Mr. Stimpson and Mr.Gorse

From the moment he set eyes on Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, Gorse knew he had found another victim...Ernest Ralph Gorse, devious hero of Hamilton's acclaimed The West Pier, turns up again one cold January night in 1928, in the saloon bar of The Friar; Reading. There Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce, archetypal colonel's widow and the worst sort of dog-owner, is holding court. She has already attracted the more or less serious attentions of Mr Stimpson (local estate agent and subterranean lecher) and Major Parry (something.of a poet since his retirement). To Gorse, undisturbed by her rabbity-toothedcharms, she represents simply an ideal opportunity to exercise his perverse and vicious genius...'Uniquely individual... He is the novelist of innocence, appallingly vulnerable, and of malevolence, coming out of some mysterious darkness of evil'-J.B. PriestleyA hypnotic writer'- Time Out