Description
Typed Letter Signed ‘John Buchan’, to the author Edmund Vale, providing a long and devastating critique of the latter’s story, Knight’s Gambit, and returning the manuscript. 2 pp. 10 x 8 inches, in good condition, folds. Thomas Nelson & Sons, 35 & 36 Paternoster Row, London, 12 February 1926. John Buchan (1875-1940), Scottish author and statesman, later Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada (1935). “The style is, on the whole, very slovenly,except when you are describing nature. The conversations are not well done, and the two heroes, especially, talk in a strain of heavy facetiousness… The writing gives an impression of diffuseness and slackness… The construction, too, I think, is very faulty… The narrative is not nearly clean enough. You must keep the salient lines of a story clear in spite of excursions into detail, or you do not give the reader the proper sense of the narrative moving towards a destined end. Even the dramatic climax, which is well imagined, is not well told.”