The cover of a collection of Simon Raven's writing, published in 2002
Simon Arthur Noël Raven (December 28, 1927,
Virginia Water, Surrey, England – May 12, 2001, London) was a novelist, journalist
and dramatist. His obituary in 'The Guardian' noted that, "he combined elements of
Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of
Rochester."
Biography
He attended first Cordwalles preparatory school and then Charterhouse, from which
he was expelled for "the usual thing" (having sex with one of the other schoolboys)[1]. It is said that the stress of expelling Raven turned headmaster Robert Birley's hair grey. After national service in the Parachute Regiment, during which he was sent as an officer cadet to Bangalore and commissioned, Raven arrived, in 1948, to read English at King's College, Cambridge.
In 1951, he married Susan Kilner, a fellow undergraduate who was expecting his child; afterwards, he studiously avoided her,
and they were divorced in 1957. In one well-known incident he received a wire from his estranged wife reading "Wife and baby
starving send money soonest," and sent the reply: "Sorry no money suggest eat baby."
After failing to submit a single word of his fellowship thesis, he withdrew from King's, and, desperate to flee "the pram in
the hall", successfully applied for a regular army commission. He spent three years in the King's Own Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI) in Germany
and Kenya, where he set up a brothel for his men, and was sent home to be training officer at
Shrewsbury.
Alas, officers in the KSLI were expected to represent the regiment at local race meetings - a prescription to go bankrupt,
which, within a year, Simon did. The regiment cared more for its good name than for army regulations, and he was quietly allowed
to resign rather than face a court-martial for conduct unbecoming.
Novels
His major work was a series of ten novels under the umbrella title Alms for Oblivion. The novels cover the period 1945 to 1973 and centre on a
group of upper and upper middle class characters. They can be considered a novel
sequence, if a somewhat loosely structured one.
The early novels are robust satires of the English upper set of the mid 1950s, but the later
tend to a more detached and philosophical tone. The later novels become more concerned with the occult and supernatural, and
include strange happenings, though this was a feature of Raven's work early in his career (eg with the early novel Doctors
Wear Scarlet which features Balkan vampires and was cited by Karl Edward Wagner
as one of the thirteen best supernatural horror novels[2]).
The titles in Alms for Oblivion are:
- The Rich Pay Late (1964)
- Friends in Low Places (1965)
- The Sabre Squadron (1966)
- Fielding Gray (1967, but the first by internal chronology)
- The Judas Boy (1968)
- Places Where They Sing (1970)
- Sound the Retreat (1971)
- Come Like Shadows (1972)
- Bring Forth the Body (1974)
- The Survivors (1976)
He followed that with the seven-volume series The First-Born of Egypt.
- Morning Star (1984)
- The Face of the Waters (1985)
- Before the Cock Crow (1986)
- New Seed for Old (1988)
- Blood of My Bone (1989)
- In the Image of God (1990)
- The Troubadour (1992)
Raven also received screen credit for writing additional dialogue for the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
Drama
See also
References
- ^ Simon Barber, The Captain
- ^ N. G. Christakos, "Three By Thirteen: The Karl Edward Wagner Lists" in
Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner, ed. Benjamin Szumskyj, Gothic Press 2007
External links
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