(No dust jacket, boards faded, damp marked, bumped and wor...)
No dust jacket, boards faded, damp marked, bumped and worn, page edges tanned and marked. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.
(Paul Presset cannot resist an open opportunity to rid him...)
Paul Presset cannot resist an open opportunity to rid himself of his overbearing wife. This powerful and haunting novel traces the dawn of motive in his mind through the murder and resulting manhunt, arrest, trial, and a final, terrible culminating scene. Paul Presset cannot resist an open opportunity to rid himself of his overbearing wife. This powerful and haunting novel traces the dawn of motive in his mind through the murder and resulting manhunt, arrest, trial, and a final, terrible culminating scene.
(Gentle Greaves is the story of a love that pursued its pa...)
Gentle Greaves is the story of a love that pursued its passionate course amid the elegance and beauty of England from before the First World War. It is rich storytelling that vividly recalls that enthralling era, while creating human beings whom you will never forget.
Ernest Raymond was a French author of more than fifty books. He is best known for his first novel, Tell England (1922), set during World War I.
Background
Ernest Raymond was born on December 31, 1888, in Argentières, France. As a toddler, Ernest was taken to London, where he and another young child - whom Raymond referred to in his memoirs as “Dots” - were raised by a woman named Emily Calder. They called her “Auntie” but Calder was an unpleasant woman who beat Raymond. Calder’s much kinder sister and Ernest's undisclosed mother, Ida Broenner, lived nearby with her husband and a son, a boy five years Raymond’s senior named Percy. Raymond gradually discovered that he and Dots were the children of Maj. Gen. George Frederick Blake and had been conceived in the same year by the Calder sisters - Dots by Emily and Ernest by Ida; he deduced that Percy was also the general’s son.
Education
Raymond was educated at St Paul's School, London, but when his father Major Blake died in 1904, the sixteen-year-old Raymond was forced to leave St. Paul’s and finish his education in a less prestigious school, since Emily Calder, his aunt, had usurped Blake’s bequest to his son. Forced to support himself, Raymond worked in a London shop for a time after leaving school in 1905, and between the years 1908 and 1912 taught school at preparatory academies in the Sussex area and then in Bath.
In 1912 Raymond enrolled in the Chichester Theological College, from which he graduated first in his class. He then earned a theology degree from Durham University, and was ordained a priest of the Church of England in 1914.
The outbreak of World War I of 1914 offered Raymond the opportunity to work as a chaplain for British Army regiments, and in this capacity he served with regiments that were active in Gallipoli, North Africa, Russia, France, and the Middle East. After the war’s end, he returned to England and was appointed curate of a Brighton church. Married in 1921 to Zoe Doucett, Raymond grew increasingly resolved to pursue a career as a writer, and took a finished novel, based loosely on his wartime experiences, to a dozen publishers before one agreed to take it on. His work Tell England: A Study in a Generation was published in 1922, and was a tremendous literary event in England that year. Critics were mixed in their assessment, but the book sold extremely well and was quickly published in the United States.
With the success of Tell England, Raymond had no difficulty in finding a publisher for his next novel - indeed his London firm, Cassell, would publish almost all of his books over the course of a very long career. Rossenal also appeared in Britain in 1922, and presented a fictional conflict clearly mined from Raymond’s own life: the title character is an illegitimate boy, raised by a female guardian; an aunt admits to being his biological mother, but the guardian aunt embezzles money from Rossenal, who is then forced to become a teacher in Sussex. He eventually achieves success as a writer.
By 1923, Raymond had resigned from the priesthood altogether. His next book, the 1923 novel Damascus Gate, also clearly mined events from his life as the basis of the plot, with its tale of two cousins raised together and their lifelong friendships. His 1925 work, Daphne Bruno and its sequel, The Fulfillment of Daphne Bruno, followed the travails of a likable English girl of affluent parentage through her teen years and adulthood.
A collection of his essays, Through Literature to Life, was an immediate bestseller in 1928 and remained in print for four decades. He was invited to make a lecture tour of Canada, and on this 1929 trip met a Toronto woman, Hazel Reid Marsh, and fell in love. Earlier that year the first of his two plays was produced in London. The Berg fictionalized the final hours of the Titanic, and was later adapted for the screen and made into separate films in Britain, France, and Germany under the title Atlantic. Raymond also enjoyed success elsewhere in 1929 with his novel A Family That Was, the saga of the fictional O’Grogan family.
By 1930 Raymond was conducting his own affair with Marsh, who came to England to find a job. That same year his next novel, The Jesting Army, continued the story of the eldest son Tony O’Grogan through World War I and his lucky survival at Gallipoli, that war’s notorious bloodbath. The 1931 novel Mary Leith continues the story of the O’Grogan family, with Tony returning from the war to his wife Honor; he settles into postwar life as a curate, but finds success in his literary endeavors. When he meets the Canadian woman of the title, he begins an affair and quits the priesthood. The work is set during a time of actual labor unrest in Britain in the mid- 1920s, and Raymond included in his plot many actual events. Following his 1932 play The Multahello Road, Raymond again drew upon his own personal experiences in creating the protagonist for his 1933 novel Newtimber Lane.
With the 1934 publication of Child of Norman’s End, Raymond began the cycle of novels that would be grouped as “The London Gallery.” After his debut novel Tell England, Raymond’s 1935 book We, the Accused would become his most successful literary achievement. It was a great critical success, sold several thousand copies, and was eventually filmed for both the large screen and television. Raymond conducted a great deal of research on the criminal Justice system, the methodology of police detective work, and even interviewed a man sentenced to die who had won a reprieve in the final hours. Yet Raymond was so agitated prior to this book’s publication in England that he actually left the country for Spain as the date neared.
During World War II, Raymond worked as an air-raid warden and helped in other civil defense actions as a member of the British Home Guard. These experiences provided the basis for his 1943 novel, The Corporal of the Guard. Raymond also wrote a nonfiction book with his eldest son, Patrick, who had served in the Royal Air Force. Published in 1945, Back to Humanity was a chronicle of Patrick Raymond’s wartime experiences, interspersed with a call for a return to sanity and moral soundness after the trauma of war. His first postwar novel, The Five Sons of Le Faber, appeared in 1946. Raymond repeated the success of the Saint Francis book with another travelogue-biography, In the Steps of the Brontes, which appealed in 1948.
Raymond continued to write prolifically, though by the 1950s he was already well into his sixties. The City and the Dream, dating from 1958, was the last of Raymond’s sixteen novels in the London Gallery. Three novels and a book about Paris appeared in the years before the publication of The Chatelaine in 1962, a novel that was, for once, even unpopular with Raymond’s readership as a result of its decidedly unsympathetic heroine. Though he continued to write a novel a year during the 1960s, Raymond also began work on his memoirs. These were published in three volumes, beginning with 1968’s The Story of My Days: An Autobiography, 1888-1922. This reveals his unusual childhood and concludes with the success of Tell England.
Raymond’s 1971 novel A Georgian Love Story was the first of his books to be published in the United States in thirty years. The work is set in the early years of the twentieth century and presents the doomed romance between Stewart, the narrator, and a young woman from a poor section of London.
Raymond’s own life was eventful enough as his own tale, and indeed Raymond sometimes used conflicts or incidents that he had personally experienced as the basis for his fiction.
Shy and introspective child as a result of the abusive home environment, Raymond was a voracious reader and developed an especial fondness for the London-set works of Charles Dickens, with their inimitable juvenile characters, and so resolved to become a writer himself.
Interests
Writers
Charles Dickens
Connections
In 1921, Raymond married Zoe Irene Maude Doucett, but they divorced in 1939, and, in 1940, Ernest married Diana Young, a writer. From his first marriage, he had two children: Patrick and Leila. From his second marriage, he had a son, Peter.