'Men Alone' as Outlaws? Hyde's 'Starkie', Lee and Lee's Porcello, and Mulgan's Johnson

Abstract

The notion of 'criminal heroes', in the title originally submitted for the conference paper, offers some intriguing ironies, yet in investigating the protagonists, 'Starkie', aka James Douglas Stark, in Robin Hyde's Passport to Hell (1936), Albany Porcello, in John A. Lee's The Hunted (1936), and Johnson, in John Mulgan's Man Alone (1939), I came to see them rather as outlaws. The linking of the three works, and their authors, is neither arbitrary nor merely a matter of close dating: between March 1936 and June 1939 Hyde and Lee were carrying on a lively correspondence about their similar literary and social concerns, Hyde in 1935 had evidently been the author of a sympathetic review of Lee's first novel, Children of the Poor (1934), and may well have been influenced by it (at least in its providing her with a precedent); and also, as will be shown below, Mulgan's novel doubtless owed much to Lee's unpublished earlier writing.