an introduction to Denis Mackail

Denis Mackail was an English novelist and short story writer in the first half of the twentieth-century. He published 36 books and over 250 magazine stories between 1920 and 1950, many with London settings, but is little remembered today. However, the reprinting in 2002 of one of his most acclaimed titles, Greenery Street, has given him a slightly higher profile in recent years and I hope that this website will help further that!

I have been collecting Mackail’s work and such published information about his life as I can find for some thirty-five years now so, for the benefit of anyone out there stumbling across one of his books, I have put together four pages :

a brief biography

a checklist of his books

a checklist of his short stories

a full descriptive bibliography

The bibliography is a full as I can make it, including brief descriptions of the plots/subjects of the books and full bibliographic descriptions of them. It also lists stories appearing in magazines and anthologies, his contribution to a successful musical comedy and a number of radio broadcasts, although there is still a lot of work to do to complete these last three sections.

If you are a returning visitor to the site, you can now find out what information here has been updated recently.

Because his output is all still in copyright, you won’t find any of Mackail’s actual texts here (unlike my Henry James website, the Ladder), but some of the titles are quite easy to pick up cheaply with the aid of secondhand booksellers’ offerings indexed on the internet: just search for his name as author (note: ‘Denis’ with one ‘n’). Hurry though: I’ve noticed prices rising over the last few years… I do hope this site is not to blame!

Subsequent to the 2002 Greenery Street, two more Mackail reprint titles have appeared, from the American print-on-demand publisher Kessinger. As these are only ‘phantom’ reprints and I have no firm details, I have excluded them from the bibliography. They seem quite expensive compared with secondhand copies of the originals from which, judging by the pagination, they are produced – I hope Kessinger are paying Mackail’s estate due royalties though!

I first discovered this author’s writings through an extract in an introduction to Britain’s railways! I only started taking a serious interest in trains when my secondary school moved to the other end of town and I had to ‘commute’ two stops on the Southern Region electric railway line which ran at the bottom of our garden (even then outer London’s buses were badly affected by congestion, and the railway was more reliable). Reading up on the subject, I found a book in the school library by O. S. Nock, The railways of Britain (1948, rev. 1962), where, in a chapter on byways and oddities, he gives a lengthy extract from Another part of the wood as an example of the charm of rural branch lines. This is the passage where the young heroine has to wait for the shunting of various vans onto her local train in southern England. The style and humour of the writing led me to seek out the whole novel in our excellent local library, but instead I found only two late 1960’s reprints of a couple of his other books. I had later to borrow Another part of the wood on inter-library loan. Coincidentally, this would all have been at about the time of Mackail’s death in 1971, although I wasn’t to realize this until some years later. Subsequently, I started my personal collection, which has now grown to the point where I can offer you some of the fruits of my researches. I hope you enjoy them.

apology to users: this website is coded with XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 (on a Linux system, of course). You are advised that some errors may occur if viewing it with older versions of Micros**t’s Internet Explorer, which are non-compliant with these standards. Sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about that and you’ll just have to get a better browser! (the excellent Mozilla Firefox and Opera browsers are available for free). Even then, I can’t find a decent sans-serif font in Windows, so you’ll have to make do with Verdana or Arial.