Everybody who reads John Meade Falkner’s novel The Nebuly Coat thinks he has discovered something extraordinary that he has to tell his friends about. So it has gone on, since 1903 when the novel was written, always recommended, never quite famous, impossible to film, sometimes in print. The title is obscure (it’s heraldic) and it is not really possible to explain usefully what it is about: a town and its cathedral, yes, for no novel rivals it for a sense of place, and the strange people caught up in its fate.

Falkner himself took a coat of arms almost the same as the hero/anti-hero of the novel, so perhaps we can expect to find something of him in his fiction. (There is the quite different kind of novel Moonfleet, and the ghostly tertium quid The Lost Stradivarius.) But one of Falkner’s contemporaries said that ‘he makes his conversation a shrouding veil for his thoughts’. Certainly it comes as a shock to readers of his novels to discover that John Meade Falkner was an armaments manufacturer.

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