Richard Hughes published only four novels, at wide intervals, throughout his lifetime, and his reputation for extraordinary brilliance as a writer rests mainly on these, all vividly daring in choice of plot, highly wrought yet brilliantly readable in style, ambitious in their variety of scene and dramatic action, each challenging basic contemporary moral, religious, social and human assumptions. At their emergence, while treating the novels in rather conventional terms, reviewers were inclined to be liberal in their use of the words "genius" and "brilliant," especially in descriptions of the first two novels. For example, of A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), a best-seller also made into a film, Arnold Bennett declared, "The style is brilliant, the ingenuity of narrative is brilliant, the characterisation is brilliant..." and Hugh Walpole stated, "It has genius because it sees something that a million people have seen before, but sees it uniquely." Of In...