It is in Fowlers End that Sam Yudenow, the proprietor of the Pantheon cinema, employs Daniel Laverock who, despite a ferocious appearance, is an educated middle class family failure, to manage the place. Read moreįowlers End is in London's outer suburbia and is quite possibly one of the most hellish places imaginable (geographically in the Edmonton/Ponders End area): a steel tube factory, a glass factory, the smokiest railway terminal in London, and a hideous chemical plant. This edition features an introduction by award-winning novelist and longtime Kersh admirer Michael Moorcock. A comic romp with echoes of Dickens, Rabelais, and The Beggar’s Opera, Kersh’s novel remains one of the funniest English novels of the 20th century and one of the best works of fiction ever written about London. And when one of Yudenow’s schemes finally goes too far, Laverock and his co-worker Copper Baldwin decide to teach him a lesson with a grand scheme of their own, with hilarious and unpredictable results.įirst published in 1957, Fowlers End is thought by many to be the masterpiece of Gerald Kersh (1911-1968). Yudenow, an incorrigible swindler and one of the greatest comic grotesques in English literature, at first seems merely an amusing old fool, but Laverock soon discovers he is actually a despicable scoundrel. It is here that Daniel Laverock, starving and penniless at the height of the Great Depression, takes the only job he can find: manager of the Pantheon Theater, a dingy old silent cinema owned by Sam Yudenow. In the dirtiest, poorest, most woebegone corner of London is Fowlers End, one of the most godforsaken spots on the face of the earth.

On an Odd Note by Gerald Kersh