Bruce Marshall - All Glorious Within

[dem bones]

Bruce Marshall - All Glorious Within (NEL, April 1969: originally Constable, 1944 as The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith)

Blurb
Lust and low living have been an old sailor's life, but Father Smith persuades him that final repentance is preferable to Chinese harlots. And the hostile, heretical Scottish community hate all his beliefs - yet they cannot resist such a humble and sincere man.

The resulting conflict is described with the wit and shrewd insight that charactises all Bruce Marshall's writing.

Now published for the first time in paperback, ALL GLORIOUS WITHIN has constantly captivated its readers.

The back-of-the-van man did me proud yesterday with four Ray Bradbury collections (will need your help sorting the horrors from the mawkish nostalgia fests), some tasty Stephen King's old and new, John Lymington's The Star Witches and a handful of curios including a groovy Diagnosis Murder tie-in and All Glorious Within. God alone knows if and when i'll ever get around to reading Father Smith's adventure but the chances have greatly improved since i looked up his creator, Lieutenant-Colonel Marshall - a colourful chap, not to mention a brave one (he lost a leg in World War I). For the first, and possibly only time during the Haining years, NEL seem to have underplayed the mildly sensational aspects of the novel or, at least, their blurb pales in comparison to this from an early US edition.

"This is the story of Father Smith, priest in a Scottish city - of his friends, the exiled French nuns, of the Bishop, of Monsignor O'Duffy who wages simple, violent war against simple sins, of Father Bonnyboat, the liturgical scholar, of all the people who come into the gentle orbit of Father Smith - from Lady Ippecacuanha, that tweedy convert, to the slut Annie who drives her husband to murder."

Marshall also wrote novels with espionage themes, though it was another religious title would prove his greatest hit, Father Malachy's Miracle. Only a film buff of Ramsey Campbell's magnitude will be able to confirm if this all but forgotten best-seller partly inspired the great 'lost' Brit horror sex comedy, Father Malarkey's Succubus.