Taking place in that most traditional and confounding of English settings, the public school. Colin Revell, impudent Oxonian and sometime sleuth, returns to his alma mater Oakington to puzzle over a schoolboy's "accidental" death. The accidents multiply in frequency and horror as Colin idly pokes about the Gothic quads, and the tightly modulated suspense ripens with a generous foretaste of Hilton's later acclaimed talent: finely perceived, individual characters, overwhelming atmosphere, and full complement of adventure and romance.
James Hilton was an English novelist. His first novel, Catherine Herself, was published when he was just 20. Several of his international bestsellers inspired successful film adaptations, notably Lost Horizon, which won a Hawthornden Prize; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; and Random Harvest. Hilton's books are sometimes characterised as sentimental and idealistic celebrations of English virtues. This is true of Mr. Chips, but some of his novels had a darker side. Flaws in the English society of his time - particularly narrow-mindedness and class-consciousness - were frequently his targets. His novel We Are Not Alone, despite its inspirational-sounding title, is a grim story of legally approved lynching brought on by wartime hysteria in Britain. Hilton lived and worked in Hollywood beginning in the mid-1930s, and won an Academy Award in 1942 for his work on the screenplay of Mrs. Miniver, based on the novel by Jan Struther and one of his later novels, Morning Journey, was about the movie business.
