Selected Stories: Edited and introduced by Paul Willetts

The world of Maclaren-Ross’s short fiction tends to be the dingy, down-at-heel world of smoke-veiled bars, rented lodgings, blacked out streets and wartime army garrisons. Whether they’re narrated in the breathless, slangy voice of an uneducated soldier or the abrupt cadences of a colonial expat, they’re imprinted with Maclaren-Ross’s unmistakable literary logo. The prevailing tone is casual, matter of fact and laconic, his characteristically humorous asides failing to conceal the melancholy that seeps through their hardboiled surfaces.

Book Author

Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64) was born in London, the youngest child of a Cuban father and an Anglo-Indian mother, and grew up in Britain and on the French Riviera. He worked as a door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman before being conscripted into the army from which he later deserted. Having been discharged from the army after a traumatic spell in a psychiatric hospital, he found a job working with Dylan Thomas as a screenwriter. Invariably clad in dark glasses and an imaculate suit, augmented by a malacca cane and silver snuff-box, he soon established himself as a pivotal figure in warti...
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Book Reviews

• The Times
  "Funny, bitter and original."
• Allan Massie, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
  "Maclaren-Ross is the master of the story which seems like a slice of life."
• The Daily Telegraph
  "Immediate, casual and slangy… these laconic and exhilaratingly under-punctuated vignettes are… reminiscent of the work of Henry Green."
• The Guardian
  "The stories [are]… told in a manner that brings Maclaren-Ross’s various worlds alive for us more than half a century on."