Julian Maclaren-Ross died in 1964, in circumstances quite as chaotic as the moth-eaten, bailiff-haunted atmosphere of his novels. Despite occasional murmurs over the intervening 40 years, the real revival of interest in his work began with a 2001 Penguin Modern Classic edition of his South Coast vacuum cleaner salesman epic Of Love and Hunger. There followed a diligent biography by Paul Willetts (Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia, 2003), a volume of selected stories and last year’s Collected Memoirs. Now comes another bumper paperback containing the 30,000-word novella of the title, various scraps of short fiction, a tranche of film criticism and a couple of dozen book reviews, the latter mostly longish ‘middles’ from the immediately post-war Times Literary Supplement.
Brought up on legends of Maclaren-Ross the vagrant but Soho-tethered barfly, scribbling on maniacally into the small hours with the packet of Benzedrine handy at his elbow, I expected Bitten by the Tarantula, a good part of which dates from his Fifties decline, to show a marked falling off from its predecessors.
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