The Gift of the Deer/The Walking Stick/H.M.S. Leviathan/The Town and Dr. Moore [antikvár]

The Authors and Their BooksIt is sometimes quite a shock to meet an author. You may have been reading his books for years, and have come to form a distinct picture of the man behind the pen. If he writes nice, crisp stories about nice, crisp characters, you tend to think of him as beingwell, nice and crisp. It can come as quite a surprise when you discover that he is old and fat and short of breath, and that, when not being an author, he works in a back room on the fourth floor of the Min. of --Ag. and Fish.But Winston Graham (whose stories, incidentally, are very nice and very crisp indeed ) is one author who is not the least bit disappoint-ing when seen in the flesh. On the contrary, he looks every inch an author. And he is quiet, unassuming, a little shy, very likeableand rather typically British too.He and his wife live in a charming half eighteenth-century, half Edwardian manor that stands in five acres of Sussex Downland just outside Buxted. When I visited him there, he was wearing worsted check trousers and a Rex Harrison waistcoat. He showed me into a large, spacious drawing-room with large, spacious windows giving a clear viewover a number of neatly tended rose bedsof theWINSTON GRAHAM