Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories

Stories from a man who travelled where he wrote: a Spanish beggar boy who inherits, a Russian border, a Corsican vendetta, an English country house with a secret. Merriman was Hugh Stowell Scott, a Lloyd's underwriter who used a pen name so the City would not learn he wrote novels, and died at forty-one. His short work is tighter than his novels and half-forgotten.