Maurice Walsh

Much of his work invoked a rural Ireland that was fast disappearing in the 1930s and while little read today, at the time they proved immensely popular, being translated into Italian, Danish, French, German and Flemish.

[5] In 1908, he married Caroline Begg, always referred to by her nickname "Toshon", who came from Dufftown, Banffshire, in Scotland; they had three sons, Ian, Neil and Maurice, and two daughters, Molly and Elizabeth, both of whom died young.

[7] The founding of the Free State split the nationalist movement and led to the 1922-1923 Irish Civil War; as a result, Walsh left his family in Scotland until it was safe for them to join him in 1923.

[11] Over the next decade, several short stories were printed in The Dublin Magazine, a journal founded in 1925 featuring Irish authors, including Samuel Beckett, and the poet Austin Clarke.

[5] From 1930, others were placed in Capuchin Annual, while his book sales grew steadily, especially after an unsolicited letter of praise for The Key Above the Door from J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan.

The story was included in the collection published in 1935 as Green Rushes; several of these were considerably darker than his other work and feature Hugh Forbes, an IRA member during the Irish War of Independence.

[7] After the war, he published several collections of short stories, the most popular being those featuring Tomasheen James, a figure allegedly based on Paddy Bawn Enright.

Sons of the Swordmaker goes back to the first century BCE; it also features common links between Scotland and Ireland, while the second half is a re-working of the Irish saga The Destruction of Da Derga's Hall.

'[16] This meant being Irish was not a function of race, politics or religion but a shared physical and cultural landscape, an idea with enormous appeal in the divided Ireland of the late 1920s and 1930s.

[18] The five stories in Green Rushes that include "The Quiet Man" share a common theme of IRA members coming to terms with their memories of the fighting.