S02E47 W S By L P Hartley

In which a writer starts to receive mysterious and increasingly menacing postcards from an apparent stranger. He asks his friends what to do. He goes to the police. And then it all becomes clear. L P Hartley Leslie Poles Harltey was born in Cambridgeshire in England in 1895 and died aged 76 in London England. L P was  educated first at  home and then a Preparatory School before going to  Harrow School–— a private school in North London, where he had won a scholarship.  His father was not particularly high class, he was a solicitor and owned a brickyard.  After Harrow, L P went to Oxford to study (or ‘read’) as they say at Oxbridge, Modern History. This was in 1915. In 1917 he joined the army. I think he was conscripted. He was commissioned as an officer in the Norfolk Regiment but never saw active service due to having a weak heart. He was a famous hypochondriac in fact and had what we would call these days a health anxiety.  In 1922 he suffered a nervous breakdown and soon after this started spending long periods in Venice in Italy where he owned his own gondola. He had a particular male friend David Cecil. And this was in a time when being gay was illegal and punishable by time in prison so gay people did not come out. It was believed that he was gay.  After the war he returned to complete his degree Oxford, and even at that time he had an ambition to be a writer.   His first published work was in Oxford Poetry.  And he became editor of Oxford Outlook. He was a lifelong friend of Cynthia Asquith who, as we know, was a famous author of ghost stories and editor of the Pan Horror series for a while.  He mixed in aristocratic circles after graduation and worked as a book reviewer, but his own work did not initially find success and he was depressed.  In 1924, his first volume Night Fears was published and it was well received critically and his work was supported by many influential writers including Cynthia Asquith. He had moderate to good success w