J C Snaith #NottsWriters

To celebrate the launch of Follow the Moon and Stars here's a new series on #NottsWriters: 

J C Snaith (1876–1936) 

John Collis Snaith grew up in West Bridgford where he’d been born. He was educated at High Pavement School and University College, and played first class cricket for Nottinghamshire.

Snaith wrote over forty books including works of historical romance, fantasy, sci-fi, whimsical comedy, crime thrillers, poignant satire, psychological and visionary works. His varied output made him impossible for readers or critics to label.

Snaith wrote Willow the King: The Story of a Cricket Match (1899), described as ‘the best cricket story ever written.’ This humorous novel, with a romance at its heart, is about the annual two-day cricket match between Little Clumpton and Hickory. Snaith dedicated the book to his colleagues back at the Nottingham Forest Cricket Club who played on The Forest.

Patricia at the Inn (1901)

'For a time the landlord and the mariner sat watching one another. On one side was a contemptuous carelessness; on the other a measure of suspicion amounting to hatred.'

We encounter an unusual father and son in his novel William Jordan, Junior (1907). The peculiar story follows the father, a scholar and bookseller, and son, a highly-strung poet and dreamer, as they struggle to negotiate contemporary life. Both characters are visionaries and neither is equipped for the real world. AE Russell was ‘moved’ by the novel, and The New York Times quoted its ‘peculiar charm and rare quality’ and ‘psychological loveliness, half mystic, half human.’

Fortune (1910):

from Fortune

Lady Barbarity (1912), a romantic comedy.

To deny that I am an absurdly handsome being would be an affectation. Besides, if I did deny it, my face and shape are always present to reprove me.

Snaith’s sci-fi novel, An Affair of State (1913) was set in a near-future England under a cloud of social unrest.

Broke of Covenden (1923)

An odd little man waddled in. his legs were so crooked with addiction to the saddle that he looked as painfully out of his element in a pedestrian mode as a mariner on dry land.

Mistress Dorothy Marvin (1896). Being Excerpta From the Memoirs of Sir Edward Armstrong, Baronet, Of Copeland Hall, In the County of Somerset.

There’s local interest in his acclaimed The Sailor (1916)

'A large woman in a torn dress stood at the gate of a rag and bone dealer’s yard. The season was November, the hour midnight, the place a slum in a Midland textile town.'

In Thus Far (1925), Snaith questions whether science has gone too far, in a story that features a powerful, amoral, telepathic superman, created with rays, chemicals and elements from the “missing link” in our evolution.

Snaith turned to fantasy in 1917, writing The Coming, about the second coming of Christ, and, in 1921, came his dystopian The Council of Seven, a novel about a totalitarian system of government that imposes a strict regime on anyone who challenges its vision for world peace.

Snaith's other books include books as diverse as Surrender and Love Lane.

From sentimental romance to satire and works of great imagination, Snaith was a true all-rounder.