In Search of James Prior

In the new publication from Spokesman Books, In Search of James Prior, Ailish D’Arcy has rediscovered one of the great Nottinghamshire writers, 100 years after his death.

In this study, James Prior emerges as an accomplished poet and novelist with a body of work that has been neglected for too long, a man who made a contribution to the study of Notts dialect that is unsurpassed.

On Saturday 26^th November 2022, Bingham erected its first ever blue plaques. Prior’s two Bingham homes, on Fisher Lane and The Banks, now proudly mark where he lived and wrote his great novels between 1891 and 1922.

There’s also an exhibition inside Bingham Library.

In the course of her research Ailish has discovered Prior’s remarkable contribution to the recording of dialects. Her journey began after attending an Inspire course on Nottinghamshire’s literary locations at West Bridgford Library, a course that is being repeated in January 2023.

Ailish D'Arcy with John Baird

Publisher Tony Simpson reading from Forest Folk

It was on Mapperley Road near the centre of Nottingham that Prior was born. His first major novel, Renie, opens in Bingham (Bawton), and the local connections keep coming.

Ripple and Flood features Caythorpe and Hoveringham (both renamed) in a story about Prior’s beloved river, the “smug and silver Trent”.

Forest Folk is set around the Blidworth countryside during an eventful period of history that covers the Napoleonic Wars and Luddite riots.

Hyssop, his weakest book, is set in Burton Joyce.

A Walking Gentleman, which includes a ramble that passes through Notts, is the story of a gentleman who decamped on the eve of his wedding, making escape from the “madding crowd” and encountering many strange adventures on the way.

Fortuna Chance features Sherwood Forest.

Prior's grave

In Search of James Prior is available from Five Leaves Bookshop and The Bookcase in Lowdham, priced £7.

Bingham finally pays tribute to Prior

Exploring Detective Fiction

A new Inspire course starts Sunday 20th November at West Bridgford Library.

Here's the LINK to book your place

Do you enjoy detective stories? Would you like to learn about the history of detective fiction and discover new sleuths? If so, don your deerstalkers and join a published crime writer for an enjoyable exploration of detective fiction, from the early days of real crime and the introduction of the detective novel to modern crime thrillers. 

What will be covered on the course?  

• You’ll be guided through the history of this most popular genre. Whilst looking at the life and work of the most famous crime writers, we’ll also feature groundbreaking novels as you get to share your favourites, discussing different books and characters, including TV crime dramas.  
• Beginning with the origins of detective fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin and his influence on that most famous of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, through the interwar years of Britain’s Golden Age, of Christie et al., and America’s Hardboiled PIs like Philip Marlowe, to today’s best-sellers, we will investigate the characteristics of the great detective novel in all its forms, and consider why the genre remains so widely read and appreciated. 

Week 1 - British Detectives

Week 2 - American Detectives

Week 3 - The Rest of the World (translated crime fiction)

Week 4 - Notts crime novels/novelists

Cost: Free to £24

Adult Reading Scheme

Inspire are offering adults free 1-to-1 

help with their reading

If you are interested in joining the scheme, please visit THIS link or speak to a member of staff at your local Notts library.

1 in 6 adults* in England never learnt to read when they were younger. 

There may be many reasons for this, but the good news is that it’s never too late to learn and there are people who can help. By learning to read, adults improve their employment opportunities, confidence and self-esteem, and general well-being. Many adults are also motivated by wanting to be able to read with their children or grandchildren and there's now help to develop these skills.

How it works

Inspire will match a local adult who wishes to improve their reading to a volunteer coach and arrange for them to meet each week in one of he Notts libraries to work through a reading manual designed for adults. You would start with the basics and then as your confidence grows you'll be given more support to access some of the beginner reading books from the libraries.

Who is it for?

This scheme is suitable for any adult who wants to learn to read English. Whatever a person’s starting point they will go back to basics and work at their own pace.

This scheme is not intended for adults learning English as a second language, Inspire would instead recommend one of their Inspire Adult Learning ESOL courses as being more appropriate.

Where would it be held?

Readers and coaches will meet in one of the Notts Inspire libraries. Currently the scheme is offered at

• Arnold
• Beeston
• Kirkby-in-Ashfield
• Mansfield Central Library
• Newark
• West Bridgford
• and Worksop.

A weekly hour-long, 1:1 session will take place in a quiet corner of the library. Readers will not be over-looked but there will be other people around.

If there are any additional requirements, these will discussed this with both the reader and the coach before the first session.

How long will it take?

Reading sessions will take place for an hour each week at a time that suits the coach and reader.

Inspire will initially set up the sessions for 10 weeks and then review this. Some people may complete the course in as little as nine months for others it may take longer.

Charles Birkin #NottsWriters

Sir Charles Birkin (1907-1985)

Born in Nottingham in 1907 - and grandson of the former High Sherriff of Nottingham, Sir Thomas Birkin, owner of the Birkin Lace Company - Sir Charles Birkin launched the career of many a horror writer and, in the 1960s, he did much to keep the genre alive in Britain.

Birkin is associated with Ruddington Grange, a mansion made famous under the Birkins’ ownership when monkeys roamed freely inside. It was later occupied by Frank Bowden (founder of Raleigh) who sold it to Thomas Farr (founder of Home Ales). Its land is now home to the Ruddington Grange Golf Club.

Charles Birkin was educated at Eton (1921-26) before working as an editor for the London Publisher Philip Allan, developing their Creeps Library of titles, a series of anthologies which began with Creeps in 1932, for which he included stories of his own under the alias Charles Lloyd. Birkin acquired and published many collections including the debut of the US sci-fi writer Edmond Hamilton, and the first published story from William F Temple (a leading sci-fi writer of the ‘40s and ‘50s), in addition to the many reprinted works from the likes of Tod Robbins and Russell Thorndike. The popular Pan Book of Horror series later pulled stories from Creeps which was one of the few magazines of the era to feature horror.

At Philip Allan, Birkin published the early short stories of John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven (1933), but the contract had lapsed before Steinbeck become a big seller. Philip Allan’s greatest success came with the steamy novels of Winifred Mary Scott and Pamela Wynne, then, in 1936, Birkin had his own book published, Dark Spawn, a collection of his Charles Lloyd stories.

During the Second World War he served as a Captain in the Sherwood Foresters and married the Australian actress Janet Johnson. Their son, John Birkin, directed/produced many TV comedies including Mr. Bean, French and Saunders, and Harry Enfield's Television Programme.

It wasn’t until 1963 that Birkin resumed his writing career after being contacted by Hutchinson (Stanley Middleton’s publisher) requesting new stories. Nearly 100 stories followed, in seven collections, from The Kiss of Death (1964) to Spawn of Satan (1971). They now fetch quite a fee, though they come with a warning, Birkin writing of murder, rape, torture, mutilation and concentration camps. His prize-winning story Fairy Dust was admired by Noel Coward, and, according to Mike Ashley (not that one), writing in 1999, “invokes the darker side of Peter Pan and Never-Never Land.”

There's a warning on the cover: 'Not For the Squimish!'

In the early 1970s Birkin lived in Cyprus, fleeing after the Turkish invasion, an experience he reflects upon in A Low Profile (1977). Birkin and his wife retired to Sulby on the Isle of Man.

Cecil Roberts #NottsWriters

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

Cecil Roberts (1892-1976)

“At 15, with a mother and myself to keep, I began writing,” said Roberts after his father died suddenly. Working as a weights and measures inspector he learned to operate a typewriter, using it to type out poems and articles. In 1912, after winning the annual Henry Kirke White prize with his long poem The Trent, Roberts had five books of verse published in five years, then, “I had a living to earn with my pen, and turned to more remunerative work,” he said.

Reflecting in later life, he wrote: “The beginning was tough but I was never a beatnik nor saw any merit in the kitchen sink” (he hated Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning). “In this marvellous world all my writing has been an expression of joy in the journey.”

After work as a war correspondent, and alongside work as a journalist and editor at the Nottingham Journal (he welcomed Graham Greene to Nottingham), it was the success of his first novel Scissors (1923) that launched his career as a novelist.

“Scissors is the nicest boy in English fiction,” wrote Israel Zangwill.

Spears Against Us (1932), the story of the downfall of an old Austrian family, is one of his most famous novels.

The other huge seller being Victoria Four-Thirty (1937) about a world-famous composer, a honeymooning couple, a novelist in search of a plot, a German film star and a young crown prince, who are among the disparate group of travellers on a journey to Europe.

John Betjeman wrote: “Many a more pretentious author could take a lesson from Mr Cecil Roberts. He writes with a trained journalist’s gift of readability…he can tell a story.”

Don't be put off by the cover, this is a Nottingham novel.

A Terrace in the Sun (1951) is about a small boy, a miner’s son, who became a famous artist. The book was a success but Roberts regretted not calling it A Nottingham Lad as there was so much of his early life in its pages. 

He always referred to the book as his 'Nottingham novel' despite the book’s opening and narrator being on the once swanky Mediterranean coast. If you’re interested in Nottingham (of course you are) then this is well worth a read.

David and Diana (1929) also features Nottingham and Goose Fair (the book's US title).

His three “Rustic” nonfiction books, an odyssey of the countryside, include Gone Rustic (1935) about Roberts beloved Pilgrim Cottage, Gone Rambling, and Gone Afield, which tells of the common events and local legends and history around the Cottage. 

Other non-fiction books are And So to Bath (1940) and And So to Rome (1950), they city he made his home.

There are three “Pilgrim Cottage” novels too: Pilgrim Cottage (1933), The Guests Arrive (1934) and Volcano (1935).

Pilgrim Cottage presents a picture of Russia in the first enthusiasm of the revolution, contrasted with traditional England.

Cecil Roberts was a snob and a proper name-dropper, but it’s for good reason that he had a room named after him at Angel Row’s Central Library and he was the first Nottingham novelist to become a Freeman of the City. His novels often skillfully blend history, information and romance. If we ever enter another lockdown, try his five volume autobiography, too, when Roberts' incredible memory comes into its own.

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.

Muriel Hine #NottsWriters

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

Muriel Hine (1874-1949)

"[Muriel] Hine has won fame and made friends wherever the English language is spoken, through the truth of her characterisations, her ability to see the comedy of life – as well as its tragedy – and her genuine humanity.”

Want an example this ‘comedy of life’? How about this, from A Different Woman (1936):

Mrs Jeremy Waldo had been told that after the operation she would be a “different woman,” but this morning the surgeon had said kindly: “You will soon be feeling yourself.”

After Muriel’s grandfather - the great Nottingham architect TC Hine - retired in 1890, her father George started his own practice in Westminster moving the family to London. But Muriel’s time in Nottingham, where she was born and raised, shaped much of her writing. Several of her novels are set in 1880s Nottingham – or, as she calls it, Lacingham – and they provide insight into life here at that time.

Hine’s semi-autobiographical A Great Adventure (1939) covers the period up to her family’s move to the capital. In the author’s Nottingham, The Park is named The Chase. On The Park/Chase she writes:

All the roads and circles were lined with trees, and the houses backed by irregular gardens that gave the illusion of the country, the result so different from the normal dull rows of the period that Lacingham had cause to be proud of “The Chase”.

The Hine’s Regent Street house, on the corner of Oxford Street near the Playhouse, is also described accurately in the book.

In the novel, Frances is the ruling passion of George Henty’s life, and for her sake he embarks on a get rich scheme. How can a man, handicapped as a junior partner in his grudging old father’s firm and forbidden any initiative, satisfy his wife’s ambition?

Their fine home also features in Hine’s Wild Rye (1931), in which a young woman breaks with expectations.

And in its sequel Jenny Rorke (1932).

Hine had a “gift of infusing life into the characters and an equally striking gift for description.” The Times.

In A Man’s Way (1933) Hine has an author and his unsuitable wife spend most of the year, over which the book’s drama takes place, in Lincolnshire, giving the writer the chance to take us on journeys to Lincoln Cathedral, Tattershall Castle and various other places.

In many of her thirty-five novels, Muriel Hine explored the challenges faced by women, including the fight for the vote.

One of her books, The Best in Life (1918), was made into the silent film Fifth Avenue Models, produced by Universal Pictures in 1924. She also wrote plays and song lyrics.

A Different Woman (1936) is a romance novel about a woman married to an older man ("a rounder and extremely selfish"), who finds herself falling in love with a scientist.

Muriel Hine’s architect father and grandfather worked together on many projects in Nottingham, such as the renovations of the burnt-out Nottingham Castle, which they turned into the first municipal museum of art outside of London.