“The Devil Is An English Gentleman, Cournos’s ninth novel, came out two years after Strong Poison, when Cournos was just over fifty. It’s over twice as long as Strong Poison (the publisher issued it in two volumes), and the second half is clearly intended as a rebuttal to Sayers’ book in which he tells the real story of their relationship. And if it’s anything like his other novels, the field of Cournos scholarship is going to lie fallow for a long time to come, because it is appallingly, unbelievably dreadful – if someone had quoted some of the passages to me without showing a source I would have assumed they were a parody aimed at a tin-eared, self-delighted Literary Man. I don’t just mean that it’s badly written – although it is – but the egotism and total lack of perception exhibited by the leading characters is so astounding that, far from making me think that there might have been another side to the affair, it made me think that Sayers hadn’t been hard enough on him.”
“The Devil Is An English Gentleman” by John Cournos (1932)
Published
Mooncustafer 