Leonard Strong

Leonard Alfred George Strong (8 March 1896 – 17 August 1958) was a popular English novelist, critic, historian, and poet, and published under the name L. A. G. Strong. He served as a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd. from 1938 to 1958.

Life

Strong was born at Compton Gifford, of an Irish mother, Marion Jane (née Mongan), and a half-Irish father born in the United States, Leonard Ernest Strong (1862/3–1948), a chemical works manager (eventually director of Fisons), and was proud of his Irish heritage. His father was a grandson and great-grandson of Church of England clergymen educated at Wadham College, Oxford. As a youth, Strong considered being a comedian and took lessons in singing. He was educated at Brighton College and earned a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, as an Open Classical Scholar (studies in literature and the arts). There, he came under the influence of W. B. Yeats, about whom Strong wrote fairly extensively; they met first in the autumn of 1919 and their friendship lasted for twenty years.

Strong taught at an Oxford preparatory school, before becoming a full-time writer in 1930. His first two volumes of poetry were Dublin Days (1921) and The Lowery Road (1923), and his career as a novelist was launched with Dewer Rides (1929, set on Dartmoor).

Later, Strong formed a literary partnership with an Irish friend, John Francis Swaine (1880–1954), paying Swaine a percentage of royalties for five novels and numerous short stories, published between about 1930 and 1953, which were attributed to Strong. These included the Sea Wall (1933), The Bay (1944), and Trevannion (1948). Swaine's short stories described the thoughts and experiences of an Irish character, Mangan, a fictional version of Swaine himself. Strong wrote many works of non‐fiction and an autobiography of his early years, Green Memory (1961). He gained a wide interest in literature and wrote about many important contemporary authors, including James Joyce, William Faulkner, John Millington Synge, and John Masefield.

He worked as an assistant schoolmaster at Summer Fields School, a boys' boarding prep school on the outskirts of Oxford, from 1917 to 1919 and from 1920 to 1930, and as a Visiting Tutor at the Central School of Speech and Drama. One of his pupils was a son of Reginald McKenna. He was a director of the publishers Methuen Ltd. from 1938 until his death. For many years he was a governor of his old school, Brighton College. Strong's autobiography, Green Memory, published after his death, described his family (including a grandmother in Ireland), his earliest years, his school-days, and his friendships at Wadham College; among them were Yeats and George Moore.

Following his death in Guildford, Surrey, a memorial service was held for him at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London, on 3 October 1958.

The nurse Emily MacManus was one of his cousins; he wrote the foreword for her autobiography, Fifty Years of Nursing – Matron of Guy's (1956).

John Francis Swaine reference authority the Oxford Companion to English Literature, Ninth Edition, General Editor Professor Dinah Birch. Swaine's papers and manuscripts are lodged with the National Library of Ireland, Dublin.

Writing career

Strong began by writing poetry and published three volumes in the early 1920s. Next, he turned his hand to short stories, and his first collection, Doyle's Rock and Other Stories, was published by Basil Blackwell in 1925. His first novel, Dewer Rides, appeared in 1929 and was followed by more than twenty more. He also wrote plays, children's books, biography, criticism, and film scripts.

His works include detective novels, featuring Detective-Inspector McKay of Scotland Yard, and horror fiction. Many of his adventure and romance novels were set in Scotland or the West of England. The classic short story "Breakdown", a tale about a married man who has the perfect plan to murder his mistress, and which has a twist ending, has been reprinted often; it was a favourite of Boris Karloff. (Unhappy marriages were an occasional theme in his fiction, in works such as Deliverance.) His supernatural stories were often reprinted, as well. Strong was interested in the paranormal, as his haunted house and other horror stories attest, and believed he had seen ghosts and witnessed psychic phenomena.

One of his earliest writings, A Defence of Ignorance, was the first book sold by Captain Louis Henry Cohn, the founder of House of Books, which specialized in first editions of contemporary writers. Cohn was a New York book collector who of necessity became a bookseller due to the Wall Street crash of 1929, and he had Strong's manuscript, a six-page essay, in his collection. Cohn published 200 signed copies of the title, priced at $2.00 each.

Some of Strong's poems were set to music by Arthur Bliss. His Selected Poems appeared in 1931 (first American edition in 1932), and The Body's Imperfection: Collected Poems in 1957. He also edited anthologies of poetry, sometimes in collaboration with Cecil Day-Lewis.

His 1932 novel The Brothers was filmed in 1947 by the Scottish director David MacDonald; it starred Patricia Roc. One reviewer commented, "In a break from tradition, the film substitutes the novel's unhappy ending with an even unhappier one." Strong collaborated on or contributed to such filmscripts as Haunted Honeymoon (1940; a Dorothy L. Sayers story about Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane), Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1948), and Happy Ever After (1954).