The Grey Room

Phillpotts wrote a great many books with a Dartmoor setting. One of his novels Widecombe Fair inspired by an annual fair at the village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor provided the scenario for his comic play The Farmers Wife (1916). It went on to become a 1928 silent film of the same name directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was followed by a 1941 remake directed by Norman Lee and Leslie Arliss. It became a BBC TV drama in 1955 directed by Owen Reed. Jan Stewer played Churdles Ash. The BBC had broadcast the play in 1934. He co-wrote several plays with his daughter Adelaide Phillpotts The Farmers Wife and Yellow Sands (1926); she later claimed their relationship was incestuous. Eden is best known as the author of many novels plays and poems about Dartmoor. His Dartmoor cycle of 18 novels and two volumes of short stories still has many avid readers despite the fact that many titles are out of print. Philpotts also wrote a series of novels each set against the background of a different trade or industry. Titles include: Brunels Tower (a pottery) and Storm in a Teacup (hand-papermaking). Among his other works is The Grey Room the plot of which is centred on a haunted room in an English manor house. He also wrote a number of other mystery novels both under his own name and the pseudonym Harrington Hext. These include: The Thing at Their Heels The Red Redmaynes The Monster The Clue from the Stars and The Captains Curio. The Human Boy was a collection of schoolboy stories in the same genre as Rudyard Kiplings Stalky & Co. though different in mood and style. Late in his long writing career he wrote a few books of interest to science fiction and fantasy readers the most noteworthy being Saurus which involves an alien reptilian observing human life. Eric Partridge praised the immediacy and impact of his dialect writing.