The Farmer's Wife

A couple of years ago a friend of mine who deals in old books said he had bought at an auction a batch of books by Eden Phillpotts. "Do you know his work?" he asked.
I told him that my father had read him and, I think, liked what he'd read. I said I had never read a novel by him but had once picked one up in a library, read a few pages, put it back - it was a very thick book with small print and heaps of pages - but I had heard a radio play by him once when I was a kid. It had frightened the living daylights out of me. There was a murderer of children at large and - I remember the final scene well - he was making his way across a field to the farm house of two children with knife in his hand, when the knife's blade glittered in the moon's rays and attracted the attention of the farmer's bull.... You can guess the rest. Hooves running on grass. Boom. Scream. End of the murderer.
Yet I don't think he was that sort of writer generally - I mean of horror stories; he wrote country (Devon) novels about villagers and farmers and the love affairs and so on.
A novel by Phillpotts was turned into a play which ran in London's West End for a long spell. When my father and mother met in London in the twenties they went to see it. And enjoyed it. Later in 1928 it was made into a film, one of Alfred Hitchcock's early silent films.
I see from Google that a theatre group in a place called Tickenham (no, not Twickenham) are staging "The Farmer's Wife" on the 18th of November to the 22nd November this year. Wish Tickenham was bit closer to Cardiff.
I did once see Eden Phillpotts on TV. John Betjeman went down to Devon to interview him. He was then a very old man (he died aged 98); it was obvious that Betjeman admired him tremendously. Maybe because as well as being a popular novelist he was also a recognised poet.
Though most, if not all, of Phillpott's works are now out of print, it is possible to get some on Amazon and other sites for a quid or two. Think I'll get one.