A passage in his second novel, The Wind Cannot Read (1946), may shed some light on Auden's critique: "When I was a boy at school I had written a story about a man and a woman.
The English master was a poet with a great understanding of human nature, and in red ink at the end he had written, 'Yes, my dear, but people do not fall in love as quickly as all that, you know.'
In the 1960s he restored an apartment in Rome and then went on to raise sheep on an estate in Wales with his second wife, Sarett Rudley, a television mystery writer best known for a number of Alfred Hitchcock Presents teleplays.
In the early 1970s, Mason returned to Rome, where he met his third wife Margot ("Maggie") Wolf in 1972, with whom he had a son, Theo, and a daughter, Jessica.
He is interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome (near Percy Shelley), where his headstone is inscribed with the words "Though on the sign it is written: 'Don't pluck these blossoms'—it is useless against the wind, which cannot read".
Jasper Doyle, an intelligence officer formerly of Scotland Yard, is posted to Fenmallham Airdrome, England, from which RAF bombers depart for missions over occupied Europe and Germany.
The novel and film were sufficiently successful that Mason was subsequently able to devote himself entirely to writing and travel, including visits to the Caribbean and Polynesia.
Easily the most charming of Mason's novels, it details the amusing experiences of a newly-formed husband and wife detective team as they attempt to determine the fate of a missing person.
"I had felt I needed background for a book and something in me said Hong Kong was a place where I would immediately find material, so I simply bought a ticket," he commented to an interviewer.
[11] Mason's delight in his observations there did indeed inspire him to write his best-known book, The World of Suzie Wong (1957), a tale of an artist's surprisingly tender romance with a Hong Kong prostitute.
It quickly became a well-reviewed bestseller, The Times Literary Supplement, for example, calling it "extremely readable" and noting that it was "written with uncommon skill and intelligence."
[14] Mason wrote the first draft of the novel in Hong Kong in three months in 1956, but upon returning to England he felt he had been too close to the material to judge it properly and put the manuscript away in a cabinet.
The film differs significantly from the novel in a number of ways (Lomax, for example, is transformed into an American, a major character is omitted altogether, and Suzie's travails with the legal system and health make no appearance).
From this point forward he lived entirely on royalties earned from his publications and films and spent time learning sculpting from the Rome-based artist Robert Cook.