C. P. Snow, A Coat of Varnish

Nicolas Tredell (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: English Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary Britain , 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Kerry Myler (Newman University), Jenni Ramone (The Nottingham Trent University)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1978

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

A Coat of Varnish (1979) was C. P. Snow’s seventeenth and last novel and it has a detective story element which echoes his first, Death Under Sail (1932). This time, however, the murder takes place, not on a yacht on the Norfolk Broads as it did in Death Under Sail, but in one of those privileged enclaves in which Snow took particular interest in his fiction and his life. In his previous novels, the enclaves were either formed by social and political dissidents, as in George Passant (1940) and The Malcontents (1972), or by institutions – a Cambridge college in The Masters (1951) and The Affair (1960), the House of Lords in In Their Wisdom (1974). In A Coat …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

1540 words

Citation: Tredell, Nicolas. "A Coat of Varnish". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 October 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=19414, accessed 26 November 2024.]

Save this article