Writer set for a return to dear green place after 42 years

FORTY-TWO years ago, Archie Hind published a novel that earned him three British literary awards and defined the character of Glasgow for a generation.

The Dear Green Place told the story of a Glasgow slaughterhouse worker, a young working-class man driven to write.

There was never a follow-up.

After the book appeared in 1966, Mr Hind dropped off the radar of literary life after struggling with family tragedy, a lost manuscript and cancer.

That was until yesterday, however, when the Aye Write! book festival in Glasgow announced his impending return.

Mr Hind, 81, is due to appear at the event with his friend of 50 years, the leading Scottish author Alasdair Gray. It will mark the release of a fourth edition of his book and, for the first time, the publication of the surviving two-thirds of an unfinished second novel, For Sadie.

Dr Gavin Wallace, head of literature at the Scottish Arts Council, said it could be "one of the most unexpected literary comebacks seen in Scotland".

However, both Gray and Hind's wife, Eleanor, warned yesterday that the ailing author may be too ill to make the March event. Suffering a chest infection, Mr Hind was unable to give an interview yesterday.

However, Mrs Hind said: "Most people saw the (festival programme] and thought, 'Who is Archie Hind?'. They thought he had gone long ago. It's really a shame that he's been so ignored. He has written cracking stuff."

Two years ago, The Dear Green Place was listed as one of Scotland's greatest 100 books. The title comes from Glasgow's name – in Gaelic, Glaschu means "dear green place".

Ending on a note of despair, as the hero Matt Craig, a family man, becomes obsessed with being a writer, the book is seen as a brilliant evocation of post-war city life and an early expression of the working-class Glaswegian voice.

Dr Wallace said the "brilliant" novel, which won awards from the Scottish Arts Council and the Guardian and Yorkshire Post newspapers, inspired a "whole genre", including Gray's Lanark and writers such as Booker prize-winner James Kelman.

Mr Hind served in the army medical corps during the Second World War and later took jobs ranging from a warehouse clerk to a slaughterhouse labourer to driving a trolleybus.

By 1971, he was telling interviewers he had finished his second novel, For Sadie, as he worked at the Easterhouse Youth Project. Three years later, he was Aberdeen's first writer-in-residence. However, sometime in the early 1970s, the manuscript of For Sadie mysteriously disappeared, said Mrs Hind. In 1974 the family suffered the "terrible blow" of the death of their second son, Gavin.

Mr Hind began writing plays, two of which, Shoulder to Shoulder, and an adaptation of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, a book on socialism, fared well in major theatres.



His other jobs included working as a copytaker for newspapers in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

Mrs Hind said: "All the praise and criticism he got didn't actually pay the bills. He did everything."

Gray added that when Mrs Hind began working as a social worker, her husband moved to being a "house-husband".

He also helped care for the couple's wheelchair-bound daughter, Helen, now 50. He is not a recluse, say friends, but hasn't written for several years.

If he is well enough to attend the Aye, Write! festival, he would find a place alongside Scottish writers of a new generation, including Louise Welsh and Zoë Strachan. Other famous names due to appear at the festival include Kathleen Turner, the Hollywood actress, and Sir Menzies Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat leader.

Andrew Kelly, the event's programmer, said: "The Dear Green Place is such a wonderful book because it's an evocation of Glasgow years ago.

"I wanted to do something with him in the previous two festivals but I didn't have a way of contacting him."

For Sadie is about a middle-aged Glasgow housewife, married with two grown-up sons who still live at home, who rediscovers her love of classical music and takes up the piano.

Commenting on the novel, Gray said: "It's an unusually rich piece of writing.

"We don't know quite how complete it is. We are putting it in because it's very good, interesting writing."

The new edition, from Birlinn, will also include some of the author's articles for a literary magazine.

The Lanark author's friendship with the Hind family has seen him create a series of drawings of their beloved daughter.

Of Archie Hind, Gray said: "We have been close friends since 1958. I cannot help thinking of him as being a writer of considerable range."

Asked if his friend could make a literary return, Gray added: "I don't think a writer's work should depend upon their physical presence. As far as I'm concerned, his book has not been away, it has been reprinted. Young people forget it, and then it appears again."

MISSING IN ACTION
ALAN Sharp's first two novels won huge acclaim before he decided to attempt to break into movies.

His debut novel, A Green Tree in Gedde, was published in 1961, and won the Scottish Arts Council prize for literature. One critic said that it "altered the face of the modern Scottish urban novel".

After writing the successful second part of a trilogy, Sharp headed to the United States to begin a screen-writing career. From writing successful Hollywood westerns, he slumped to second-rate mini-series and dramas, before rebounding in 1995 with the script of Rob Roy.

Other writers have opted to drop out of the industry almost entirely. A decade after its publication in 1951 Catcher in the Rye, became a cult book, with its story of quintessential adolescent Holden Caulfield.

But its author, JD Salinger, pictured below, responded to the attention by retreating from public life and writing less and less.

He wrote a last novella in 1965, and has not been interviewed since 1980. There was no follow-up to Catcher in the Rye, which continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year.

Since finishing To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most successful and popular novels of the 20th century, author Harper Lee has published only a few short essays. She is said to have worked on a second novel, but it was never published.