John Cowper Powys Thomas Hardy, and these novels are set in Somerset and Dorset, part of Hardy's mythical Wessex. American scholar Richard Maxwell describes these four novels "as remarkably successful with the reading public of his time". "Maiden Castle", the last of the Wessex novels, is set in Dorchester, Thomas Hardy's Casterbridge, and which he intended to be a "rival" to Hardy's "Mayor of Casterbridge". All the same, despite his indebtedness to the Victorian novel and his enthusiasm for Hardy and Walter Scott, as well as for lesser figures such as Ainsworth, Powys was clearly a modernist, and has affinities also with Fyodor
Alex Gray (author) Alex Gray (author) Alex Gray (born 27 May 1950) is a Scottish crime writer. She has published fifteen novels, all set around Glasgow and featuring the character of Detective Chief Inspector Lorimer and his psychological profiler Solomon Brightman, the earlier novels being published by Canongate and later books by Little Brown. She has also written several magazine articles. Alex Gray was brought up in the Craigbank area of Glasgow and attended Hutchesons' Grammar School. Her father was a telecommunications engineer and her mother, originally from Tobermory on the Isle of Mull, was a telephone exchange operator. She studied English and