The Unspeakable Skipton

From the prolifically gifted Pamela Hansford Johnson, neglected peer of Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark, comes "a maliciously witty account of literary skulduggery and lofty pretensions, set in Johnson's beloved Bruges." (The Telegraph)

It's not easy being a genius. Just ask Daniel Skipton, the greatest--or, let us say, the most under-recognized--novelist of his generation. Skipton is only a few revisions away from finishing his masterpiece: a satire of literary London that will humiliate his enemies and make him as famous, and as rich, as he deserves. Yet, in the meantime, he is forced to scrape by in obscurity and self-imposed exile amid the deserted canals of Bruges, barely surviving on a regimen of blackmail, bullying, persistence, and native charm.

One afternoon at a local cafe, he encounters the acclaimed playwright Dorothy Merlin and her entourage--worldly tourists on the lookout for erotic adventure and in need of a local guide. Soon they are joined by an even juicier target, a Venetian count who dreams of singing on the English stage and who will spend anything to make his dream come true. Or so he leads Skipton to believe.

Too long out of print in the U.S., Pamela Hansford Johnson's comic masterpiece The Unspeakable Skipton belongs on the shelf beside the best work of Nancy Mitford and Muriel Spark. As Michael Dirda writes in his foreword, it is "a dark chocolate treat, deliciously witty and bittersweet."

Pamela Hansford Johnson shocked the public at age twenty-three when she published This Bed Thy Centre (1935), a sexually frank novel inspired by her romance with Dylan Thomas. Its success allowed Johnson to quit secretarial work and launch a full-time literary career. She would publish twenty-six more novels, and though Johnson's career was overshadowed in her lifetime by that of her second husband, the novelist C. P. Snow, The Unspeakable Skipton (1959) retains a more passionate following than any of her other books, or his.