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
James McGee (author) James McGee (author) James McGee is an English novelist known for his historical adventure novels about a fictional Bow Street Runner, Matthew Hawkwood. James McGee was born in Kent, but, as an army child, spent his childhood in Gibraltar, Germany and Northern Ireland. He has worked in various trades and professions including banking, newspapers and bookselling. McGee's historical novels are set during the Regency period, when Britain was at war with Napoleon. His hero, Matthew Hawkwood, is working as a Bow Street Runner, an early investigative officer working out of London's Bow Street Magistrates' Court. He is called upon to