Simon (Arthur No - Biography, Novels, Drama

Novelist, playwright, and journalist, born in Leicester, Leicestershire, C England, UK. He studied at King's College, Cambridge, served in the army, then turned to writing, producing his first novel, The Feathers of Death, in 1959. His most notable work is Alms for Oblivion (1964–76), a series of novels portraying the mid-20th-c English upper classes, and this was followed by another sequence, The First-born of Egypt (1984–92). Television dramatizations of well-known works include Point Counter Point (1968), The Way We Live Now (1969), The Pallisers (1974), Edward and Mrs Simpson (1978), and The Blackheath Poisonings (1993). His short story collections include Remember Your Grammar, and Other Haunted Stories (1997). A regular newspaper contributor, he also wrote an autobiography, Shadows on the Grass (1982), and several other books of memoirs.

Simon Arthur Noël Raven (December 28, 1927, Virginia Water, Surrey, England – May 12, 2001, London) was a novelist, journalist and dramatist.

Biography

He attended Cordwalles preparatory school and then Charterhouse, (from which he was expelled for "the usual thing").

In 1951, he married Susan Kilner, a fellow undergraduate who was expecting his child;

After failing to submit a single word of his fellowship thesis, he withdrew from King's, and, desperate to flee "the pram in the hall", successfully applied for a regular army commission.

Alas, officers in the KSLI were expected to represent the regiment at local race meetings - a prescription to go bankrupt, which, within a year, Simon did.

Novels

His major work was a series of ten novels under the umbrella title Alms for Oblivion.

The early novels are robust satires of the English upper set of the mid 1950s, but the later tend to a more detached and philosophical tone. The later novels become more concerned with the occult and supernatural, and include strange happenings, though this was a feature of Raven's work early in his career (eg with the early novel 'Doctors Wear Scarlet' which features Balkan vampires).

The titles in Alms for Oblivion are:

The Rich Pay Late (1964) Friends in Low Places (1965) The Sabre Squadron (1966) Fielding Gray (1967, but the first by internal chronology) The Judas Boy (1968) Places Where They Sing (1970) Sound the Retreat (1971) Come Like Shadows (1972) Bring Forth the Body (1974) The Survivors (1976)

He followed that with the seven-volume series The First-Born of Egypt.

Morning Star (1984) The Face of the Waters (1985) Before the Cock Crow (1986) New Seed for Old (1988) Blood of My Bone (1989) In the Image of God (1990) The Troubadour (1992)

Drama

The Pallisers, a 22-episode adaptation for the BBC of all six Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope, first broadcast in 1974.