Julian Gloag

In 2013 Editions Autrement published a new French-language version under the title L'imposteur (The Impostor).

In Le passeur de la nuit (1996), Aaron is a volunteer for Secours-Amitié (a telephone counselling service similar to the British Samaritans), and he also cares for his sick wife whilst running a bookshop and cataloging the immense library of the wealthy Matilda. Though a good, compassionate man, he is drawn by circumstances into becoming a criminal. The narrative unfolds in part through Aaron's phone conversations with the needy and desperate, and as with Gloag's previous work there are Gothic elements:

Gloag's final novel, Chambre d'ombre (1996), was adapted from his teleplay The Dark Room at the suggestion of Paris publisher Editions Autrement. The story involves Edinburgh couple Deb and Greg, who live in a rundown flat with a small baby, and eventually enlist a deaf-mute cleaning lady, Mrs Keats.

Set in Paris in 1989 (the bicentenary of the Revolution), Love as a Foreign Language (1991) concerns Connie and Walter, who meet on an English-language teaching course. As they share language exercises and vocabulary games, they fall in love, but the age difference and the concerns of their personal lives work to separate them.

The second is The Dark Room, part of the BBC Play on One series and was broadcast in 1988. It starred Susan Wooldridge and Philip Jackson and was again directed by Guy Slater. The teleplay was later novelized for Editions Autrement as Chambre d'ombre.

A short “drawing-room comedy”, Only Yesterday (1986) involves aged retired architect Oliver, his wife May, their middle-aged son, Rupert and his daughter Miranda. The action takes place over a weekend, when Rupert turns up and announces that he is once again divorcing and leaving his job for no real reason except middle-aged malaise. Miranda, a first-year medical student, also appears, happy that her father has left her militant, feminist mother. “Only Yesterday does a splendid job of defining three generations bound by family ties that are stronger than foolishness, ill will, even meanness.”

Gloag's has written two teleplays. The first is Only Yesterday, an adaptation of his novel of the same name, directed by Guy Slater and starring Paul Scofield and Wendy Hiller, which was broadcast by the BBC in 1986.

Murder is the theme once again in Blood For Blood (1985), where a prominent barrister, Vivian Winter, is stabbed to death in his flat. Unsuccessful writer Ivor Speke turns detective and uncovers a web of intrigue surrounding Winter's former clients. Patterns emerge and the mystery deepens when Speke delves into the details of Winter's will.

Gloag's fifth novel Sleeping Dogs Lie (1980) is another murder mystery and whodunit, which the Kirkus reviewer compares to the disordered psychological world of Hitchcock’s Spellbound, with the plot convolutions and red herrings of Agatha Christie. As in Gloag’s earlier works, childhood traumas and psychiatric intervention mix with crime and sexual intrigues in a complex layered narrative.

When Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden was published in 1978, some reviewers noted remarkable similarities between that novel and Our Mother’s House, and this issue resurfaced in 2006 when McEwan was again accused of copying passages from Lucilla Andrews’s memoir No Time for Romance – for the wartime hospital sections of his novel Atonement.

Themes of suffering and alienation continue in Woman Of Character (1973), which involves Anne Mansard's killing of her fiancé and the ensuing complications surrounding his estate. Soon her lover and various family members and friends also meet untimely ends, all to Anne's advantage.

McEwan himself denied the charge of plagiarism, claiming he was unaware of Our Mother’s House. Gloag was convinced he had been plagiarized and aired his views on Word for Word, a 1970s BBC book programme presented by Robert Robinson; the discussion panel included McEwan’s publisher, Tom Maschler, and Auberon Waugh. Gloag’s belief led him to write the subsequent novel Lost and Found, published in 1981, which involves a writer having his novel copied by another, who passes it off as his own.

In Maundy (1968), the eponymous protagonist is an unassuming banker, planning marriage, until he undergoes “psychic dismemberment” and commences a spree of violence and vandalism. New York Times reviewer James R. Frakes says the novel “…has all the lineaments of a funnel or a maelstrom: the whole plot movement is a downwards whirl, a relentless plunge from glazed sunshine to devouring night”.

Film director Jack Clayton, who had previously directed Room at the Top, got to hear about Gloag's novel from his friend, Canadian writer Mordecai Richler, and he found it “instantly fascinating”. The film version of Our Mother’s House was produced by MGM and Filmways and released in 1967. Dirk Bogarde played the father, Charlie Hook, Yootha Joyce played cleaning lady Mrs Quayle, and Mark Lester played Jiminee, one of the younger boys.

Gloag’s second novel, A Sentence Of Life (1966), tells the story of Jordan Maddox who suddenly he finds himself accused of murder. At first it seems an amusing mistake to him, but to the police Maddox is the guilty man. Imprisoned, he undergoes an agonizing trial and a dark night of the soul where he confronts a more general sense of guilt.

Gloag's first novel was an unexpected success and launched him onto the 1960s literary scene. Our Mother’s House received high praise from many prominent critics. Evelyn Waugh read it “with keen pleasure and admiration”. Christopher Fry says the novel “drew me into its world from the first page and held me there ... a penetrating and touching story, which at every point touches on even more than it speaks”. The London Magazine compares the work to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and says it “achieves explosive effects with seemingly unpromising material”.

Julian Gloag (born 2 July 1930) is an English novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of eleven novels, the best known of which is his first, Our Mother’s House (1963), which was made into a film of the same name starring Dirk Bogarde.