Woolf, ‘Sapper’, Edgar Wallace

Sometimes the census just tells you what you already knew. Here is the return submitted by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, from an address oddly transcribed as ‘Rodmell, Lewes, Southease & Rodmell, Sussex, England’: Living with the couple are Nellie and Lettie, brought to life so vividly in Alison Light’s book Mrs Woolf and the Servants.

Bestsellers Lost and Found

At Sheffield Hallam University this Saturday (November 18th) there will be  a presentation about ‘Bestsellers Lost and Found’, based on the 1937 set of cigarette cards: Famous British Authors. Here’s a sample of the writers that Wills chose to commemorate:

Coming back to Dornford Yates

I read quite a bit of Dornford Yates when I was researching post-war thrillers, but I hadn’t looked at one of his novels for quite a while. Last Saturday, though, I was in the excellent Daisy Lane Books in Holmfirth, and noticed that they had a row of Yateses, so I thought I’d take another […]

‘Sapper’ paper online

A couple of years ago I was fortunate to be invited to the conference of Les Amis du Roman Populaire in Amiens. The topic was popular fiction of the First World War, and I gave a paper on ‘Sapper’: from Realism to Melodrama. This tried to explain how ‘Sapper’ ( Herman Cyril McNeile), who began as […]

Le Rocambole

Today’s post brought something I’d been eagerly looking forward to – Le Rocambole for Summer-Autumn 2015. Le Rocambole is the Bulletin of Les Amis du Roman Populaire, whose conference in Amiens I attended last year, and this issue of the journal contains the papers delivered at the conference, including my own: Sapper : du réalisme au […]