Selected Stories: Edited and introduced by Paul Willetts
Julian Maclaren-Ross
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 Details:
- Author: Julian Maclaren-Ross
- Published Year: 2004
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Rights Sold
- UK: Dewi Lewis Publishing
- Argentina: The Equilateral Beast
Julian Maclaren-Ross
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 wartime...
More about Julian Maclaren-Ross
Book Reviews
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"Funny, bitter and original."
The Times -
"Maclaren-Ross is the master of the story which seems like a slice of life."
Allan Massie, THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT -
"Immediate, casual and slangy… these laconic and exhilaratingly under-punctuated vignettes are… reminiscent of the work of Henry Green."
The Daily Telegraph -
"The stories [are]… told in a manner that brings Maclaren-Ross’s various worlds alive for us more than half a century on."
The Guardian