Curle's other works included the travel book Into the East (1923), based on his experiences in Asia, the mystery novels Corruption (1933) and Who Goes Home?
[6] After they met at a lunch hosted by Garnett at the Mont Blanc Restaurant, they entered into a mutually beneficial relationship in which Curle would write extensively about Conrad's work.
[7] Conrad viewed Curle's study as a work that would introduce him to the American market, without pigeonholing him as a mere writer of nautical fiction.
[17] The younger Conrad attests that "Dick, as we called him, became part of the family and was a frequent and very welcome visitor whenever he was in England",[17] and came to be his father's closest friend.
[18] Karl described Curle as "stable, old-fashioned in his attitudes, very much a preserver of the proprieties, and a steadying force upon Conrad.
[19] Her other relatives included the historian Frederic William Maitland, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the author Virginia Woolf, and the artist Vanessa Bell.
[3][23] He returned to the Daily Mail in the late 1910s as an assistant editor and columnist, and lived with Cordelia and Adam,[22] then travelled to Burma in 1920 to take up the editorship of The Rangoon Times.
[22] Later in life, his son recalled, Curle was haunted by a sense of failure and the fact that his work on topics other than Conrad was little-known.
[39] Adam Curle remembered his father as a compulsive traveller, "certainly not made for family life," and suffering from occasional fits of melancholy, guilt and bad temper, but also loyal, courteous and possessed of a "ribald sense of the ludicrous".
[40] He attributed his father's closeness to Conrad to their shared "sense of the inwardness of things, of mystery, of the strange hidden behind the banal".
[42][43] Conrad hoped that the book, along with his own autobiography A Personal Record, would enhance his reputation and cultivate demand for a Uniform Edition of his works.
[46][47][48] Conrad later relented, however, and suggested revisions for the piece in the hope it would aid in building his reputation in the United States, most of which Curle accepted.
[12] When Frank Swettenham responded to Curle's TLS article, arguing that parts of Conrad's Lord Jim were based on the 1880 abandonment of the SS Jeddah by its crew, Conrad disagreed with parts of Swettenham's argument, but had Curle publish a reply, and several further responses, rather than writing a rebuttal himself.
[4] Curle sold the rights to the correspondence to the Broadway producer and eccentric Crosby Gaige, who he met on board the RMS Majestic in 1926.
[3][59] He also edited a volume of the correspondence of Robert Browning and Frances Julia Wedgwood, and compiled a bibliography of publications by the Ray Society.
[60] The book is an account of his travels in Burma and British Malaya, focusing predominantly on the people of the region (both natives and colonists) rather than the natural environment.
A review in The New York Times concluded that Curle succeeds "in giving us his own brief reactions to the varied scenes and the actors with a vividness that is compelling and memorable.
"[28] Richard Niland has suggested that the book is "Conradian" in tone and compared it to Conrad's short story "Youth".
Its narrative concerns a United States Secret Service officer who uncovers a murder plot while visiting an old friend.
Set in an English country house, its plot concerns a charming young man who, over the course of the novel, is revealed to be a threat to the narrator.
The New York Times' review praised the novel's "atmosphere of brooding mystery and terror" and described it as "a tense and exciting story.
[65] A. D. Hope, reviewing the study in Meanjin, described it as "first of all a useful book" and characterised Curle's analysis as "sensible and penetrating and well supported with illustration and argument", but accused him, like other critics of Dostoevsky, of having couched his readings "in terms of the very values whose validity the novels place in doubt".