Ralph Hale Mottram wrote more than sixty books: novels, short stories, poetry, biography, autobiography, history, tour guides, topography, a study of banking--even this list is not exhaustive. However, he is usually remembered for his first three novels, The Spanish Farm (1924), Sixty-four, Ninety-four! (1925), and The Crime at Vanderlynden's (1926), which constitute The Spanish Farm Trilogy, 1914-1918 (1927). In this trilogy the futility and waste of the First World War are depicted from the viewpoints of a young French peasant woman, a Norfolk bank clerk, and an obscure provincial architect--characters whose milieux and values are rarely examined with such depth and sympathy in British fiction.

Mottram's father, like his grandfather and great-grandfather before, was chief clerk of Gurney's Bank in Norwich. Born above the bank, Mottram himself held that position until 1927, when he was led by the success of his trilogy to trust writing as a career. His family was progressive...