Leonard Strong

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.

[2] 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.

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).

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.

The classic short story "Breakdown",[3] 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.

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.

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.

"[8] 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).

Kirkus Reviews asserted in 1935, "L. A. G. Strong can be counted on for a nostalgic picture of the call of the wild, and spins a good yarn as well.

"[9] Garrett Mattingly, in The Saturday Review, praises Strong's "clean, muscular prose" and the "astonishing variety of mood and incident" in a review of The Seven Arms, saying that he "treats material which has become familiar, almost conventional, in the literature of the Celtic renascence with a freshness and power which makes it seem completely new and completely his own.

For example, a reviewer of an early novel, The Jealous Ghost (1930), the "story of an American who goes to visit for the first time his English cousins in the West Highland house where his ancestors had lived," judges that Strong's "feeling for 'the land' seems to be that of a tourist whose sensibilities are fluttered by views and sunsets," but who also concluded that in his talent "lies the possibility of a delicate comedy akin to that of Jane Austen or Henry James.