The Fool Killer ; By Helen Eustis ; Secker & Warburg, London, 1955, first edition, hard cover, green cloth, green lettering to spine, a very good copy (neat inscription on front free endpaper) in like dust wrapper (a few chips to extremities), 212pp.

Some stories are timeless, as human experience is timeless; and those stories we remember longest have that timeless quality even though they deal with a particular period. For the experience of learning to live can never be dated, the slowly and painfully acquired knowledge of good and evil and hope and despair.
So Helen Eutis’ new novel The Fool Killer, has a timeless quality, though it is set in those strained and troubled days just after the Civil War. It is the story of George Mellish, who was 12 and an orphan in a post-war world… George tells the story in a strangely evocative language as smooth as narrative poetry. There is in it, in fact, a great deal of folk poetry, as well as humour and emotion. Helen Eustis rates high praise for the way she used this device, keeping to the boy view point amazingly well, never missing a scrap of colour or character, never overstepping her bounds. It is a story of high drama, and she underplays it, deliberately with superb effect….

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