e-Book, 186 pp.
(Tina Rhea #17)
ISBN 978-1-55497-258-6 $10.00
Note by Michael Harrison inserted into David Hammer's inscribed copy: This, a decided literary and marketing success, was the last of the three novels promised under the contract, signed at The very end of World War II, with the firm of Macdonald, of which the first was the eminently successful So Linked Together, my first real best-seller, and the second the equally (though—I think—undeservedly successful Higher Things. I have since grouped four novels under a common title of ‘The Rowcester Novels,’ as all are concerned, more or less intimately, with the not-quite-imaginary Kentish cathedral city of ‘Rowcester,’ a recognizable composite of the two ancient Kentish cathedral-cities of Rochester and Canterbury. The four ‘Rowcester’ novels, in order of publication are: Higher Things, The House in Fishergate, Sinecure and The Darkened Room. An odd thing: in Fishergate, I refer to ‘a battered Old Etonian of forty’: I really hadn't the late Lord Donegall in mind, but he tetchily claimed to have ‘recognized’ himself—and my unkindness—in the portrait! Certainly, one of my better novels—but NOT to be tested against Ann Byerly’s strictly American views. Yes ... yet another very English book! And obviously not for export ... 16th May, 1988 — Michael Harrison