Wet Weather

New York: The Goldsmith Publishing Co.. Very Good- in Good dj. (c.1927). Reprint. Hardcover. [moderate wear to all corners, with a touch of fraying at both ends of the spine, light age-toning and dust-soiling to edges of text block; the jacket has a number of tiny chips and nicks along the top and bottom edges, a few small surface-peel spots on the front and rear panels, general overall wear]. This British novel was summed up by one American reviewer as "a rather exciting story of a newspaper fight against immorality, with Jill Slaymark, daughter of the editor of the Cherringdale Chronicle, and Eugene Calvey, a young man whose nerves were shot to (truncated) pieces in the war, as the protagonists, [which] seems admirably designed for the movies. [Note: I checked; the movies apparently didn't get the memo.] There is the proper amount of suspense, action a plenty, the love plot runs against the usual snags, and victory in the main project of the story is tantalizingly elusive." Sounds interesting enough, but who the heck was this "Hilary March"? My research has turned up nothing in the way of biographical details -- not even a definitive gender (contemporary reviewers seemed to have trouble deciding if the author was a woman or a man). OCLC credits her/him with only this novel and two others: "Simon Wisdom" (1929); and "A Widow on Richmond Green" (1930). And just to add to the confusion, OCLC also links to this author name a novel published in 1966, which turns out to be a different writer altogether, one LaLage Pulvertaft, who used "Hilary March" as a pseudonym for the last of her four novels, published between 1956 and 1966. (Ms. Pulvertaft was also born in 1925, so obviously didn't write this book.) Originally published by Methuen in London in 1927, the first American edition of "Wet Weather" was issued by J.H. Sears & Co., of which this Goldsmith edition is a reprint. But the real question is: why are this author's books so scarce, given that she/he was essentially a literary nobody, and seems to have left almost no trace behind? (Try Googling "Hilary March" and most of what you get concerns Hilary Mantel.) I mean, we at ReadInk pride ourselves on specializing in the works of forgotten authors, but even for us this seems an extreme case. . (Inventory #: 29861)