When Hugo Charteris’s first novel, the haunting A Share of the World, was published in 1953 to the praise of Rosamond Lehmann (who helped to get it published), Peter Quennell, Evelyn Waugh, and Francis Wyndham (Charteris’s relation and consistent supporter), the author, just turned thirty-one, seemed set for lasting fame. It hasn’t worked that way in the almost five decades since his death of cancer in 1970, aged only forty-seven.

Nowadays, few people seem to know his name. This is true among not only the ever-growing majority who pay little attention to novels and novelists, but also the enlightened minority who do. The obscurity is at odds with the rich admiration shown in Charteris’s time by many of his contemporaries. Alan Ross, for forty years The London Magazine’s editor, found Charteris “one of the most original, quirky and shrewd explorers of the behaviour of the landed gentry . . . and at a time when prose was plain, his was idiosyncratically stylish.” Francis Hope saw Charteris as “original and banal, straightforward and complicated, topical and old-fashioned, derivative and original; a Greene obsessed with irrelevancies, a Firbank who reads the newspapers.” Malcolm Muggeridge, who published Charteris’s short pieces in Punch, wrote that his close friend captured a “prevailing sense of a class, a society, decomposing . . . well written and well composed, in places very funny.” To Elizabeth Bowen, Charteris was a “romantic anti-romantic . . . one of the most incalculable of post-war