tale of passionate love, possessiveness, and jealousy between the two men, a brazen and scandalous relationship that ended in Harley’s violent death. The tension builds as the truth about the two men’s liaison and Lynch’s decision to pull the trigger gradually emerges, leading to a shocking finale.
(Richard Fountain, a promising young Cambridge scholar, we...)
Richard Fountain, a promising young Cambridge scholar, went to the island of Crete to study ancient rites and pagan rituals before, suddenly and inexplicably, breaking off all contact with the outside world. Disturbing rumors have filtered their way back to England, whispering of blasphemous rituals and obscene orgies, hints of terrible crimes and wanton murder. Three of Richard’s friends travel to Greece to find him and bring him back. Following a grim progression of ominous clues, they will arrive at last at an abandoned fortress high in the wild and desolate White Mountains, where they will discover Richard’s terrible and shocking fate! Chosen by Karl Edward Wagner as one of the best supernatural horror novels of all time, Simon Raven’s Doctors Wear Scarlet (1960) is a neglected classic of English horror fiction.
(They are young and entirely unconventional. They have fin...)
They are young and entirely unconventional. They have finished at Cambridge and done the tour of Europe. Now the three friends need to earn a living, so they have set up a unique organization – a very exclusive London club with high membership fees, affordable only to a select few, and where the services on offer are richly varied and exotic. The menu is sex, in every imaginable form, guaranteed to satisfy any craving and fulfill any desire. Some of the world’s most prominent people make up the clientele.
("In 'Sound the Retreat," Simon Raven details the hectic d...)
"In 'Sound the Retreat," Simon Raven details the hectic death throes of the Indian Empire, when tradition and honor were giving way to riot, nationalism, and hatred. The second part of Simon Raven's acclaimed Alms for Oblivion series begins in 1945, at the end of World War II. British colonial rule in India is slowly disintegrating. Peter Morrison arrives at the Officer Training School as one of a batch of one hundred Indian Army Infantry Cadets during turbulent times, just as the army leadership is turned over to the Indians. With the Empire's demise at hand, only a few of the cadets will ever be officers in India or anywhere in the Far East.
(This first volume in Simon Raven's ‘First Born of Egypt' ...)
This first volume in Simon Raven's ‘First Born of Egypt' saga opens with the christening of the Marquess Canteloupe's son and heir, Sarum of Old Sarum. The ceremony, attended by the godparents and the real father, Fielding Gray, is not without drama. The christening introduces a bizarre cast of eccentric characters and complicated relationships. In Morning Star we meet the brilliant but troublesome teenager Marius Stern. Marius' increasingly outrageous behaviour has him constantly on the verge of expulsion from prep school. When his parents are kidnapped, apparently without reason, events take a turn for the worse.
(The fourth in the First Born of Egypt series has Lord Can...)
The fourth in the First Born of Egypt series has Lord Canteloupe wanting a satisfactory heir so that his dynasty may continue. Unfortunately, Lord Canteloupe is impotent and his existing heir, little Tully Sarum, is not of sound mind. His wife Theodosia is prepared to do her duty when a suitable partner is found. Finding the man and the occasion proves somewhat tricky however, and it is not until Lord Canteloupe goes up to Lord's for the first match of the season that progress is made.
Simon Raven was a British playwright, screenwriter, critic, and author. He wrote in a highly satiric and critical style and published over thirty novels.
Background
Simon Raven was born on December 28, 1927, in London, United Kingdom. He was a son of Arthur and Esther Raven. His father had inherited the family hosiery business and did not need to work. His mother was a baker's daughter and a nationally-successful athlete. He had two siblings.
Education
Simon Raven was educated at Charterhouse School, Surrey, and King’s College, Cambridge.
After leaving King’s College, Simon Raven secured an army commission, serving in Germany and Kenya before being forced to resign (in lieu of court-martial) over his mounting gambling debts. He then managed to eke out a living in journalism until he met the young publisher Anthony Blond, who believed in Raven’s writing talent and offered to subsidize him while he wrote his first novel, The Feathers of Death (1959), on condition that he leave London and its temptations.
Anthony Blond published Raven’s work over the next three decades, including the spy thriller Brother Cain (1959), the classic vampire tale Doctors Wear Scarlet (1960), and the ten-volume Alms for Oblivion sequence (1964-1976), satirical novels focusing on the English upper class after the Second World War. The second sequence of seven novels, The First-Born of Egypt (1984-1992), which involved some of the same characters as the Alms series, was substantially less successful. In later works, Raven returned to the interest in horror and the supernatural he had evinced in Doctors Wear Scarlet, with the Gothic novels The Roses of Picardie (1980) and September Castle (1984), the haunting novella The Islands of Sorrow (1994), and a collection of short fiction, Remember Your Grammar and Other Haunted Stories (1997).
Additionally, he put forth numerous plays for television and radio, including a dramatization of Huxley’s Point Counterpoint for BBC Television and a radio play trilogy based on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.
In the interview on the question "You never had much time for religion. How much were you influenced by your study of the classics which advocate living this life to the full because only the superstitious believe in any kind of afterlife?", Simon Raven answered: "The classics had a great deal to do with it, and also the people among whom I was educated. Most classical authors just accepted the pagan religion as a rather decorative and poetic thing; they didn’t actually believe it, but in so far as they did, it was a fun thing. The poles were very wide, and you could do almost anything you wanted."
On the other question "Are you dismissive of Christianity chiefly because you find the idea of a merciful God absurd, or is there more to it than that?" he said: "The idea of a merciful God is absurd, particularly when you consider what he has inflicted on his people. I’m a deist in that I believe in a first cause, but there my own religious belief stops. My god is really just a scientific cause. As for the rest, Swinburne was right: ‘We thank with brief thanksgiving/Whatever gods may be/That no man lives forever,/That dead men rise up never;/That even the weariest river/Winds somewhere safe to sea.’"
Views
Simon Raven had no taste for possessions. In Deal, he had a succession of digs, his only requirement being a landlady who would cook him breakfast and, if required, high tea.
Quotations:
"Since life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better."
"Art for art's sake, money for God's sake."
Membership
In 1993 Simon Raven was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Personality
Simon Raven enjoyed reading classics in the original every day. He was a generous host, for whom the pièce de resistance was the arrival of the bill, the bigger the better. Raven loved cricket, gambling, alcohol and had affairs with both sexes. Sometimes accused of snobbery he claimed that he wrote "for people like myself, well educated, worldly and sceptical." Simon devised this epitaph for himself: "He shared his bottle - and, when still young and appetising, his bed."
Simon Raven was a bisexual. In the interview on the question "By all accounts you had a number of homosexual encounters in the army…did your fellow officers turn a blind eye?" he answered: "Well, some of my fellow officers were of course bisexual or homosexual themselves. And I was very discreet. But the main reason why there was no trouble was that I was pleasant to anybody with whom I had sexual connections, whether he was an officer or a private soldier. It’s only victims that shop a man, not people who are treated kindly. You don’t get reported as a rule, unless you get some terrible puritan who suffers from guilt. You have to be very careful about that. One or two of those army boys had puritan parents, ghastly low-church people, and that can spell trouble, particularly if they’re Baptists."
Physical Characteristics:
Simon was tall, slim, and beautiful as a youth.
Quotes from others about the person
""Raven came nearer than other novelists to exposing, in the grandeur of its squalor and the dubiety of its standards, the times he lived in and saw through."
Interests
gambling, socialising, travel
Sport & Clubs
cricket
Connections
In 1951 Simon Raven married Susan Kilner after having gotten her pregnant. After the child was born, he had little to do with her. In 1957 they divorced.