It will cost some effort to moderate my praise of the Penhale trilogy written by Cornwall’s criminally unsung Crosbie Garstin (1887 – 1930): I will have to pointedly criticize this and that – casual 1920s racism first of all, seconded by other lazy stereotypes and overly-saccharine female characters; and my need to criticize is the surest sign that I am no Crosbie Garstin, for as I expressed it to my mother when out for a walk one day, “He [Garstin] is a very you-like person,” to which she, no novelist nor a 1920s racist nor otherwise connected to Garstin in any way, asked, “How?” and I replied, “Well, he’s unpretentious.” And that is a vast oversimplification – and my urge to unravel it is, again, a sure sign I am no Crosbie Garstin – but the basic reason why this risible sentiment came out of my mouth is because the Penhale trilogy is not, strictly speaking, about “issues,” per se. It is not one of your more famous 1920s novels, your Ulysses, Gatsbys, and Dalloways taking on contemporary life and characters and innovating formally; the Penhale trilogy doesn’t pretend to be any more nor less than a grand entertainment, an adventure saga for overgrown schoolboys, an easily dismissed piece of genre fiction, one that reflects more than it criticizes the mores of its time. (George Orwell, assessing a larger group of Penguin books that included The Owl’s House, wrote only, “Crosbie Garstin I cannot do with.”) I would cautiously attribute my own besottedness with Garstin’s prose to a kind of laddish ideation, yet I suspect* his persona has broader appeal than that, compounded as it is with some of ladhood’s most handsome parts: gallantry, self-awareness, mischief, daring, and surprise; self-deprecation, earthiness, and rare verbal dexterity, and that easy nonchalance English literature has long associated with the idea of cool since Lord Byron and Defoe’s pyrates bestrode the scene, just as a long train of heroes, anti-heroes, Kingsmen, Baby Drivers, and Captain Jack Sparrows do in our own day; but for those who have never heard of him, let it be known: this Cornishman Garstin swashbuckled as jauntily as any of them.

*Actually, I more than suspect; I read in the foreword to David Tovey’s biography of Garstin that editor Barton Currie reached a deal with publisher William Heinemann in 1925 to serialize the second two volumes of the trilogy in Ladies’ Home Journal. In the 1920s, Garstin was popular on both sides of the Atlantic; if I had to speculate about why you probably have never heard of him, I would put it down to some combination of a mid-century dip in the popularity of historical fiction, a general fog in our historical memory of most popular culture from between the World Wars, the aforementioned “not really about ‘issues'” problem, and Garstin’s own untimely and mysterious death by drowning in 1930.

The Penhale trilogy primarily follows the story of Ortho Penhale, a strapping adventurer from the town of Penzance in Cornwall who by the beginning of the third novel in the trilogy, The West Wind, has already amassed a half-dozen sobriquets – “Horse-coper, smuggler, slave in Barbary, captain of Arab lances, navy seaman, [and] blackbirder.” An eighteenth century English gentleman, Burnadick, considers recruiting Penhale to captain his ship as a privateer against the French at the beginning of this third book and takes stock of the man. With “portraits of his ancestors, bare-shouldered dames with nosegays at their high bosoms, men in scarlet or blue, with glossy curled perukes or neat powdered wigs” looking on, he wonders what they would think of him placing his trust in this “queer fish, part gipsy, part squire, earrings and riding boots, the one side uppermost, then the other. Sly yet generous, brutal yet oddly sympathetic, over-dressed, vain as a peacock, a swaggering blade—yet somehow likeable, attractive very.” Ortho’s raffish, slightly androgenous look bears a lot in common with Johnny Depp’s drunk Captain Jack, and a reprint cover of the Penhale trilogy carries a blurb recommending the books to fans of the TV adaption of Winston Graham’s Poldark series – which I have not read, although I read repeated assertions that Graham’s series was likely influenced by Garstin. That is neither here nor there for me, for as I say, Garstin’s greatness lies foremost in his elaborate fancy and outstanding style.

Scarcely ever has a writer made me long to visit a place the way Garstin had me wanting to visit the Keigwin Valley near Penzance in the West Penwith area of Cornwall. At the center of this fictional universe – as vividly brought to life as Thomas Hardy’s Wessex or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County – is Bosula, the Owl’s House. Like Faulkner and Hardy, Garstin has vividly transmuted his own home into a place of romance, adding additional intrigue for locals (and intrepid Google Earth sleuthers like yours truly) by changing most of the place names. For example, there is a Bosula inn presently located to the southwest of the town of Penzance, just up a wooded valley from a place called Lamorna Cove (presumably Monks Cove in the book), though whether this Bosula is identical to that introduced in the first of the Penhale novels, The Owl’s House, would require further investigation, but the fictional Owl’s House is very vividly described, along with its environs in the Keigwin (Lamorna) valley.

It was a surprising valley. You came from the west over the storm-swept, treeless table-land that drives into the Atlantic like a wedge and is beaten upon by three seas, came with clamorous salt gales buffeting you this way and that, pelting you with black showers of rain, came suddenly to the valley rim and dropped downhill into a different climate, a serene, warm place of trees with nothing to break the peace but the gentle chatter of the stream. When the wind set roundabouts of south it was not so quiet. The cove men had a saw— “When the river calls the sea, Fishing there will be; When the sea calls the river, ’Ware foul weather.” Bosula stood at the apex of the angle, guarded on all sides, but when the wind set southerly and strong the boom of the breakers on the Twelve Apostles reef came echoing up the valley in deep, tremendous organ peals. So clear did they sound that one would imagine the sea had broken inland and that inundation was imminent.

Ortho Penhale and his brother Elie are unruly children who ramble around the valley unwatched by their mother, who after the death of her husband turns into a fat spendthrift wasting away their patrimony on food, drink, and luxurious clothing. The brothers are nonetheless awed by Wany, a witless daughter of the housekeeper who relays fantastic stories told her by the cows of the tribes of Buccas and Pixies inhabiting the valley, of ghosts, demon huntsmen, and “a baby who was crying but never seen.” All this has a magical effect on the two brothers:

The stories had one virtue, namely that they brought the young Penhales home punctually at set of sun. The wild valley they roamed so fearlessly by day assumed a different aspect when the enchanted hours of night drew on; inanimate objects stirred and drew breath, rocks took on the look of old men’s faces, thorn bushes changed into witches, shadows harbored nameless, crouching things. The creak of a bough sent chills down their spines, the hoot of an owl made them jump, a patch of moonlight on a tree trunk sent them huddling together, thinking of the ghost lady; the bark of a fox and a cow crashing through undergrowth set their hearts thumping for fear of the demon huntsman. If caught by dusk they turned their coats inside out and religiously observed all the rites recommended by Wany as charms against evil spirits. If they were not brought up in the love of God they were at least taught to respect the devil.

John Penhale, Ortho and Eli’s father and the initial occupant of Bosula we are introduced to, apparently gets his surname from a village in the vicinity of nearby Helston, where he goes to meet his aunt’s lawyer and read her will, in which she has conditioned his inheritance of her land at Tregors (nearby Tregowris, perhaps) on his marrying within the year. John’s only problem: a hunting accident years before has left his face a frightful sight to virtually any woman, but this problem is solved when he bests a gypsy highwayman in a mortal struggle on the way back to Bosula, and then is followed home by the highwayman’s companion, Teresa, with whom John falls in love.

Crosbie Garstin’s description of Teresa has a preciousness – one might say adorableness – that recurs in multiple idealized descriptions of female characters throughout the Penhale trilogy.

The number of really satisfying meals the girl Teresa had had in her time could be counted on her fingers and toes, almost. Life had been maintained by a crust here and a bone there. She was only half gypsy; her mother had been an itinerant herbalist, her father a Basque bear-leader, and she was born at Blyth Fair. Her twenty-two years had been spent on the highways, singing and dancing from tavern to tavern, harried by the law on one side and hunger on the other. She had no love for the Open Road; her feet were sore from trudging it and she knew it led nowhere but to starvation; her mother had died in a ditch and her father had been hanged. For years she had been waiting a chance to get out of the dust, and when John came along, knocked out the tumbler and jerked her a florin she saw that possible chance.

A sober farmer who tossed silver so freely should be a bachelor, she argued, and a man who could fight like that must have a good deal of the lusty animal about him. She knew the type, and of all men they were the easiest to handle. She followed up the clew hot foot, and now here she was in a land of plenty. She had no intention of leaving in a fortnight, a month, or ever, if she could help it, no desire to exchange three meat meals daily, smoking hot, for turnips; or a soft bed for the lee of a haystack. She would sit on the floor after supper, basking at the roaring hearth, her back propped against John’s knees, and listen to the drip of the eaves, the sough of the treetops, the echoed organ crashes of the sea, snuggle closer to the farmer and laugh.

When he asked her why she did that she shrugged her shoulders. But she laughed to think of what she was escaping, laughed to think that the tumbler was out in it. But for that flung florin and the pricking of her thumbs she would have been out in it too, crouched under a hedge, maybe, soaked and shivering. Penhale need have had no fears she would leave him; on the contrary she was afraid he would tire of her, and strove by every means to bind him to her irrevocably. She practiced all her wiles on John, ran to him when he came in, fondled and kissed him, rubbed her head on his shoulder, swore he didn’t care for her, pretended to cry, any excuse to get taken in his arms; once there she had him in her power. The quarter strain of gitano came uppermost then, the blood of generations of ardent southern women, professional charmers all, raced in her veins and prompted her, showed her how and when. It was all instinctive and quite irresistible; the simple northern yeoman was a clod in her hands.

Bosula is located in West Penwith, the very crooked toe of the boot-end of Great Britain that is Cornwall. The peninsula faces the English Channel to its south over crescent-shaped Mount’s Bay, and the Celtic Sea on its north and west. Sea coves and river valleys alternate on its coasts with dramatic jutting cliffs known as “heads,” (or pedn in the ancient Cornish language) such as the head of the Lizard (the southernmost point of the isle of Great Britain) or the Land’s End (its westernmost) or Ortho’s beloved Luddra Head, which appears on no map; I tentatively identify it as the Boscawen Cliff near Penzance on the basis of this description:

The Luddra Head was [Ortho’s] favorite haunt; from its crest he could see from the Lizard Point to the Logan Rock, some twenty miles east and west, and keep an eye on the shipping. He would watch the Mount’s Bay fishing fleets flocking out to their grounds; the Welsh collier brigs racing up-channel jib-boom and jib-boom; mail packets crowding all sail for open sea; a big blue-water merchantman rolling home from the world’s ends, or a smart frigate logging nine knots on a bowline, tossing the spray over her fo’csle in clouds.

For all their easy access to dramatic sea-cliffs and a near constant view of passing ships, the Cornish people are rather poor; a country of farmers, fishermen, and tin miners, in this provinciality petty resentments brew even between neighboring towns – witness the scorn of Ortho’s father, John Penhale, towards the idea of letting his aunt’s farm pass into the hands of his “smug and infallible” cousin, Carveth Donnithorne, “ship chandler of Falmouth.” The metropolis of London is so remote that when Ortho meets a charming female scallywag in the middle of High Noon, he is ready to run off with her until she proposes “living very genteel in London, my heart,” and going “to the shilling gallery at Covent Garden and the bull-baits and blunt play at Hockley-in-the-Hole and the cock-fights in Red Lion Fields and Punch’s Opera and the mechanical pictures in Little Piazzas,” at which point Ortho recoils and says,

“Madam, you have a charming nose (among other things) and I am prodigiously honoured, but it cannot be done,” said he. “I should not shape favourably as a town beau—alack! A month’s idleness and my belt would cry for mercy.” He slapped his lean middle. “Two months and my buttons would fly like grape-shot and the fine red coat burst at every seam. Further, I should grow carbuncles. Picture to yourself a fat sot in a split coat with carbuncles! You would not love me then.”

What a man or woman of Penzance loves, first of all, is the country, the cliffs, and the sea, then merriment and a good stiff drink. In the eighteenth century, the whole area acquired notoriety as a center of piracy and smuggling of contraband booze. (Piracy, as a friend and I were talking about apropos of Somalian pirates, is not difficult to explain: take an economically blighted place, put it on a shoreline where trade ships temptingly carry luxury goods to the rich and privileged to-and-fro, and you have all the incentive needed to turn the locals into pirates. If the central government also wishes to tax the import of rum, and sends a Preventive officer and his dragoons to enforce the import duty, that creates the natural incentive towards smuggling.) Local accounts from the time period claim that virtually everyone in Cornwall was in some way involved in the smuggling trade; the people of the local fishing villages were notorious for the practice of “wrecking,” inducing passing ship to wreck on the ragged rocks and invisible reefs like the Twelve Apostles (apparently to be identified with the notorious Runnel Stone off of Gwennap Head) and then ransacking them in the way Ortho’s mother Teresa and the village of Monks Cove are vividly depicted doing in Chapter VII of The Owl’s House:

Barrels were spewed up by every wave, the majority stove in, but many intact. The fisher-folk fastened on them like bulldogs, careless of risk. One man was stunned, another had his leg broken. An old widow, having nobody to work for her and maddened at the sight of all this treasure-trove going to others, suddenly threw sanity to the winds, dashed into the surf, butted a man aside and flung herself on a cask. The cask rolled out with the back-drag, the good dame with it. A breaker burst over them and they went out of sight in a boil of sand, gravel and foam. Bohenna plunged after them, was twice swept off his feet, turned head over heels and bumped along the bottom, choking, the sand stinging his face like small shot. He groped out blindly, grasped something solid and clung on. Teresa, feeling more than she could handle on her line, yelled for help. A dozen sprang to her assistance, and with a tug they got Bohenna out, Bohenna clinging to the old woman, she still clinging to her barrel. She lay on the sand, her arms about her prize, three parts drowned, spitting salt water at her savior.

The most famous smuggler of 18^th century Cornwall was John Carter, who went by the moniker “King of Prussia” after the most fearsome military leader of the time, Frederick the Great. He finds his fictional counterpart in “King Nick,” Captain Nicholas Buzza, prince of the Free Traders, smuggler and unexpected man of God, who says things like,

Think o’ they poor St. Just tinners down in the damp and dark all day. ’Tis the duty of any man professing Christian love and charity to assist they poor souls to get a drop of warm liquor cheap. What saith the Book? ‘Blessed is he that considereth the poor and needy.’

Ortho becomes involved with King Nick and other colorful criminal characters like “Jacky’s George” George Baragwanath and the gypsy horse trader Pyramus “King” Herne, resigned to a life of roguery after he left the Helston Boarding School his mother had sent him to in dramatic fashion, drubbing a bullying usher, taking flight, and in the process turning himself into an object of legend among the other boys.

A core appeal of Ortho Penhale’s subsequent adventures is the fantasy of having dashing adventures abroad and returning home a hero, thereby attaining the boons of wealth, notoriety among ones own, and the attentions of a beautiful women. This framework is set up in The Owl’s House, where Ortho Penhale gets his start working for the gypsy horse dealer, Pyramus “King” Herne, then earns local fame in the illicit rum trade in partnership with “Jacky’s George” Baragwanath and his sons and the famous “King Nick,” Captain Nicholas Buzza, only to have one smuggling run go south when the Preventive officers turn up, and in the tumult Ortho is washed out to sea/embarked on a long odyssey in the world of Barbary and Morocco, where he is first captured and sold as a slave and then earns his freedom through his legendary prowess on the battlefield – and finally, after many trials, he returns home “a personage”:

Ortho was spoken of in the same breath as King Nick and other celebrities of the [smuggling] “Trade.” […] It was a most agreeable sensation. Men in every walk of life rushed to shake his hand. He found himself sitting in Penzance taverns in the exalted company of magistrates and other notables telling the story of his adventures— with picturesque additions.

He next notices he has attracted the attention of ladies, who whisper about him to his satisfaction.

Even the fine ladies in Chapel Street turned their proud heads when he limped by. His limp was genuine to a point; but when he saw a pretty woman ahead he improved on it to draw sympathy and felt their softened eyes following him on his way, heard them whisper, “Ortho Penhale, my dear . .  . general in Barbary . .  . twelve times wounded.  .  .  . How pale he looks and how handsome!” A most agreeable sensation.

But if fame, fortune, and the admiration of pretty ladies is what Ortho Penhale wants, each book of the trilogy ultimately leaves him frustrated in these ambitions. (Denys Val Baker wrote in his A view from Land’s End that the publisher sent Garstin a telegram telling him to change the ending of The Owl’s House: “Re-write the last chapter. Penhale too good a character to kill off!” and to this it seems we may credit Ortho’s further adventures in books two and three.)

Ortho carries off glorious exploits, tempting fate many times, but disaster invariably strikes, and sends him unwillingly to further trials, captivities, and escapes in Barbary, the Caribbean, and Spain. Even when Ortho returns home, he doesn’t always receive the hero’s welcome he expects; on returning after being lost on the island of St. Lucia and participating in a glorious naval battle against the French, he rides back into Penzance and tosses greetings at the local squires – “Hello, Harry, my buck! … Hello, Carclew and Cap’n Jem! What news? Here am I back again! Been fighting you lubbers’ battles for you, I have—with Rodney.” He proposes they celebrate at the nearby tavern, but the squires decline uncomfortably, and then tell him: his mother is dead. The depth of Ortho’s story lies in episodes like this, showing that happiness and glory are fleeting, that the life we want so easily slips right out of our hands. This disappointment, heartache, and crushed hopes take the piss out of swaggering Ortho, and in that way humanize him. Intermitted with Ortho’s story is that of his salt-of-the-earth brother Eli, who loses at wrestling but wins the love of Mary Penaluna, who rejects Ortho’s extravagance in favor of his brother’s simplicity. In the third book, The West Wind, Ortho plays a cat-and-mouse game against his own unacknowledged son, Anthony Trevaski, who raises himself from an awful childhood in another man’s home to become an officer in the dragoons, and an entity of the law in contrast to his father’s outlaw ways.

All this became even more interesting once I started combing through the scarce information available about Crosbie Garstin himself. In most cases when writing a review, I don’t feel the need to learn the author’s whole life story, but somewhere around a third of the way through The Owl’s House, after Garstin started flaunting a Moby Dick chapter’s worth of salty sea jargon, I said to myself out loud, “Who the heck is this guy?” Were Garstin not extraordinarily gifted at lovingly conveying a sense of the place, I would probably not be inclined to trace his characters’ footsteps through Penzance, nor have cause to wonder if fictional Monks Cove constituted an elaborate tribute to a vibrant artist community at Lamorna Cove that for several years included Norman Garstin, an influential painter of the famous Newlyn School associated with the nearby town of that name, along with his wife Dochie and their three artistically gifted children, Crosbie, Denys, and Alethea; and Crosbie Garstin’s comical depictions of the denizens of 18^th century Penzance and their doings at such locales as the Angel Inn, Chapel Street, and Market Jew Street have added charm when you realize these are real places where he spent his youth.

I hope to get my hands on the first full-length biography of Crosbie Garstin, David Tovey’s recently published The Witty Vagabond: A Biography of Crosbie Garstin (1887 – 1930), but here is what I have gleaned from other sources: Norman Garstin, Crosbie’s father, in addition to being a well-known painter, was also a highly literate and active man, an occasional poet, and an outspoken socialist and pacifist. At the center of the Newlyn artist community, he would organize artist trips in the 1890s to the continent and teach other artists at his studio. The family lived for almost three decades at 4 Wellington Terrace in Penzance.

Crosbie’s younger brother Denys (1890 – 1918) is described by Norman Garstin’s biographer Richard Pryke as “outgoing, confident, and eager for enjoyment” but also “perceptive, earnest and courageous”; an illustrative episode Pryke gives is when a suffragette was being harassed by a crowd at an art gallery, and Denys defends here, then declines her thanks, saying, “It isn’t you I’m for, it’s the crowd I’m against.” Denys would go to Cambridge, become an editor of Granta and a contributor to Punch, and would write two books of his own, Friendly Russia and The Shilling Soldiers, based on his experiences in World War I and in Russia, where he had gone on a holiday when the war abruptly started. In August 1918, he was killed in action while deployed with the British Expeditionary Force in Archangel, Russia. Pryke says he was always his father’s favorite.

Crosbie, by contrast, seems more to fit the mold of a prodigal son. He attended Penzance High School, was sent to prep school in Cheltenham, and failed the exams needed to enter the British Navy. Ortho Penhale, we will recall, was press-ganged into that same institution, then deserted it, then climbed back aboard just in time for a glorious sea-battle, which seems not altogether at a variance with Crosbie Garstin’s experience, which ultimately saw both Denys and him volunteer to serve at the outbreak of World War I. They quarreled with their father, whose outspoken pacifism made him an unpopular personage back home. (Their solidarity notably mirrors the relationship between extravagant Ortho and his honest, salt-of-the-earth brother Eli.) In contrast to Cambridge-attending Denys, however, Richard Pryke tells us,

His father described [Crosbie] as being “practically immune” to education, and Crosbie himself says that he “broke all records for consistency in work by being bottom of one form for four years without a single interruption.

Of course, Ortho Penhale does not last long in school either. David Tovey’s preface defends the lad, noting he showed talent as a cartoonist in his father’s school, was exceptionally handsome and used by his father and other artists as a model, and “despite repeatedly coming bottom of his class, he was nevertheless later hailed by his former headmaster as a ‘genius’ who was ‘above the plane of school life’ and with ‘too rare a mind for any school curriculum.’

Be that as it may, it would appear that by age 23 Garstin was suffering from a failure to launch, and that (as much as any particular eagerness for adventure) prompted his departure for North America in 1910, to work as “horse-wrangler, cow-puncher and broncho-buster in Saskatchewan and Montana, as a ‘stooker’ and a member of a threshing gang during a Canadian harvest, as a lumberjack and sawyer in British Columbia and as a ‘mucker’ and navvy in minings camps on the Pacific Coast near Vancouver,” a long and ostentatious list of occupations that sounds like Ortho’s. Next he is found a cattle-rancher in South Africa, then when war breaks out he is a soldier, and like his brother he starts contributing poems and humorous sketches to magazines, and these form the basis of his first two books, Vagabond Verses (1917) and The Mudlarks (1918). The former read more impressively to this critic than the latter; Garstin’s verses have all the picturesqueness of belated sea shanties and what’s more, are written in traditionalist metered forms that went against the contemporary trend towards vers libre. The short stories primarily consist of dialogue between soldiers and seem far less substantial than the prose style Garstin subsequently achieves. Subsequent works like The Black Knight (1920; co-written with popular romance writer and family friend, Cecily Sidgewick) and The Coasts of Romance seem to move Garstin closer to the style achieved in The Owl’s House, but I feel some frustration, as a committed Bakhtinian, at being unable to pinpoint Garstin’s stylistic influences beyond free speculation; was he influenced by the Cornish writer Arthur Quiller-Couch? Rafael Sabatini had in recent years written, in The Sea-Hawk (1915; the action opens in Cornwall!) and Scaramouche (1921), two famous piratical books – and Sabbatini’s linguistic dexterity seems the nearest parallel to Garstin’s; but I have yet to find a textual basis for claiming that either of these writers were actual influences.

What does seem clear enough is that Crosbie Garstin engaged in copious research in preparation to write the Penhale trilogy, including taking a journey to Morocco which forms the subject of his travelogue The Coasts of Romance (1922), and then editing the 18^th century diaries of Samuel Kelly : An Eighteenth Century Seaman (1924) in preparation to write the latter two volumes of the trilogy, High Noon and The West Wind. There are fascinating correspondences between the lives of the characters in these books and Crosbie Garstin’s own life. I know of nothing in Crosbie Garstin’s 1924 marriage to the violinist Lilian Barkworth to suggest Miss Nicola Barradale, who Ortho marries and then abandons at home, dismayed by her woeful … condition. We are more solid ground, I think, in seeing the relationship between Ortho and his unacknowledged son Anthony Trevaski as in some ways inspired by the relationship between Crosbie and his father Norman, who in Richard Pryke’s telling would travel off from place to place and leave his family behind, and whose pacifist views were irreconcilable with (what Pryke tells us) were Crosbie’s strongly martial ones; Pryke, for his part, seems to find Crosbie the most distasteful of the three children of Norman Garstin, calling him “sullen, angry, and bullying” and noting examples of his racism – something readers of the middle book of the Penhale trilogy can themselves infer, seeing as the second half of the book has Ortho captain a slave ship and offers a rather contemptuous depiction of a fictional tribe of West African slave traders. But Pryke also leads us to believe there was some manner of reconciliation prior to Norman Garstin’s death in 1926, writing, “Crosbie’s letters to his sister and his parents, whom he addressed as ‘Darlings’ display great affection, and The West Wind is dedicated ‘To Norman Garstin Dearest of Fathers, Wittiest of Companions, Best of Friends.’” We can see something of this mirrored in Ortho’s rescue of his son Trevaski at the end of that same book, which I thought ended quite satisfactorily after several chapters in its first half where Garstin started to repeat a certain formula of introducing colorful characters into a set-piece locale who block Ortho in his attempt to escape Spain, and to have Ortho improvise an ingenious workaround for each tight spot he finds himself in; one or two such scenes showed a neat narrative trick, three or four and it started to get excessive. (Although three of these encounters, with the widow on St. Lucia, the old woman Esther, and the bolero dancing Dona Bianca Cantero, show wonderful tenderness and zest.)

Garstin’s post-Penhale writing career finds him in the East, writing another acclaimed travelogue, The Dragon and the Lotus (1928), in preparation for another novel that I hope to get my hands on, China Seas (1930), which was made into a famous movie starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. This novel was published posthumously; we are told he died at the age of 42 in the same manner as Percy Shelley, although Garstin eerily shares the distinction with Robert Walser of writing a character whose demise predicts his own, which eeriness is only more compounded in our imaginations by the suggestive note with which the Penhale trilogy ends. Much more can be said about Crosbie Garstin and his writing – indeed, David Tovey teases the existence of voluminous correspondence from the war, to publishers, “his letters from America, Canada and South Africa, the first of which was fifty pages long,” suggesting that some of my lingering questions about the author may be answered there. I will likely be spending much more time with Garstin’s works in the future, for his kind of wit and picturesque prose is what I least tire of.