Under the Brutchstone

New York: Coward-McCann, Inc.. Fair. 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. NOISBN . (no dust jacket) [solid reading copy, moderate external soiling, some deterioration to cloth on rear cover, 3-inch split to cloth along front joint; humorous contemporary gift inscription (non-authorial) on ffep, along with attractive vintage bookplate of one Marianna V. Hover]. Novel set in the Lake District of northern England (Cumberland, specifically), telling the tale of a couple of poachers, Red Ike and Will Moffatt, who run afoul of a powerful and not-very-nice landowner -- a situation complicated by the fact that Will and the landowner's daughter are in love. (And Red Ike is in love with a gypsy girl who might also turn out to be a daughter of the landowner.) In the words of a contemporary reviewer: "There are secret passages, caves, graves at full moon, elaborate gypsy staffs, and much other machinery of romance." Apparently the book's primary author, Denwood, had himself been a poacher for many years before turning over a new leaf, getting a little education, and developing literary ambitions; according to the book's preface (by Wright) and introduction (by Hugh Walpole), Wright was brought in as a kind of novelistic script doctor, to rework Denwood's vivid but imperfectly rendered yarn into publishable form. He is entirely self-effacing about this, claiming that he had "added little of value," having basically just performed some "arrangement and modification, and the rewriting of some earlier portions where the plan of reconstruction which I adopted rendered it unavoidable." He goes on to assert that "the finest prose passages in the book . . . are Mr. Denwood's unaided and unaltered work." .