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About this book

A barrister, a priest, a detective, a lovelorn Irishman, a handwriting expert, a heinous spiritual medium -- the very British bachelors of Muriel Spark's supreme 1960 novel come in every stripe. First found contentedly chatting in their London clubs and shopping at Fortnum's, the cozy bachelors (as any Spark reader might guess) are not set to stay cozy for long. Soon enough, the men are variously tormented -- defrauded or stolen from; blackmailed or pressed to attend horrid seances -- and then plunged, all together, into the nastiest of lawsuits. At the center of that suit hovers pale, blank Patrick Seton, the medium. Meanwhile, horrors of every size plague the poor bachelors -- from the rising price of frozen peas to epileptic fits, forgeries, spiritualists foaming with protoplasm, and murder.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Muriel Spark

1918 – 2006

Dame Muriel Spark, DBE was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer, and poet whose darkly comedic voice made her one of the most distinctive writers of the twentieth century. Spark received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1965 for The Mandelbaum Gate, the Ingersoll Foundation TS Eliot Award in 1992 and the David Cohen Prize in 1997. She became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1993, in recognition of her services to literature. In 1998, she was awarded the Golden PEN Award by English PEN for "a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature". Spark received eight honorary doctorates in her lifetime. These included a Doctor of the University degree f…