'As in life, so in a game of hazard, skill will make something of the worst of throws'

Few successful writers are also arms dealers, but John Meade Falkner (1858-1932) was a man of many parts. He transformed himself from a children's tutor into the chairman of Armstrong Whitworth, then one of the world's largest manufacturers of arms, while also writing some exceptional novels, and becoming an expert on medieval manuscripts. His first two novels The Lost Stradivarius (1895), an Oxford ghost story shot through which runs a thread of 1890s Aestheticism; and Moonfleet (1898), a gripping, fast-paced tale of smuggling and treasure on the Dorset coast show the range of his interests.

Meade Falkner is a gifted storyteller, but also as a conscious artist who could use popular genres like the ghost story and adventure romance to tell complex tales about the pull of the past on the present, and the nature of the self. His layered, atmospheric and immersive tales linger in the memory long after a first reading, and are a magic casement that opens on the fears and desires of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

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