Brian Moore is the most extraordinary and the most professional of Canada's writers. In 26 years he has published 12 novels of high literary quality, earning himself a Governor General's Award for fiction with his third, The Luck of Ginger Coffey,… in 1960. And yet his name is rarely included in those Canlitanies that our critics delight in droning through. Brian Moore 1921– © Thomas Victor 1984Amongst our literary establishment, it seems almost a breach of good taste to mention that Moore is a Canadian writer.

He has two strikes against him, of course. Not only is he an immigrant, but he is a Canadian emigré. More often than not he sets his novels in his Irish homeland or in the United States where he now lives instead of in the true North strong and free. And he has chosen to work out of effete Malibu rather than weather the rough justice of...