Hurrell, F G
Entry updated 14 October 2024. Tagged: Author.
(1885-1957) UK author, in active service during World War One, whose second novel, the Scientific Romance John Lillibud (1934), plays sophisticatedly with echoes and doublings of plot and theme and Identity (see also Doubles in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy), in a manner that shifts Equipoisally between fantasy and sf. A young writer becomes a purveyor of Inventions, one of which is a cosmetic plastic which transforms one's face (and perhaps one's identity); by creating a transformative nose for himself, the writer "becomes" in secret a much more successful author named Richard (or Dick) Whittington, and in this guise becomes involved with a cadre of deaf-mute revolutionaries called The Voice which broadcasts propaganda messages via Telepathy. Transfigured echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) are evident; and also of "The Nose" (1836 Sovremennik as "Nos") by Nicolai Gogol [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. London itself – Dick Whittington being a famous London folk-figure and mayor – is fantasticated alluringly, though almost always understandable in sf terms. Betrayals, and mirrorings, and tit-for-tat ironies proliferate, mockingly, throughout.
The appearance in Promises on a Ring of Stone (2006) by J Campbell of a New York theatrical entrepreneur named Francis Gordon Hurrell, who confesses to murder on his deathbed, seems inadvertent. [JC]
Francis Gordon Hurrell
born Kenninghall, Norfolk: 1885
died Reading, Berkshire: 24 November 1957
works
- John Lillibud (London: Rich and Cowan, 1934) [hb/Trever Evans]
links
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